Developer Ice-Pick Lodge and publisher HypeTrain Digital have announced Pathologic 3, a third installment in the relentlessly miserable and fascinating Pathologic series. It’s targeting a 2025 release.
Unlike its predecessor, Pathologic 3 offers only one playable character: the Bachelor, a doctor “famous for his fight against death himself”. As the Bachelor, you’ll explore another disease-ridden town, uncovering its secrets and battling the plague that has the town in its grip.
Pathologic 3‘s unique twist on the formula that made its predecessors so unique is a time-loop mechanic with which you can “revisit key events and alter them to [your] advantage”. You’ll still have just twelve days to save the town, but this new time-loop system should make things a bit less punishing.
Ice-Pick Lodge and HypeTrain are promising the same “chilling, immersive world that made Pathologic a cult hit”, now with more “layers of narrative complexity”.
As a doctor, you’ll be able to diagnose and treat your patients using medical procedures; you’ll need to examine patients, use your microscope to identify pathogens, and develop treatments to help patients overcome their illnesses.
You can also battle the plague by “implementing quarantines and deploying patrols”, so it sounds like you’ve got more power than just treating individual patients.
Of course, since this is a Pathologic game, you can expect your every choice to impact the story in a meaningful way, and you can also expect to meet a host of characters that you absolutely cannot and should not trust as far as you can throw them.
It seems like Pathologic 3 grew out of the seeds of an intended update for Pathologic 2, which would have introduced a new Bachelor scenario to that game. Now, however, it appears that Ice-Pick Lodge has spun that route out into an entirely new Pathologic game.
In any case, Pathologic 3 launches for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S sometime in 2025. Stay tuned for more on this one.
