Post Script

Nikolay Dybowski, founder, Ice-Pick Lodge

The original Pathologic was Ice-Pick Lodge’s first game, and for a time this summer there was concern that Pathologic 2 would be its last. Sluggish early sales forced the studio to lay off many staff and postpone the game’s Bachelor and Changeling scenarios. Today, the outlook is a little rosier. Ice-Pick has a number of smaller projects under way, and believes it has found a direction for Pathologic 2’ s expansions that is both more economical and better suited to its strengths. Here, founder Nikolay Dybowski reflects on infection vectors, rogue architects and switching genres.

What is the status of Ice-Pick Lodge right now? What projects are you working on?

We’ve decided to take a break from the Pathologic universe – we’ve spent about nine years of our lives on it. Currently, we’re working on two smaller games, [IcePick Lodge managing director] Ayrat Zakirov’s personal project Know By Heart and another game with the working title Franz. The latter one is an experimental game about toxic and codependent relationships. It will be more similar to Knock-Knock in terms of its atmosphere, rather than to Pathologic or The Void. And, of course, we will continue working on the Bachelor’s and Changeling’s scenarios. No matter how much we’d like to hide from them, they won’t let us go. They want to be born and knock on your brainpans.

Your goals for Pathologic 2 seem to have changed a lot during development – for example, how exactly the disease spreads across the town. What were your grandest ambitions, and what do you most regret not being able to do?

I deeply regret not being able to convey the sense of danger from the tactile contact through gameplay. The mechanics of how the plague would spread and evolve that we wanted to implement initially were more interesting. Any passing touch, any interaction, from engaging in dialogue to opening a door or consuming food, should’ve been dangerous for both the player and the town. I regret not being able to make the player feel afraid that they’re an involuntary plague carrier – during the incubation period, the plague wasn’t yet manifest, but it was already actively spreading throughout the town.

What were your major starting inspirations for the town itself – its buildings, its people, its history? In terms of the visuals, that is a question for our art directors and artists – Eli Goren, Meethos and Anna Orlova. In general, we wanted to convey the feeling of ‘outside-of-timeness’, a place that could conceivably exist both 150 years ago and now, both in rural Russia and somewhere in Europe. There are those strange little towns in Russia – it’s clear that some very unique and talented architects worked there at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, not being able to find a place for their ambitions and quirks in Moscow or Saint Petersburg.

What needs to happen before you can add the Changeling and Bachelor scenarios for Pathologic 2, and can you give us a sense of how you plan to alter those scenarios from the original game?

Surprise news – we’ve decided that we want to do Bachelor and Changeling in different genres. Their playthroughs will take less time, longer than our Marble Nest expansion but less time than a Haruspex playthrough, and the gameplay will be different. There are several reasons for this decision.

Firstly, we [have to be mindful of] our capabilities. Making another open-world scenario with dozens of unique quests with a small team like ours would mean postponing release by another several years. In the mutually exclusive trio of ‘Fast – Cheap – Good’, IcePick Lodge usually sacrifices the first component. We also know that we’re not the best at certain gameplay elements, such as fighting and survival mechanics, and other components of a realistic simulation game. So it’s best for us to focus on our strong suits: atmosphere, narrative and [an overall] controlling idea.

Secondly, we see more and more people enjoying short but eventful games, rather than long, epic adventures. If we can package the same gaming experience in two hours rather than 22, we should save our players the time and go with the first option. The era of gameplay hours being a selling point is almost over. There are too many interesting games coming out, and not enough free time to finish them all.

Why do you think Pathologic 2 struggled to sell? Was it mostly to do with the difficulty? Is there anything you could have done differently in terms of promoting the game?

In fact, the game has sold better than we thought it would shortly after launch. Yes, the sales weren’t explosive to begin with. During the summer, a lot of my acquaintances kept asking why even they didn’t know that the game had been released. But as more and more people learn about the game and word of mouth spreads, our sales are slowly growing. Perhaps this is a game that isn’t easy to sell using a publisher’s usual methods, and it’s not convenient for streamers due to the high volume of text. Most importantly for us, everyone who bought the game has praised it. We get almost no negativity.

It’s best for us to focus on our strong suits: atmosphere, narrative and [an overall] controlling idea