Pathologic 3 is a Unique Psychological Horror Best Enjoyed Off the Steam Deck

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The Pathologic series hasn't had a miss yet, and that looks to continue with Pathologic 3, with intriguing gameplay mechanics and an eerie sense of atmosphere, backed up by an intricate storyline that weaves a tale as you play. The game just launched, and we dived in to take a look at some first impressions of gameplay, as well as how it performs on the Steam Deck.

Pathologic 3 - Gameplay Impressions

Pathologic 3 does one thing very well, and that's make you feel immersed in the game world. And given that Pathologic 3 is a horror game, it's probably a good thing that the world you're in is an absolutely horrible place that makes you feel on edge pretty much the entire time you're playing.

You play as researcher/doctor Daniil Dankovsky, who has arrived in a remote town to investigate reports of immortality, but soon after, a plague sweeps through the town, wiping it out in just 5 days. Whereas in previous Pathologic games, you start at Day 1 and have to solve problems on the fly to survive, Pathologic 3 takes a different stance and instead introduces Time Travel, for better or for worse.

My opinion on time travel in stories is usually not very favorable; a lot of the tropes involved in the concept I find very tiresome, but I feel as though it's handled in a positive way in Pathologic 3. The objective of the game is to allow the town to survive 12 days without succumbing to the plague and its effects, but you won't get it right on your first time through, so you'll need to rewind time and alter your decisions to achieve the best outcome.

These decisions all make up a tapestry known as the "Mind Map", which lets you see where your decisions led. It reminds me very much of the layout of Visual Novels, which allow you to go back to certain choices you made and go down another path to see where it leads, and I love this gameplay feature in narrative-focused titles, which Pathologic 3 certainly is. A narrative very much steeped in the occult and otherworldly phenomena.

Your time in Pathologic 3 will be a mixture of managing the town and its decrees to ensure its survival from the Town Hall, venturing out into the town itself and all the dangers that lurk there, ranging from the fairly mundane to the outright supernatural, and examining patients to bring you one step closer to a medical breakthrough.

Pathologic 3 - Steam Deck Performance

When it comes to Pathologic 3's performance on the Steam Deck, things do get a little more disappointing, sadly. The controls work fine, and the game does work on the Steam Deck, but performance just isn't able to reach acceptable levels for me.

If you must play on Steam Deck, these were the best settings I found for a mix of visual quality and playability:

For a game all about atmosphere, it's essential to have at least a stable framerate, even if it's 30 FPS, but sadly, the performance is all over the place in Pathologic 3. Areas with heavy foliage seem to head down towards 20 FPS, and once you reach the part of the game when the plague has overtaken the town, performance dips even further, and you'll be playing at closer to 20 than 30, regardless of graphical settings, due to the CPU and GPU fighting for what power the Steam Deck has.

The cutscenes also constantly stuttered and froze during my time playing, but a hotfix was released after I was done playing, which I can confirm has rectified this issue.

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