In Pathologic you play as a doctor, who has wandered into a plague stricken town that is extremely surreal. The economy in the game is a nightmare, everything is too expensive, you need food to feed yourself, you need medicine to keep yourself alive, and you need to do the same for all the important members in the city as well as for all the random civilians as the disease slowly but inevitably spreads.
The first day bread and medicine is expensive, and it'll take you most of the day just to scavenge enough to survive. The second day the stores have stopped receiving supplies from outside of town and start to gauge you, maybe by the third day you're paying twice as much, and on that day you'll realize you literally can't make enough money to support yourself. So what do you do? At night there are all of these gangsters that chase you around and try to steal all your loot, well that third night, I thought, "Well I'll steal THEIR loot! Hah! This game can't outsmart me, I'll do anything to win." So every night I'd kill all of these gangsters, and made enough to save for a gun. With my gun robbing these criminals became even easier, and everything was going well until the army showed up. In their hazmat suits they used flamethrowers to kill anyone outwardly infected, and the increased army presence meant that even smugglers couldn't get into the city with supplies. Prices for medicine the next day had jumped by a minimum of 1000% and robbing gangsters wasn't enough anymore, even if I did make the money to buy medicine they were out of stock. I had heard rumors that a small gang of pre-adolescent orphan children had medicine, so I looked for them, when I found them the price they were asking for medicine was high, so high in fact that I had to sell my gun and all of my bullets just for a single unit. The next day, the price had doubled, all I had was a knife, but I was SO CLOSE, I just needed to make it a few more days, I just had to stay alive a bit longer and I would win! So when that child told me I could fuck off if I didn't have the money for the medicine I needed; I waited, and watched, and when that 10 year old boy was alone I slit his throat and took his medicine, and I had SO MUCH! Enough to win the game! It wasn't enough to stop the plague from destroying the town, but fuck the town! I didn't survive all these weeks of plague to NOT WIN THE GAME!
But the plague that infected the town wasn't natural, as they often aren't in these fantastical settings, it was caused by greed. Greed that would see a man slit another's throat for his own gain instead of supporting each other through hard times, greed that would blind a man to his own evil, maybe even to the evil of stalking a ten year old child so you could murder him and take his medicine. At the end of the game, I won, but in the process my character had lost his soul, he realized he was simply a puppet and in the end, had no humanity.
My character turned out not to be some kind of "chosen one" savior, just my puppet in this particular play, I had gone out of my way to screw people over so that I could survive, so that I could save the town! Well I wasn't so special was I? I was just making excuses as to why my own life was more useful than a child's, or than another man's, I realized this is what the "bad guys" do in survival tv shows and video games. When push came to shove, I was that bad guy, I was that guy that puts his own life above the lives of others.
