This place is hell. A vast labyrinth of strange near asymmetrical buildings and outlandish perspective and physics bending architectural anomalies. Places that twist the logic between interior and exterior space. Children wander through the town with their own strange customs and gangs. The Adults are trapped in their own world of superstition, politics, and bizarre pseudo-physical class distinction. A thick blanket of yellow brown smog covers the dingy cattle town making everything brown and dying. Unseen dogs bark and howl madly in the distance. Overhead, a tiny patch of sky shows a distant sky of blue and clouds. This is Ancient Step.

I am the player. I am playing Pathologic. I insert myself into this horrid place as a number of characters. I am, at best, a casual participant or pawn in the events that will unfold before me. I start as the scientist who wishes to conquer death. I have come here to see and immortal man.

I wake in a dingy little bed and breakfast. All the mirrors in the town are broken for some inexplicable reason. I leave. In the backyard is a transient and some bizarre fetal creature, they are the half formed men, the cattle herders of the swamplands. They are the wurm. By the buildings gates is a creature in a medieval plague suit and a faceless wraith like creature. They tell me to behave like myself and be mindful of my condition, for I am bound by the rules of reality here. I can hunger, I can weaken myself through fatigue and illness. I listen carefully and leave.

The immortal man is dead. Found murdered in his hidden antechamber between the folds of space and time. Worse, my friend and mentor is dead, found with a giant spike as long as your arm rammed straight through his chest. Some suspect his son, the crazy surgeon. Others suspect a mad half man cow slaughterer. I am deeply confused.

Worse yet, something terrible is coming. Disease. Death, my enemy, creeps ever closer. Every day, people die, places become quarantined, fights break out, and food and resources become excessively scarce. Horror and violence breaks out amongst the people as they fight to survive. I find a weapon and have to sell it for medicine and food. But only the children with toy dog heads have the proper medicine. I have no money and nothing to barter with these mad kids. I am desperate, I am dying. I have no choice; I find a group of them and slaughter them, one by one, with a bullet to the head. I finish off my indiscretion by raiding their corpses and stealing what I need. What have I done?

Soon the world becomes infected. The walls welt and sores open on the buildings. They fester with this strange disease from beyond the concept of conventional understanding. The bodies pile higher and the people grow increasingly mad. The government comes in to quash the infection only to fall to this strange metaphysical illness. People die and I am incapable of doing anything outside of making things seemingly worse.

A million years ago and a face later, I am the surgeon, a healer of men and savior of life. I am also a serial killer. I know I can survive coming illness. I can make medicine but only the swamp dwelling wurm have the sufficient materials. To make my deal with them, I need to sow the land with flesh and blood. I murder people and bury their kidneys in the ground. I get my medicine and live a little longer. The ditches fill with my corpses of my sacrifices. It’s good to be alive.


It all suddenly becomes clear to me. I am responsible for this. If there one thing that is clear, none of this would have happened if I had not pressed the new game button. I speak not of myself in terms of my masks, the characters I can choose to play. I speak of myself, the man before the computer. The disease and horror I unleash is a result of entering this world. If I chose nothing, to not play this game at all this place, this town would still be here trapped in its own little digital universe. I am the outsider, who brings a disease to a new world. I am a bringer of death.

Such are the consequences of my actions. They span not only across this game, but all games. The fact of my mere presence brings suffering to bear for all the simple digital beings within the code. It is like a dark atom, trapped in a constant quantum flux between two states, ever changing. The simple act of observation upon this place of quantum flux causes the condition of the observed ‘universe’ to change. The quantum state chooses one aspect and for some strange reason, it always destruction. I wish I control this universe’s quantum state change but I can not seemingly jump timelines where everything is okay for the town of Ancient Step, the world of Oblivion or the wastes of Chernobyl. But this is simple quantum physics on a macro level, a basic law if you will. The act of observing something will always change the conditions of what you are observing.

I am the player. I am not a passive observer or pawn of the events that unfold before me. I am the instigator, the chaos bringer wrapped in many faces and personas as I travel between distant worlds and stories. I bring famine, war, disease and death upon a people innocent of the Armageddon I unleash upon them. I am the horsemen of the apocalypse. I am a dark god who sows the seeds of misery and destruction in the myriad of worlds I choose to play with.

I am the player of games and I wish to be entertained. Now, who do I play with next?