the “a friend of yours is being hunted” quests fucks up my whole being if I’m being honest
it’s very difficult to really explain that pathologic has the best balance of player choice and intended play I have ever seen. The other good example that’s going to pop up is breath of the wild, which indeed lets you solve puzzles in a million ways, but botw manages by being a lot less narratively heavy. Pathologic 2 definitely railroads you, with the “thoughts” menu and the “end of day” screens, or, like. that amazing bells tolling sequence on day 3. pathologic 2 has no problem railroading you and making it very obvious, but also knows and repeats that you are not going to have time to do everything on your list and you must choose how you want to spend your time. gives the player agency where it matters: in deciding which actions are going to help you survive or which moral choices you are willing to gamble your health or allies or information for.
but obviously the fourth-wall breaking makes it all a little more than just “moral choices vs tactical decision” because mark immortell addressing your inability to be the hero every time you die puts each of the two options into their own separate balance of player choice vs intended play.
for example, going to the house of death to help notkin and khan is both the moral choice (you’re not gonna let two teenagers go in there alone) and the tactical decision (you avoid infection in the crude sprawl), but you might have to skip it simply because you need that extra hour to find enough food to survive the rest of the night. you might be forced to make the “wrong” choice not by personal taste or to make another, better one down the line but because game mechanics sometimes actively work against you making choices at all
and that’s what fucks me up about the whole “a friend of yours is being hunted” quest: the question of morality in this case is not in rubin’s favour, but the options you have are not so much “help him vs stop him” and more “search for him or don’t”, between informed allyship or blissfull ignorance. BUT if you do find him and ask for answer, that’s where it spawns four npcs who will beat you to death in three punches, and those npcs straight up tell you “we know he’s here because we followed you”, so really inaction helps both you and him.
Which in itself makes for an amazing moral choice to have in a video game: it would have been easy to question the morality of “cutting poor people to pieces for the sake of a nebulous greater good” but that’s not what ends up happening, what ends up happening is: no matter your opinion, your decision not to get involved in the matter guarantees that he can get away with it.
but what really fucks me up is that it’s not a choice that artemy burakh the character really makes, because “a friend of yours is being hunted; past dawn you won’t be able to help him” appears on your end of day screen, not your thoughts menu. So you, the player, know something’s up before artemy burakh does. if you don’t speak to worm people at all that night, technically artemy burakh the character has no idea that they’re searching for his friend, or that he’s up to something. so you, the player, can make the tactical decision to bypass an entire moral struggle for him. which I had to do! not because I think burin should live or die, not because I don’t think artemy is the kind of guy to put his nose in his friend’s business either, but because I cannot beat four guys in hand to hand combat, and my job here is to keep my character alive!
Really, if we’re being honest, I want to be involved! I want to know what’s going on here! I love the complex moral choices. I crave the heartbreaking moment of looking at your old friend in the eye and asking him why the fuck there’s blood everywhere, just a few days after he asked you the same. I want the emotion that comes out of facing your crimes reflected in someone else, both of you having really shitty but also understandable justifications for it. I also want the turmoil of realizing that by trying to help a friend you caused his downfall, and even if it is deserved, it’s still your friend, and still your fault! But I am not the audience in this game, and I am not the director either. I am the actor in the middle, and I can choose how to deliver the lines, but not the scene we’re playing today.