I had problems with the previous Pathologic games, but I never thought those problems were the result of laziness, or arrogance, or greed.

I can understand Ice Pick Lodge wanting to change the gameplay of their series. After all, that makes it easier to justify putting a bunch of resource-hogging grass textures into Pathologic 2 and selling it full price as a new game. But these changes were not it. Gone is the open world map, gone is the robust bartering system, the combat, going into buildings. Instead the map has been cut up into a bunch of levels for the sake of terrible survival horror type gameplay. It's far less immersive and far less interesting. Was it to make the game easier to load, was that the point of killing an entire town, because the game still runs poorly. All this accompanied by a pointless sanity meter that forces you to run around kicking random objects so you don't lose level select currency and health.

As you may have heard this game was originally suppose to be DLC for Pathologic 2, and I really wish it had stayed that way. The only other big edition to the gameplay is diagnosing patients. It's okay but not great, and it could really use a rewrite. Especially the skin diseases, they could use better descriptions so you can tell one "reddening skin with bumps" diseases from the other "reddening skin with bumps". But it's fine, and could have been easily slotted into Pathologic 2 without any problems.

But the worst part is the level select. The game calls it time travel, it's a level select. You have to grind for level select currency by going into the survival horror zones and finding a minigame that relies on pure chance to win, and pure chance that the minigame even has enough level select currency to in. And to even access the mini game you have to run around the maps for crafting materials to make the medicines to play the game, and whether the materials even appear is up to chance. Grinding and luck on top of grinding and luck, you have to do that several times to earn enough to change the level once. That becomes a nightmare at the end game when you are suppose to go back to earlier levels and replay earlier conversations and pick a different dialogue choice to unlock other dialogue in later levels.

I'm writing this as someone who played the first two Pathologic games, but I wouldn't recommend this one for newcomers either. The survival horror isn't good, the dialogue quests aren't very good, and the plot is just as confusing as it was in the first Pathologic, except this time it's missing two-thirds of the story and adds sort-of-time-travel to the mess. I'd recommend just playing Pathologic 2 instead, it's cheaper and more coherent.

Maybe fans of the series will get lucky and a modder will somehow move the diagnosing gameplay and the script from this game to 2 like it should have been to begin with.

Also the soundtrack has taken a major nosedive and the game still crashes half the time you start it up or quit it.

Play pathologic 2 first, that is a really good game. I can see how Ice-Pick Lodge tried to avoid making Bachelor's route just Patho2 with slightly different story, but Patho 3's story is less engaging and the gameplay mechanics failed to grip me. I think this game need maybe another year to connect different mechanics together to make something as engaging as 2, but I will still try to finish this. At least the bull we bought in 2 is cannon now!

I have only played this release from the series. Pretty fun story game with some odd characters. The story is interesting, with choices majorly impacting the story. I would say about 50hrs of casual gameplay at least, without guide. Going to need to be able to remember a lot and figure some unusual things out (Like the mechanics... trying to be vague here)

Some of the negatives are
-Mechanics are poorly explained
-Astonishing amount of bugs.
-Almost too much vague/cryptic information
-Some of their gameplay mechanics can be tedious/annoying.
-Some of their mini-games are not fun, but also not required (I skipped most opportunities)
-Hostile districts are fun at first, then become tedious