Video Game / Pathologic 2

Pathologic 2 is the sequel-remake to the 2005 Pathologic, developed by Ice-Pick Lodge. Much like its predecessor the style and genre is a bit iffy to describe, and is perhaps best described as a First-Person Survival Horror Adventure Game with some light Immersive Sim and RPG Elements. The game was released for PC on May 23, 2019.

Development began when Ice-Pick Lodge launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a successor of the original Pathologic in September 2014. The final result came to be named, although it is not a plot sequel, instead retelling the original's story with more content and mechanics, as well as more polished graphics. It is frequently referred to as a "remake", but the developers came to reject this label, instead likening it to how games like Silent Hill 2 and Dark Souls 2 revisit and experiment with the concepts introduced in their predecessors.

A limited demo version, titled Pathologic: The Marble Nest, was released in 2017. It is not an excerpt of the game proper — it's more of a side story branching off late in the game's storyline, and it has an internal progression of its own. (The developers' notes at the beginning of the demo compare it to a short story.) The demo uses early versions of many of the main game's assets and mechanics. The Marble Nest was later remade as a DLC for the final game on October 28, 2019.

Currently, only the Haruspex’s route of Pathologic 2 is available, with the Bachelor and Changeling campaigns releasing sometime later:

• As the Haruspex, Artemy Burakh, you’ll unravel the mystery of your father’s death (which you’re blamed for), discover how to defeat the Plague (or not), and delve into the secrets of the Town-on-Gorkhon and its intricate politics and history.

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The game provides examples of:

Main Game

A-J

• Aborted Arc: If a character dies, any subplot or quest chain affiliated with them will come to a very abrupt end.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Averted. Every single weapon in the game loses durability each time you use it and will not be effective beyond a point. They will have to be repaired to restore effectiveness.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: A few, despite the otherwise realistic gameplay.
  • Time stops in dialogue screens, which one could argue is a necessity, given the text-heavy nature of the game.
  • It also takes no time to consume food/medicine or wear protective equipment. Brewing tinctures out of herbs also occurs instantly, although using the larger alembic to make serums will take some time.
• Accidental Misnaming: On their first meeting, the Bachelor keeps calling Artemy 'Vorakh' even after Artemy corrects him. It doesn't stick because later a patrolman calls Artemy 'Vorakh' too.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: In the first game, Var was a hunchback with a somewhat deformed face. Here, outside of a scarred eye and grey hair, he looks like your average Pochard NPC, though he claims to not be part of the Kin.
• Adaptational Context Change: The opening play with the three characters in the first game is now a dream that Artemy has in the fourth act.
• Adaptation Expansion: Fully animated 3D portraits for everyone! ^note The original game was limited to monochromatic stock photographs.
• Adaptation Personality Change: Quite a few characters, but most noticeably with Bad Grief and Foreman Oyun.
  • Anna Angel is now a misophobe, which is an aspect of her personality not present in the original Pathologic.
  • As part of Artemy's Adaptation Relationship Overhaul, Bad Grief is now one of his childhood friends, significantly fleshing out his backstory and personality. In Pathologic he was just a gang leader with no meaningful backstory.
  • In Pathologic, Vlad Jr. knew the Termitary was infected and deliberately locked the Kin in to die, demonstrating his professed kindness towards them was a sham. Here, he did not know about the plague in advance and locked the Termitary because his father lied to him about the Kin rioting. When he discovers the truth, he is overcome with guilt and voluntarily gives himself up to the Kin.
  • In Pathologic, Oyun was an evil and power-hungry man who killed Isidor to retain his power over the Kin, and attempts to kill Artemy several times under the guise of "trials". In this game, Oyun is not antagonistic towards Artemy at all, and though he did still kill Isidor, he did so for a noble reason rather than a selfish one: stopping Isidor from infecting the Town with sand pest.
  • In Pathologic, Captain Longin mutined against General Block and caused terrible chaos in the final days, seving as the Bachelor's Final Boss. Here, the mutiny is staged — Longin is actually a loyalist of Block's, and only pretended to mutiny to give Block an excuse to leave without shelling the Town.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul:
  • In the original game, Artemy's only friend in town was Stakh Rubin, who refused to speak with Artemy for most of the game because he believed Artemy murdered Isidor. Now, Artemy has a childhood posse of himself, Rubin, Lara Ravel, and Bad Grief. Over the course of the game, Artemy can try to rekindle the friendship between the group, and seems particularly protective of them.
  • In the original game, Artemy only meaningfully interacted with Capella and Notkin despite all the children being his Bound, and he only even saw Khan a scant few times. Now, there are many more quests involving all of the children and their relationships with Artemy are much more developed. In particular, Sticky moves to the Lair and works as Artemy's assistant, and Khan leaves the Polyhedron early and remains in the Town for most of the game.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts:
  • A key game mechanic. Prices in stores will fluctuate wildly as the Plague progresses and town slips into chaos, usually resulting in things being much more expensive today than they were yesterday.
  • A man you encounter on day one will sell you a bull for a steal, citing this trope as his justification: he believes that prices will skyrocket in the coming days, and money will be much more valuable than livestock. At this point in the game, there's no reason to believe such a thing will occur, and uninformed players might laugh him off as being odd or paranoid. He's right, of course.
• Affably Evil: The Fellow Traveler is pretty friendly for the literal personification of Death.
• Affectionate Nickname: All of the Haruspex's childhood friends call him Cub (except for Rubin, since he hates you). In turn, their friend group has the nickname "Gravel" for Lara Ravel. Isidor also had several nicknames with the children of the town, such as Grandfather Burakh.
• Afterlife Antechamber: The Theater, which is where you appear when you die. As characters start dying, they too appear in the theater, staring into nothingness and sadly explaining their path in life.
• Against My Religion: A number of activities are considered taboo by the Town, based on the beliefs of the Kin, stemming from the worship of the Earth as a mother deity. These include digging holes, cutting into flesh, and possession of sharp objects.
• The Alcoholic: Peter Stamatin is addicted to twyrine, which isn't exactly alcoholic, but he still fits the mould.
• Alleged Lookalikes: Played with. Simon and Georgiy Kain are twin brothers but Simon appeared to be twice as old as Georgiy. This is brought up in-universe.
• All Just a Dream: The first leg of the game, up until you board the train. Interestingly, you're told the prologue was a dream during a section that Artemy later theorizes was also a dream.
• All There in the Manual: The Art of Pathologic 2, the art book for the game, contains small tidbits about the characters and the setting.
• Alien Sky: The strange constellations with visible connecting lines in the sky seen from atop the Polyhedron.
• Ambiguous Time Period: Signs seem to point to the game taking place in the early twentieth century, but anachronisms such as the modern-looking antibiotics, characters' outfits being all over the place and the general weirdness of the setting make it impossible to pinpoint an exact time period.
• Animal Motifs:
  • The Kin revere bulls, and as such bulls are often used as a symbol of the Kin.
  • The tonwsfolk are likened to a flock of birds and many of them are even given birds' names.
• Another Dimension: The Abattoir and the Underground may or may not be this. Time seems to work differently underground. If Lika the Doghead really did go underground then what he saw changed him, to say the least.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Unexpected, given the original game's reputation, but a few exist.
  • On day one, Bad Grief declares you a friend of his gang, and assures you that his men will bail you out if you get into trouble. What this means mechanically is that if you die in a fight, you'll awaken somewhere nearby with no major penalties (you'll lose some health and time will progress, but your items and money are untouched). This gives you a bit of wiggle room to get familiar with the new combat system, along with reducing the risk of new players getting frustrated and quitting because of progress lost from constantly dying in street fights. This mechanic can become invaluable if you're having a hard time getting around town while everyone wants you dead.
  • Regardless of how cruel and unforgiving the game claims to be, it's very difficult to genuinely get yourself in an inescapable death spiral when it comes to your resources. Sure, you might have to ignore your quests for the day because you need to dig through every trash can in town in order to find enough needles and marbles to barter for food and medicine, but you can find enough materials to scrape by.
  • If you cure an infected person of the Plague while the district they're in is infected, they won't be in danger of catching the disease again that night.
  • Unlike in the first game, dialogue options which will end a conversation are clearly marked.
• Anyone Can Die: Almost^*The other healers, the Inquisitor, and the General are safe anyone can catch the Sand Plague and anyone can die from it.
• Arc Words: Artemy has the option to ask "What does this mean for me?" at multiple, often pivotal points during the game.
• The Ark: Georgiy Kain explicitly calls the Town this, in discussing his brother Simon inviting several geniuses to the Town like the Stamatin brothers and Yulia Lyuricheva.
• Arranged Marriage: Capella and Khan plan on entering into one, once they become adults.
• Art Evolution: Pathologic 2 is a massive improvement on its predecessor, with gorgeous, striking visuals everywhere you look. Additionally, transition into and out of buildings is now seamless with the greater world, creating a much more immersive sense of the Town as a whole.
• As You Know: Averted. Since Artemy is a local of the town, and is descended from the Kin, people will express some surprise if he asks for information about things he's already supposed to know. As an audience, you also learn about the town through Artemy's dialogue options.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Guns. They're powerful and have a good range, but they are rare and expensive, and so is their ammo. They are prone to jamming as they wear down from use, and the items needed to repair them aren't exactly common either. They're also noisy and will likely just draw more hostile attention to you.
  • Organ harvesting. You can cut up anyone you kill, collect whatever organs you like, and either sell them for cash to a shady chemist on the west side of town, or use them to brew painkillers and antibiotics. The problem is that organs take up a lot of inventory space, doing surgery does immense damage to your reputation (and scalpel), and the drugs you can produce from them are similarly just not as space-efficient as what you can buy from the store, making the whole thing largely not worth the trouble.
• The Bad Guy Wins: If you opt for the ending where you spare the Polyhedron, the Sand Pest accomplishes what it set out to do, killing most of the local human population and displacing the survivors. All the miracles that the earth produces remain, including the Sand Pest, which will one day resurface.
• Bag of Spilling: You can't carry items from the prologue into the main game. You also can't carry items into the Abattoir, but you can carry the Living Blood out.
• Bait-and-Switch: On Day 6, you have the option to talk to Bad Grief about blowing up the railway tracks to prevent the Inquisitor from arriving in Town. He tells you to meet him on the tracks at night, but when you get there it becomes clear that Grief never had any intention of doing this at all, and mocks Artemy's stupidity in expecting he would have dynamite on him just because he's a thug.
• Bar Brawl: Possible on Day 11 at the Broken Heart Pub. A strange example in that the person you fight is the person hired to play Artemy Burakh after you die...
• Beat Still, My Heart: Artemy trades hearts with a member of the Kin in the prologue. Later in the game, Anna Angel must exchange her heart for a spindle to rid herself of a curse.
• Beneath the Mask: Certain characters have 'Reflections', representations of their inner self that you can have conversations with, to get a sense of what's really going on with those characters.
• Better Off Sold:
  • Both played straight and averted/justified. Your main avenue of acquiring resources is by looting, whether that's from people's cupboards or public trash cans. Most of the items you find are worth so little money that you might as well not bother. However, these items are truly valuable when it comes to the barter system. Every subtype of NPC has a different set of "trash" items that they consider valuable for whatever reason, and you can offer them up in exchange for items the NPC has that you might want—children will accept bugs and toys (obvious enough), sharp objects (taboo and thus enticing), and nuts (believed by children to house souls). Adults might want things like bottled water (in the case of hungover drunks) or mechanical parts (soldiers who need to maintain their equipment), although bartering with adults is a bit of an edge case, as the items they're willing to barter for are generally of some use to you as well. In this situation, what is and is not vendor trash becomes a matter of the player's opinion. If you've got so much water that you can't carry it all, perhaps you'll gladly throw some of it away in exchange for that drunkard's tourniquets; on the other hand, you may find yourself unwilling to part with your repair parts even if you'd really like to get that smoked meat in exchange.
  • Played straight with jewelry, which can be looted from bodies or obtained at the Dead Item Shop. It serves no practical purpose for you, but shops will pay enormous sums for them, in addition to them being valuable barter material.
  • There's a class of useless "dead items" generated when other items are used: broken ampoules of morphine, bloody used bandages, and rotten food. Every night, the Fellow Traveler will open a shop that trades these items for useful ones such as jewelry, ammo, and medicine.
• Big Fancy House: Most of the named characters have distinctive, generally large houses.
• Bilingual Dialogue: Artemy can have these with members of the Kin, especially Aspity, unless you choose to respond in kind.
• Bittersweet Ending: Both main endings.
  • In the Diurnal Ending, you save the town, which include every surviving named character. Everyone is planning for the future, cautiously optimistic. The sky is blue and the atmosphere is warm and peaceful. However, you know this was accomplished at the cost of dooming both the Kin and the Earth beneath the town, something Aspity will be sure to remind you of if you talk to her, provided she survived. Given however that the Mistresses' influence is still around, it's implied it's not a true The Magic Goes Away situation.
  • The Nocturnal Ending is the opposite. The Kin, people and creatures with no place in the future, will thrive. Silhouettes of majestic beasts loom in the sky. The Earth lives and Aspity is ecstatic. But this comes at the cost of the town. Almost every living named character is forced to flee the town, potentially against the Haruspex's wish, possibly to their death. The night sky and still present (though now harmless) infection set a melancholic tone. Compared to the Diurnal Ending, the whole town feels empty and quiet.
• Bizarrchitecture: The Polyhedron and the Stairways to Heaven, which actively defy the laws of physics.
• Black Market: A couple. You can buy weapons from Bad Grief, the Shady Shop next door will always trade with you regardless of reputation and always trades in currency, even in the late game, and you can sell organs to Var.
• Bloodless Carnage: There is a notable absence of blood when killing enemies.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Many of the Kains' grand plans for pushing past the boundaries of physical limitations as well as the rationale for the Steppe customs don't seem rooted in conventional ideas of Good and Evil.
• Book Ends:
  • Both the first and last days have quests that involve surgically extracting something from a local thug. It's something Artemy can comment on.
  • The Diurnal and Nocturnal Endings begin with you stepping off the Train just like you did on the first day.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The knife. You can get one for free as early as Day 1, it's easy to keep in tip-top shape with the relatively common whetstones and chisels, and two strong stabs are enough to kill most human enemies.
  • Though guns in general tend to be Awesome, but Impractical, the humble revolver tends to be the most reliable one. While shotguns and rifles are unobtainable until the second half of the game, you can get a revolver as early as Day 1, and its ammunition is also relatively plentiful (held by children and patrolmen, who will barter for it). Though it requires two shots to kill most enemies, its large magazine size allows you to deal with large groups of enemies without needing to reload.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The game draws on techniques from Brechtian theatre to break immersion and actively remind you that you're an actor in a play:
  • The game opens with you on a stage asking Mark Immortell, the director, for a chance to do the play over again.
  • The Prompters that serve as the tutorial, like a prompter reminding an actor of their lines.
  • The Reflections of characters telling the audience the true nature of those characters.
  • The convenient spotlights that appear occasionally around the town, sometimes out of nowhere.
  • Deaths being treated as an actor flubbing a line.
  • After the play at the end of Day 1, you can have a conversation with Mark about this. Interestingly, this is the only time you can speak to him after any of these performances.
  • At times, the 'Backstage Characters', i.e. Mark, Beak, Talon, and the Rat Prophet appear to talk past Artemy to the player.
  • In the Diurnal and Nocturnal endings, you can speak with the Devisers, who appear to be children, but in reality are the game's developers talking directly to you, the player.
• Brick Joke: The game has a particularly cruel instance of this trope. The second time you die, Mark Immortell will decide that not only will he take away another sliver of health from you, he will also steal your ability to hug people. This just seems like flavor text because you can't hug people anyway, and Artemy himself even lampshades what a silly limitation that is. Near the end of the game, you can have a conversation with Lara that ends with you attempting to comfort her by giving her a reassuring hug... only to realize to your horror and confusion that you can't and some unseen force is preventing you from doing so.
• Burn the Witch!:
  • On Day 1, you can witness villagers burning a herb bride at the stake. Their paranoia—and the effects of twyre pollen—have convinced them that she's the Steppe Demon who killed Isidor. It's lampshaded that Aspity is closer to what the vigilantes were looking for, but obviously they couldn't recognize what she is because, you know, magic.
• But Thou Must!: Completely averted outside the prologue. It is possible to completely ignore any and all quests in the game.
• Call-Back:
  • In the hide-and-seek quest on days 2 and 3, tagging a child will play the "reputation up" sound effect from the original game (Measley's laugh). The same sound effect plays if the player switches "intended difficulty" back on after switching it off.
  • The lantern in the Nutshell shows the map of the town from the first game.
  • In the prologue, Clara says that the "birds" (orderlies) are actually fingers. This is a reference to the fact that the first game was nothing but a game played by two children.
• Campfire Character Exploration: Artemy can reconnect with his childhood friends Lara, Stakh, and Bad Grief around a fire at night.
• Central Theme: The game has several:
  • Tradition versus Progress: The game explores the conflict between maintaining a way of life from the past and the pressures and advantages of modernizing. Some of the other conflicts of the game like the children of the Town staying in the Polyhedron in a perpetual childhood without having to grow up, the Kin wishing to preserve their traditions, the Olgimskys' exploitation of the Kin, and even the choice of endings relate to this.
  • The game uses the framing device of Mark Immortell staging a play to explore themes of free will, fate, and dealing with failure.
  • As the game's art book says: "This is a game about boundaries. Humans transcending their own limitations..." This is most evident with the Kains and the characters aligned with them. A conversation with Georgy Kain explicitly discusses the idea of transcending boundaries.
• Chain of Deals: The trading system lends itself to these. Most items can be bought, but opportunities to make money are scarce and the most important items (like shmowders) can only be bartered for. And to think you start the game scavenging through dumpsters...
  • Most notably, women around town will only trade their supplies for valuable medicine... or common soap. Soap is rarely sold in pharmacies, but your main source is through bartering with children. Similar mechanics apply to candle stubs (obtained from factory works and accepted by Kin).
• Childhood Friends: Lara, Rubin and Grief are these for Artemy. They all even have nicknames for each other!
• Children Are Innocent: Played straight and averted.
  • On Day 2, you can see children acting out some of the events of Day 1 (the burning of the Herb Bride, the Herb Bride holding the Bull's skull, and children ganging up on the child of the man being ganged up on in the exact same location on Day 1). It's clear that the children don't really understand what they're playing. It comes up later too, when the children make a game out of the arsonists burning infected people in the street.
  • This trope is averted by the child gangs present in Town. These gangs have their own politics, history, and rules, and are treated seriously by the game and Artemy, who expresses surprise at how intense children's games have become. Some of the Town's children also talk about things that children their age wouldn't typically know about.
• Choice-and-Consequence System: Of two flavors. First, some of your daily quests have more than one option for completion. Which path you take will generally affect something in the future, with consequences ranging from minor (you get some money or an item) to major (preventing a character's death). Second, your choices in dialogue and trades with townsfolk will have an effect on your reputation in the district. If you choose friendly dialogue options or give people extra in barters, your reputation will be improved as a result.
• City with No Name: The town is only ever referred to as 'The Town' in-game. Some sections of the audience refer to it as the Town-On-Gorkhon, for the river that the city was settled beside.
• Civil War: A civil war is taking place in the wider world, although the Town seems mostly unaffected by it. Depending on player dialogue choice, Artemy may have been involved in the conflict prior to the story's events.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The Three Layers and the tinctures and antibiotics that work on that Layer have corresponding colours:
  • White - Bone Layer, Yas Tincture, Neomycinium.
  • Green - Nerve Layer, Medrel Tincture, Ferromycinium.
  • Orange - Blood Layer, Zurkh Tincture, Monomycinium.
• Commonplace Rare: Fresh beef reduces your hunger more than any other food, but it's rare and very expensive, and gets moreso every day. This would make a certain amount of sense as the plague gets worse and food and supplies are harder to come by... except that the town's largest business is a beef slaughterhouse.
• Conlang: The Steppe Language is contructed, influenced heavily by Buryat, as well as Mongolian and Tibetan.
• Continuing is Painful: When you die in this game, you don't simply get a "Game Over" that prompts you to reload. You instead suffer a reduction to your health and survival meters that are all permanent. Worse, Save Scumming doesn't prevent this; every death you suffer is automatically saved to your profile, so you'll still suffer from diminished health for the rest of your game when you reload an earlier save.
• Crapsack World: The Town just doesn't seem to be a great place to live in, even before the plague, and the wider world doesn't seem to be a much better place, given that there's a war going on and some political instability.
• Creator Backlash: In-universe, Mark Immortell has rather a low opinion of the performances he has staged so far. As he is an Author Avatar, this may be out-of-universe as well.
• Creepy Child: Just about all of them, really. The most notable example is Clara the Changeling. Whether or not the Dogheads qualify depends on whether you think child gangs are creepy.
• Creepy Crows: On Day 3, just before the outbreak, crows can be seen circling the Cathedral. Artemy can talk to three bystanders: a Stone Yard man, a Steppe man, and a child, who explain why the crows are a bad omen from each of their perspectives. According to Bad Grief, there used to more harmless birds in Town, but lately they have all been replaced by crows.
• Crisis Point Hospital: The makeshift hospital in the Theatre is in progressively worse shape every day, with more and more dying and dead people. One late-game quest has you identifying people who are still alive among all the corpses.
• Cruel to Be Kind:
  • Isidor once quarantined a group of people until they died, so their infection would not spread to anyone else.
  • Artemy can find a house with unburied infected bodies. The bodies were hidden there because the people did not want their loved ones to be buried in a mass grave or cremated, a huge cultural taboo. Artemy can turn these people in, getting rid of the bodies, but protecting that district from infection.
• Cut and Paste Environments: Buildings in each of the three sections of the Town have a specific look that is remixed within all the districts in that section.
• Darkest Hour: Day 11. The Fund has closed because General Block has given up any hope of treatment, all the children have been evacuated which deprives you of one of your easiest sources for food and medicine, Aglaya Lilich is dead, and every single child on your list has been infected by the plague.
• The Day of Reckoning: Day 11, where the all the game's themes and conflicts come to a head.
• Dead Person Conversation: Artemy can have at least one of these with his father.
• Deal with the Devil: You can make a deal with the Stranger to undo the game's death penalty, resetting all your survival meters back to their original values. Doing so, however, will lock you into the game's worst ending. Oh, and the Stranger reveals that he is the manifestation of the Plague itself.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • In the original game, none of the Bound could actually die, only become infected. Here, Anyone Can Die.
  • Most notably, Aglaya dies on the last day of the Haruspex's scenario, and unlike with other characters there's nothing you can do to prevent this.
• Death of a Child: Children are not immune to the sand pest, and the ones on Artemy's list can get randomly infected and die just like the other named characters.
• Determinator: Every character with a name—and some who don't—have something that they never stop wanting to live for. Well, they are Russian.
• Dialogue Tree: How you talk to people. Choose options wisely because unless you're willing to load saves, you might not get all the information you could have.
• Disc-One Nuke: You can get a knife very easily on the first day. It'll very likely be your most dependable weapon, as you can safely kill hostile enemies quickly with a few stealthy backstabs.
• Doorstopper: The script for the game has more than 250,000 words, placing it among some famous doorstoppers in literature.
• The Dog Bites Back: After the Termitary is unlocked, the workers in the Termitary get fed up with the Olgimskys' treatment of them and demand their lives as payback. You can choose which Vlad to delivery or save both of them with some clever manouvering.
• Downer Beginning: The game proper (after the prologue) begins with Artemy getting ambushed by three townsfolk, whom he then kills in self-defense. Soon after, he learns that his father, whose letter brought him to the town in the first place, died the previous night. And then it turns out everyone thinks he's the killer...
• Downer Ending:
  • The game starts with one. It's the twelfth and final day of the Plague, everyone is dead, and the military has decided to destroy the town. You start the game proper by declaring your intent to try again and do things right this time.
  • It is possible to lock oneself out from either valid ending, trapped inside the theater and unable to save the town. It's caused by making a deal with the Fellow Traveler to go easy on you when dying. Instead of a conclusion, the game cuts to you and the Traveler on a train, just like the beginning of the story.
• Dreaming the Truth: Certain revelations required to progress the plot only occur to Artemy after dreams.
  Loading screen tip: Certain answers only come in your sleep. Do not neglect dreams.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: The prologue features Artemy awakening in the theater, with all of his children dead, the other two doctors hysterical, and the town doomed. He then awakens on the train into town, the train’s other occupant saying he was having a nightmare.
• Due to the Dead:
  • Isidor's funeral on the morning of Day 2. Artemy discovers the Earth refuses to let him be buried, and Artemy must do more to allow him to rest properly.
  • Frequently discussed by Grace, the cemetary attendant. She believes (perhaps correctly) that she can speak to the dead, and demands they be given proper funerary rites. This comes to a head as the deaths from the Plague mount, forcing workers to pile bodies in a mass grave as the cemetary is full. Grace tells you the dead are crowded and suffering, but that cremating them would deny them their connection to Earth. You must decide how to resolve the situation.
• Dying Race: The Kin are in decline because of exploitation by the Town, especially the Olgimsky family.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Measly and Thrush can be seen for the first time during the Downer Beginning prologue, watching you from behind an Army barricade.
  • Aspity can be seen among the crowd watching the Ring of Suok during the combat tutorial.
  • Peter Stamatin and Anna Angel are among the crowd in front of Isidor's house before Artemy is properly introduced to them. Artemy also sees them in the prologue, along with Foreman Oyun, the Three Mistresses, and the Bachelor and the Changeling.
• Early Game Hell: Zigzagged. On the one hand, just like in the first game, Artemy begins the campaign dirt poor, on the brink of death, nearly starving, and with almost the entire town out to kill him. On the other, people don't turn hostile to Artemy immediately, which means you're given a little time to prepare yourself accordingly; it's a lot easier to move around the town without getting attacked; you can fight people off without killing them, preserving more reputation; and you can't technically die on the first day thanks to Bad Grief keeping an eye out for you.
• Earthy Barefoot Character: The Herb Brides are a very literal example. This can be explicitly brought up in conversation, where it's revealed they go barefoot to better communicate with the Earth during their ritual dances.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The Town was just a town once, apparently, but now it's an "ark" filled with all kinds of prodigies and literally magical people. And the steppe outside it is even more surreal.
  • The Abbatoir is a beef slaughterhouse that's also a temple. Even some people in-universe don't understand how that's possible.
• Emergency Authority: Inquisitor Aglaya Lilich, and later General Block.
• Emergent Narrative: The random nature of infections combined with it being in the player's hands as to how/whether to treat infected NPCs means that the outbreak of the plague will claim different victims each playthrough.
• Family of Choice: The "blood" section contains characters that Artemy considers to be family. The only character who is related to him by blood is his dead father. Aspity, his spiritual older sister, starts there as well, despite the fact that they have no blood relation. Over the course of the game, all seven of Artemy's wards and his three friends can make their way there as well as he begins to consider them family.
• Fantastic Drug: Twyrine is said to enhance hearing and allow you to hear "the Town calling to you".
• Fantastic Flora: The herbs that grow in the Steppe, and around the town, that emit unique sounds.
• Fantastic Medicinal Bodily Product: Human organs can be used to make serums that help with the plague, and to make painkillers. More typically, the Living Blood used in the Panacea.
• Fantastic Racism: There's tension between the humans and the Kin; the latter are treated like slaves in the Termitary, blamed for the misfortunes happening all across the Steppe, and even believed to be the cause of the Plague. It turns out that's not too far off the mark. The Kin are aligned with the earth, and the earth is using the Sand Plague to wipe out the humans. Even in the early parts of the game, there's talk among the Kin of them killing the townsfolk.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The Kin are one for the Steppe cultures of the Mongols. The language the Kin speak is based on Buryat.
• Fast-Forward Mechanic: Sleeping makes time pass faster, but even the game tells you that if you don't need to sleep, you're probably better off spending your time scavenging and trading items.
• The Ferryman: The Worms that ferry you up and down the Gorkhon river and its tributaries.
• Fictional Greetings and Farewells: "Bayarlaa. How fares your kine?", among the Kin.
• Find the Cure!: A big part of the third act of the game. Artemy is certain that a cure is possible, but his attempts to brew treatments with infected organs is a failure. It is only after he obtains "Living Blood" from Shekhen that he is finally able to make a true panacea. This actually happens only halfway through the game, but a single vial of cure can't stop an outbreak. The rest of the game revolves around Artemy's attempts to find larger sources of the key ingredient.
• Fire/Water Juxtaposition: On Day 11, Artemy must find three couriers bearing orders to destroy the Polyhedron. Two of them are revealed to have already been intercepted by the other playable characters: The Bachelor shoots the courier and burns the orders just before you find him; the Changeling tried to heal the courier but failed, and the orders got lost in a nearby stream.
• Forgotten First Meeting: Artemy has no memory of meeting the Herb Bride that keeps approaching him, even though she says they know each other.
• Forgotten Phlebotinum: You can obtain and use shmowder to cure the plague very early on, with Notkin even having special dialogue if you use it on him. Despite this, other characters and Artemy himself will insist the plague has no cure in most dialogue options. The one exception is a conversation with the Bachelor during the town hall meeting, where he will dismiss it as a solution out of hand and never bring it up again.
• Foreshadowing:
  • If the player chooses to destroy the Polyhedron, conversations with specific characters on the final day will hint at potential plotlines or events in the Bachelor's and Changeling's storylines:
    • The Changeling will reveal that forces up above (presumably the Powers That Be) were waiting to meet her. Destroying the Polyhedron has prevented this meeting from occurring.
    • Eva will mention that Daniil became fascinated with the Oneirotects, the people responsible for building the town, with one in particular (Farkad, who Peter claims to have murdered) having built the Cathedral. Daniil apparently spent any spare time he had in the town searching for information on them.
  • The udurgh, whose identity you spend most of the game puzzling out, is perpetually stated to be "In Danger" on your list, which only happens to people who are at risk of catching the plague due to residing in an infected district. The udurgh is the town itself, which the Sand Plague is constantly infecting.
  • The pantomimes at the Theater are full of this.
    • The play for Day 1, dedicated to introducing Artemy, has diagrams and equipment from his lair around him. To his left is the dissecting table used in the Abattoir sequence.
    • The pantomime for Day 4 takes place in a graveyard where two characters are discussing Artemy's dead father. A giant horn swings above them. It turns out this is the murder weapon.
    • In Day 5's play, the glowing curtain from Stakh's hideout is situated directly behind the Bachelor, hinting that he was Stakh's collaborator.
    • The play for Day 6 is the Inquisitor discussing criminal acts. She ends by referring to Capella without elaboration. The next play is the Inquisitor stating that "the only real crime is betraying someone who trusted you." Later that day, Capella says that she will take the children from Artemy, which can be seen as an act of betrayal.
    • Day 9's play is a discussion between the Inquisitor and Artemy viewed from a train car, foreshadowing their possible attempt to flee the town by boarding a train.
    • The Inquisitor and the General appear in the plays that take place the morning before their arrival.
  • In the final moments of the introduction sequence, the Fellow Traveler will turn into an Executor— the same Executor form that the Sand Plague uses to taunt Artemy.
    • His dialogue foreshadows his true identity as the Plague as well, as he "hopes he can manage to meet his toll" once he arrives in the town.
  • In an odd dream sequence, Artemy sees Lara talking about eating people. He comes to the conclusion that Lara is going to kill someone. He's right. On Day 10, she will attempt to kill General Block.
• Framing Device: The game is framed as a play being staged by Mark Immortell.
• Friend to All Children: The Haruspex can be one, depending on your dialogue choices. You'll always have the option to be kind and friendly to every child you talk to, and doing so is usually rewarded as the "correct" decision. There's also the fact that your Bound are all children.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Sometimes intentional, given the setting's meta nature, and sometimes not.
  • On Day 1 of the Haruspex's route, he can knock on the Nutshell door and be let in...but there are clearly no people in the building.
  • Many characters mention that it's twyre season, but you can't find any on the steppe until Day 2.
  • Townsfolk NPCs never decline in number no matter how high the end-of-day death totals reach.
  • Looting or autopsying bodies will always hurt your reputation, even if there are no visible witnesses.
  • Characters repeatedly state that there is no cure for the plague prior to your discovery of the panacea, even if you've previous cured people with shmowder.
  • You can insist to the flamethrower corps the plague is not spread by miasma. In gameplay, the primary means of infection is by roaming plague clouds... which can be warded off by fire, even.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The soldiers patrolling the infected districts wear gas masks to protect themselves from the diseased miasma. In the last couple days, you can even buy and use their equipment.
• Genius Loci: The earth on which the town is built upon is a living thing in and of itself, complete with blood and organs that you will find if you dig deep enough. It births the Kin, who serve as its tenders and fleshly avatars, and even the Sand Plague itself is a creation of hers.
• Giant Animal Worship: The Kin revere Bos Turokh, the World Bull. A manifestation of Bos Turokh, or possibly the deity itself, appears in the Nocturnal Ending.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: The Executor costumes have these.
• God of Good: According to Steppe belief, Bos Turokh, the World Bull, is the central deity.
• God of Evil: Suok, the Kin's personification of evil.
• Good Pays Better: Completing your hospital task for the day and giving at least three people antibiotics nets you a large and extremely helpful amount of food and money and a boost in reputation. Rescuing babies from infected houses yields similar rewards.
• Gratuitous Iambic Pentameter: The Prompters who serve as a Justified Tutorial on Day 1 speak like this.
• Gratuitous Latin: The Bachelor's still fond of this, but it occurs less frequently.
• Greek Chorus: The Townsfolk are said to fulfill this purpose, commenting on the decline of the Town through the game. Beak and Talon also serve as this, especially during the pantomime rehearsals.
• Grid Inventory: Artemy's carrying capacity is portrayed this way. Different items stack up to varying limits.
• The Grim Reaper: The Executors, especially Talon and Beak, bring this trope to mind. Additionally, the Fellow Traveler is implied to be a personification of the death the plague will bring.
• Healing Herb: Not directly, but the herbs you find around the Town and the Steppe can be used to brew tinctures which help with immunity and other meters.
• Heart of the Matter: In the Abattoir, Artemy crafts a Heart which speaks to him with Mother Boddho's voice out of random objects he finds, signifying that he now truly understands the Lines. After this, he jumps into the bottomless abyss in the Abattoir and can speak to a large heart, which is the heart of the Town itself.
• Heroic Sacrifice: A steppe man asks the Haruspex if he will exchange his "rotten", outcast heart for his healthy one. If Haruspex expresses concerns about what the rot will do to him, he brushes it off, saying that he does not value himself as an individual, but as part of the collective he needs to rejoin.
• Hive Mind: Some members of the Kin, including Foreman Oyun, believe the Kin to be a single organism with no individualism. He might be right. The Plague seems to not affect people who are able to completely give themselves over to the collective Kin.
• Home Base: Artemy's Lair under the factory serves as this.
• Hope Spot: After journeying through the Abattoir and obtaining up to six panaceas, the Plague breaks its own rules and immediately infects all the children on your list.
• Honor Among Thieves: Even the Town's criminal elements by and large follow the rule of not cutting flesh. It's a sign of how bad things have gotten when knife-wielding looters start appearing at night.
• I'm a Humanitarian: No one in the game commits cannibalism per se, but the antibiotics and painkillers you can brew require human organs to make. Which means human flesh is being consumed every time you quaff a potion or administer one to a sick patient.
• Industrial Ghetto: The Termitary serves as this, given that it houses most of the workers of the Bull Enterprise, and was not the nicest place to live, even before the outbreak.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The shotgun. It's not as good or as versatile as the rifle, but ammo is more plentiful and you can get one for free if you complete a certain late-game quest chain. Meanwhile, the rifle is so excessively rare that you're unlikely to even see one on a typical playthrough.
• Innocent Fanservice Girl: Herb brides wear torn and skimpy dresses, to the point where some are even borderline naked, but don't have any real taboo against nudity and don't treat their appearance as sexual regardless.
• The Insomniac: Rubin works round the clock helping the sick and developing a cure, which does little to improve his already sour mood. If you manage to prevent him from dying, it'll catch up to him and he'll start spending the whole day asleep in bed. Could also apply to you too, depending on how you play; sleep takes up time that could be spent doing something useful, and time is never on your side.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: You can jump, but it costs a decent chunk of stamina and doesn't really go high enough to get over anything. It's useful for getting around difficult geometry, but you won't be hopping fences.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: You have three compartments with differing amounts of space, and each object takes up a given amount of inventory space. Equipped clothing and weapons don't take up inventory space. Most objects stack and money doesn't occupy a slot, but there are caps to the stacks. One such cap that the player may encounter early on relates to water bottles: you can only stack 10 in one space. This may come as a surprise to veterans of the series who are used to carrying dozens of bottles in one slot without difficulty.
• In Which a Trope Is Described: How each new day is introduced, except for Day 12 (the prologue)^note 'Which the Haruspex ends with a semicolon' .
• It Is Beyond Saving: Several characters feel this way about the Town. You can decide this for sure with the ending choice.
• Justified Save Point: The various clocks around the game serve as this, including the giant pendulum in the Cathedral. Conversation with Victor Kain implies that the Cathedral produces time which is distributed by the clocks, making saving an in-game feature.

K-Z

• Karma Meter: The Reputation system returns, but it's much more complex this time around. Every district has its own localized reputation meter, which allows for more nuance in how your actions are rewarded or punished. If you kill someone on one end of town, nobody on the other end will come after you; but if you repair your reputation in one district, it will still be sour in the other. Certain plot events, such as being blamed for a murder, will tank your reputation everywhere.
• Killed Offscreen: Characters who die of the plague do so offscreen. Additionally, there are a few specific examples based on quest decisions:
  • If you don't brew the panacea by Day 7, Rubin dies offscreen.
  • If you don't flee the town with them, Aglaya Lilich is found dead on Day 11.
• Killing in Self-Defense: The three townsfolk that Artemy kills on his arrival into the Town. They wanted to catch the killer of two important figures of the Town and assumed the killer would be at the station trying to flee.
• Kill It with Fire: After a few days, firestarters start running into infected districts, hurling Molotov cocktails at every infected person they come across (which could potentially include you) out of some desperate belief they can curb the Sand Plague by burning it. Later on, the Army ups the ante by bringing in flamethrowers. It turns out they have a point, as fire can in fact reduce the infection - which can prove useful to you should you be unlucky enough to catch the plague.
• King of Thieves: Grief appears to be one initially. His reflection tells you it's an act.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: If you want to survive, be prepared to take a lot of things that don't belong to you. Especially while the owners and their neighbors are unavailable on account of their homes being infected by a deadly pandemic.
• Knight Templar: The Inquisition led by Aglaya takes a very hard stance on crime, to the point where it practically believes that All Crimes Are Equal, punishing each criminal caught with death. The Army is just as representative of this trope, as it arrives with the very real goal to level the entire Town-on-Gorkhon just to keep the Plague from spreading. Ironically, given the Genius Loci of the game's setting, the Plague is only capable of infecting the area of the town, representing the All for Nothing nature of both Aglaya and Block's solutions.
• Lampshade Hanging: The game touches on the fact that the non-named Townsfolk are nameless, faceless extras, with a Prompter discussing it, as well as the 'scrap name' item which allows Townsfolk to discard their names once they are no longer needed.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: With the exception of the "Deal" ending, the ending comes entirely down to how you resolve the final quest of Day 11. Delivering Aglaya's orders to destroy the Polyhedron gets you the "Diurnal" ending; burning the orders gets you the "Nocturnal" ending; and failing to complete the quest in time gets you the "Late" ending.
• Late to the Tragedy: The source of most of Artemy's problems on Day 1.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Leading looters chasing you into guards and soldiers leads to a fight between them, allowing you to slip away or take a chance with a weakened enemy.
• Life/Death Juxtaposition: The quest where Artemy is tasked with rescuing babies from infected districts, which is so emblematic of the game's themes that an advertisement for the PS4 release centered around it.
• Like a Son to Me: Depending on Artemy's choices, he can become a father figure for most of the children on the List, and his dialog options reflect his growing attachment to them, calling them "my children" and telling the Inquisitor he can't run away with her because he has his kids to take care of. So of course the manifestation of the Sand Pest decides to infect all of them at the same time out of spite. Even if you save every bottle of living blood to make the panacea, unless you've gotten a shmowder too, you won't be able to save them all.
• Like Brother and Sister: Lara and Artemy. Artemy can call her "abgai," which means sister, and call her sister in their Day 11 conversation. Lara refers to them as "siblings in suffering."
• Loyal Animal Companion: The Soul-and-a-Halves are all about this. They each have a pet, known as their Half, that they raise from infancy and bond with for life. Notkin's is a cat named Jester.
• Luck-Based Mission: The game uses dicerolls to decide which characters become infected with the Plague (or killed by it, if already infected), determined at dawn but only revealed at midnight to discourage Save Scumming. You can tilt the odds in your favor by giving at-risk characters immunity boosters, but you can never guarantee their safety.
• MacGuffin: The game's design documents refer to the Polyhedron as one.
• The Magic Comes Back: In the ending where the Polyhedron is spared, not only will the assorted miracles of the earth remain in effect and thrive under the new conditions, but long-extinct beings like the aurochs return to the world and the inhabitants of the Polyhedron enter into a deeper stage of fourth wall-breaking enlightenment.
• The Magic Goes Away: In the ending where the Polyhedron is destroyed, this seems to be the case at first. All the miracles of the earth begin to die. That includes the miraculous healing blood, the twyre herbs, supernatural creatures like the odonghs and herb brides, Clara's powers, and the Sand Plague itself. However, the Mistresses still retain their abilities, implying that while Mother Boddho's children are doomed, there remains strange wonders in the world.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: Artemy has studied to be a surgeon but through the game, his pursuit of a cure relies heavily on his knowledge of steppe medicine. His surgery skills only come into play when he harvests organs from corpses for his tinctures and serums. Similarly, Dankovsky has dedicated himself to the study of death, but finds himself managing the outbreak in the town and attempting to create a vaccine. This is acknowledged in-game.
• Malicious Slander: The deaths of Isidor Burakh and Simon Kain whip the town into a frenzy, desperate to persecute someone for the crime. After blaming and attacking the steppe people for a while, everybody decides that you did it. Your reputation in every district plummets to "hated" until the matter's resolved a few hours later, but some folks will hold the grudge. Rubin's lingering resentment is especially notable, since the Bachelor went to some length to convince him of your innocence.
• Memorial Statue: Mistresses Nina Kaina and Victoria Olgimskya have special tombs and giant statues to commemorate them.
• Menu Time Lockout: Accessing the menu mercifully pauses the game. However, accessing your inventory outside the menu, e.g. looting objects, does not pause time.
• Mercy Mode: Die enough times, and the Fellow Traveler will offer to undo all the negative effects of death for you. It's a trap; taking it will lock you into the game's worst ending.
• Meta Guy: Many of them. The most prominent is Mark Immortell, who appears at the beginning and when the player dies to "recast" Artemy, because the role is too important to flub.
• Mini-Game: There are three:
  • The Lockpicking Minigame.
  • The surgery mini-game.
  • The immunity-boosting/infection-reducing mini-game.
• Minor Living Alone: Grace and Murky are orphans who live by themselves. Notkin and the children of the Polyhedron live without their parents, but do have each other, at least.
• More Diverse Sequel: This game has distinctly different models for the Kin NPCs, and there are as many of them as there are of the 'Town' NPCs.
• More than Meets the Eye: The 'reflections' that you see around certain characters affirm this about them. This is also true for the deaths of Simon Kain and Isador Burakh and for the town as a whole.
• Multiple Endings: Depending on the player's choice on what to save.
  • If you destroy the Polyhedron, both the Tower and the miracles of the Kin cease to exist. The new Mistresses take their power, and the survivors try to put the pieces back together.
  • If you save the Polyhedron, the miracles of the Kin stay in the world, but those not tied to the Kin are forced to walk across the marshes into the steppe, not even aware of the Haruspex, into what's implied to be the afterlife. The Town and its outsider people die, but the Kin thrive. Those in the Polyhedron begin breaking down as the fourth wall breaks down with them.
  • If you fail to find the orders in time, you will be transported to the Theater and be berated by Beak and Talon for not accomplishing your task in time. You cannot go back to the Town and its fate is left unresolved. Mark Immortell dismisses you. The Bachelor is on stage, appearing to prepare to perform next, while the Changeling makes her usual cryptic allusions.
  • If you choose to run away, Aglaya and Artemy venture away from town on the train. However, it is stopped and returned to the Town, whereupon the Inquisitor is shot dead by the Army. You can be shot as well or choose one of the other endings.
  • If you make a deal with the Fellow Traveler: The Theater will not release you, as you corrupted the grand design by asking for mercy and the Traveler reveals himself as the Plague, thanking you for allowing him to follow you home.
• Mystical City Planning: The Kains are heavily engaged building a town and structures that affect the human soul, and employed the Stamatin Brothers, Farkhad and Yulia Lyuricheva to assist them.
• Mythology Gag: The item description for Cloth Gloves quotes the opening line of the Haruspex's introductory text from the first game: "How does one call upon menkhu, the faithful of the Kin? Know them by their hands, for they are butchers…".
• Mythopoeia: The Kin believe in an earth deity, Mother Boddho, and that she is a living, breathing thing. They believe that all living beings are created from the earth. This is why digging into the ground and cutting into flesh is massively taboo in the Town. They also believe in a world bull, Bos Turok, and a death god, Suok. There are myths surrounding these figures in the folklore of the Kin. She isn't just real, she's dying and taking the entire town with her.
• Navel-Deep Neckline: The Herb Brides, all of which appear in tattered dresses that barely cover the bare essentials (except for a few, who are just plain naked). One of them explains their clothes fray and tear from their dancing.
• News Travels Fast: Rumours surrounding Artemy's part in Isador's death spread quickly on Day 1. While confined to only the district you're currently in and some neighboring districts news of your deeds, either good or bad, spread instantly. This occurs even if there are no visible witnesses.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Some well-meaning things you do will only make the situation worse.
  • In particular, Lara gets it into her head to turn her home into a shelter for the displaced on Day 4, and requests that you deliver a barrel of water to her. The only barrel you'll be able to find is one filled with dirty water. This gives you a choice: you can either deliver the water to Lara as is, or report it to the Bachelor. Do the former, and her district will get infected the next day. Do the latter, and he'll have all barrels in the central part of town destroyed, clean and dirty alike, leaving everyone with less water to go around. As it is, the best resolution for this quest is to not do it at all.
  • The combat-heavy sidequests to protect Rubin from the Kin only need to be done if you took the trouble to check in on Rubin. The Kin chasing Rubin tell you that they would have given up on looking for him in the area, but your being there has confirmed his presence for them. If you don't bother finding Rubin, he won't need help fending off the Kin.
• Nintendo Hard: Have fun balancing four different survival meters and navigating the giant maze of plague clouds and unreliable NPC schedules that is the Town.
• Nobody Poops: Even though you'll be eating and drinking all you can to stave off starvation and dehydration, you never have to worry about excising any waste from your body. For that matter, neither does anyone else. There aren't even any bathrooms, lavatories, or latrines to be found in the town to even imply that people have to defecate and urinate, and the subject is never brought up, even though it would be very relevant in a setting where digging any kind of hole in the earth is considered deeply taboo.
• No-Gear Level: The earth beneath the Abattoir. Just going into it robs you of your entire inventory, including whatever weapons and healing items you were carrying. That's not good, because you have to contend with some very tough and very hostile odonghs.
• No Hero Discount:
  • Your status as protagonist or doctor does not exempt you from the wildly fluctuating prices of items.
  • Bad Grief outright says he won't give you a discount on his Black Market despite being childhood friends.
• The Nondescript: The Fellow Traveler uses a male NPC model commonly seen in the game, despite the unique role he plays.
• No Nudity Taboo: The Herb Brides feel no shame about their varying states of undress.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Stairways in the Town's 'Superstructures' — The Polyhedron, the Termitary, and the Stairways to Nowhere — do not have railings. Note that you take fall damage in this game.
  • Just as in the first game, the Cathedral's second floor has a balcony with no railing. If you fall from it, the falling damage is enough to kill you instantly.
• Noticing the Fourth Wall: The game begins with Mark Immortell chastising the player for how badly they played the role of the Haruspex, before allowing him one more chance. Whenever Artemy dies, Immortell "recasts" him, a new actor taking the role. This gets even more meta on Day 11, where the player's successor appears early. The player can feign Artemy's confusion or have a chat with "Artemy" wherein he complains about the successor being paid in advance.
• No True Scotsman: Some of the Kin believe that Artemy is no longer one of them because of the time he spent away from the Town. Depending on dialogue choices Artemy can prove them right or wrong, or end up somewhere in the middle.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: An anonymous Kingfisher NPC is accosted by three vigilantes who believe him to be the hated Artemy Burakh. If Artemy talks to the vigilantes but does not reveal his identity, the Kingfisher will take this opportunity to run off. They pursue him...but later in the same area you find that Kingfisher stumbling around, badly injured but alive. Nearby are the corpses of those three men.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: On Day 1, Artemy can take the Bachelor to task for declining to treat what he thinks are poisoned children. He doesn't know yet that the Bachelor was asked to treat the children's poisoned dogs.
• One Man's Trash Is Another's Treasure: You'll soon learn which items are valuable to the different kinds of townsfolk, and which items they offer in turn. This is most prominent with the Dead Item Shop, which takes literal garbage that even other townsfolk have no interest in.
  Loading screen tip: Even the most absurd garbage is valuable to someone.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted with Governer Alexander Saburov and General Alexander Block.
• Optional Stealth: You can sneak past enemies if you'd rather not fight them. And if you're lucky.
• Organ Drops: You can harvest organs from corpses, although this is hugely taboo and the locals do not take kindly to it.
• Panacea: Serves as a cure for the Plague in this game.
• Parents as People: On returning to the town, Artemy learns that his father Isador Burakh dealt with the first outbreak of the plague five years prior to the events of the game by quarantining the crude sprawl, condemning everyone inside to a horrible death. This causes Artemy some distress, as it goes against the idealistic vision he had of his father. Additionally, it is revealed that Isidor was patient zero of the plague, and intentionally spread it to the town, further muddying Artemy's feelings towards him.
• The Plague: Called the Sand Pest in this game. The word is present in the Russian title of the game.
• Plague Doctor: Expect to come across a lot of people wearing the bird-faced garb inspired by the profession. Some of them are simple orderlies stuck working in infected districts. Others are... something far more sinister.
• Permanently Missable Content: Everything except the opening dreams; you can literally sleep through the entire plot if you want.
  • Quests run on a strict timeline, which the game politely informs you it will give no prior hints about. Some are available for days, others will end within one.
  • NPCs may not give you their quests, depending on the path Artemy takes through conversations with them. Warn those kids with a poisoned friend that you're a surgeon, not a toxicologist? They will leave. Don't suggest to Lara that she meet with her friends? She'll remain depressed.
• Powder Keg Crowd: Bad Grief describes the Townsfolk this way. He's right and as the plague gets worse, the Town further descends into chaos.
• Psychic Dreams for Everyone: Maria Kaina, Anna Angel and Eva Yan all have the same symbolism-laden dream despite the latter two women not having explicit supernatural abilities.
• Pursuing Parental Perils: Through the course of the game, Artemy begins to take over for his father in combating the Plague, looking after the Town's children, and becoming a leader to the Kin. All of these can end up getting him killed in one way or another.
• Pushover Parents: Disturbingly enforced. You can speak to NPCs early in the game who reveal the reason the children in the Polyhedron are free to stay there is because the Polyhedron prevents their parents from intervening.
• Putting the Band Back Together: Artemy can choose to reestablish his old friendships with Lara Ravel, Bad Grief and Rubin, which in turn improves relations between his three friends too.
• Quirky Town: With its firmly-held superstitions, odd beliefs and practices, roving child gangs, eccentric characters and numerous impossible structures, the Town is an extreme example of this trope.
• Railroad to Horizon: The tracks stretching a long way out into the Steppe drive home just how isolated the Town is from the outside world, and its dependence on the trains for survival.
• Reliably Unreliable Guns: At lower levels of durability, guns become less accurate and are more likely to jam.
• Remilitarized Zone: The Town is this after the arrival of General Block.
• Resting Recovery: Health regenerates during sleep, unlike in the first game. Using morphine before sleeping increases the rate of regeneration.
• Roadside Surgery: Artemy can perform autopsies to harvest organs from corpses in the streets. The locals do not like this.
• Rule of Three: A recurring motif in the game:
  • The three primary healers/playable characters: Daniil Dankovsky, Artemy Burakh and Clara the Changeling.
  • The town is divided into three segments by the Gorkhon river and its tributaries.
  • The town has three ruling families: The Kains, the Olgimskys, and the Saburovs.
  • The three Mistresses: Maria Kaina, Capella, and Katerina Saburova.
  • Artemy's three childhood friends: Stakh Rubin, Bad Grief and Lara Ravel.
  • The three rulers of the Kin: Taya Tycheek, Forman Oyun and Isador Burakh.
  • The three layers, three types of tinctures and three types of antibiotics.
  • Three types of common herbs, and three types of rare ones.
  • You must test three serums before you realise it's a dead end.
• Sadistic Choice: A big part of the game is having to choose between looking out for youself and helping other people. Do you risk getting the plague going into an infected building to rescue a baby or walk past, ignoring the baby's cries, and missing out on a sizeable reward? More specifically, do you take the plague in place of Murky, saving her but putting you in a very difficult situation if you have no cures, or let her die, saving yourself?
  • After visiting the Abbatoir, all seven children on the List will become infected. You can only obtain up to 5 vials of living blood from the Abbatoir, meaning two will have to die unless you have shmowders.
• Save Scumming: No longer possible, unless you're very dedicated or don't mind losing progress. There is no quicksave function, and you can only save in a few specific locations. The intent was to prevent this behavior entirely by making it prohibitively difficult and not really worth the effort. You can reload old saves, but unless you're in the same room as a save device you'll likely lose a lot of time and progress. A loading screen tip also advises against this: "Don't abuse time-turning. Sometimes the consequences of our failures can be just as compelling as our successes."
  • Additionally, death punishments persist across all saves in a profile. Mark Immortell will even chide you if you declare your intent to save scum your way out of this.
• Scenery Porn: All the design and aesthetic value of the original game have been reimagined with clean, modern graphics, and it is gorgeous. Even the burning corpses and pustule-covered houses are lovely to look at.
• Sequel Hook: The Haruspex's scenario ends with Mark Immortell deciding he wants to put on another performance, this one starring a protagonist who takes the subject of death much more seriously, hinting at the upcoming Bachelor scenario.
• The Shadow Knows: If you look closely at the Fellow Traveler in the train car after getting the bad ending by accepting his deal, you'll realize his shadow is, appropriately enough, that of a large, horned creature.
• Shout-Out:
  • The "living blood" of a god can cure the plague, no surprise there.
  • The flavour text when you enter the Factory district reads 'Welcome to the Machine'. The opening lyrics fit the situation too.
  • Aspity's description of Earth's body inverts a quote from Assassin's Creed.
  "Everything is true and nothing is permitted."
• Sliding Scale of Realistic vs. Fantastic: An unusual example. The 'rules' of the setting are internally consistent and events have rational consequences; for example the fluctuating prices of food. However, the people of the setting hold atypical beliefs, and the story incorporates several supernatural elements while mostly retaining a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane tone. The main source of ambiguity comes from the very different definition of "mundane" this setting has.
• The Snark Knight: Artemy had a touch of this in the original game, but here it's come out in full force. Almost every dialogue choice has at least one sassy option, if not more. Conversations with people Artemy dislikes may leave you with no non-snarky options at all.
• Source Music: When passing certain buildings, Gnossienne No. 3 can be heard. Investigating the source of the music leads to a quest.
• Spell My Name With An S: The debate on various names rages on, complicated by Ice-Pick Lodge having changed the spelling of some. The Changeling is now Clara, and the drunk Stamatin is now Peter. A blog post from the developers discussed the changes, stating that certain names were changed because there was no real point to their original spelling aside from 'sounding Russian'.
• Spreading Disaster Map Graphic: Not a graphic as such, but the infected districts of the day are shaded in red on the map. Some days it's not so bad, but on other days...
• Stranger in a Familiar Land: Artemy has returned to his hometown after many years away, and sometimes needs to be reminided of its many, many quirks and oddities
• Surgeons Can Do Autopsies If They Want: Initially averted, not because of issues with Artemy's qualifications, but because of the Town's strict taboo about cutting flesh. Played straight later with the hospital where Artemy is expected to harvest organs at one point, and with the fact that Artemy is perfectly capable of performing autopsies.
• Take Care of the Kids: In a manner of speaking. Isidor Burakh left Artemy a list of children from the Town who he believed would play an important role in its futue, and wants Artemy to protect and guide them.
• Taking a Third Option: You can placate the Kin at the Termitary by delivering them Big Vlad or Vlad the Younger. Or you can wait for a third option to present itself.
• Technically-Living Zombie: People who enter the more advanced stages of infection effectively become zombies in the classical sense, mindless thralls of the Sand Plague whose only goal is to spread it to those who haven't been infected yet. They're still alive, but not for long.
• Textile Work Is Feminine: If you need to get your clothing mended, your best bet will be to ask an adult female NPC for repairs. You can, however, mend clothes yourself in your Lair.
• Timed Mission: Technically, the entire game is a big timed mission. Failing to complete missions on time will have consequences, which are often as compelling as those for completing the tasks on time.
  Loading screen tip: Some events take several days to resolve. Some events take hours. There is no way to know which is which.
• Together in Death: A possible in-universe perspective of the Nocturnal ending. Artemy can't follow his friends on their journey through the afterlife no matter what he does, but he can tell them: "You go on ahead, I'll catch up with you later."
• Train Job: Artemy and Bad Grief can plan to blow up the train tracks to prevent the Inquisitor from arriving in Town. When you actually show up, however, Grief reveals he never had any intent to do so.
• Translation Train Wreck: Thankfully averted this time. Ice-Pick Lodge devoted a lot of time and energy to making the English translation as good as it can be, and it shows.
• Unbroken First-Person Perspective: You play the game as Artmey Burakh ^note Technically actors playing the role of Artemy for all twelve days plus the prologue with no cutscenes or timeskips.
• Unstable Equilibrium: As is often the case in survival games, intelligent resource management early on will allow you to save up more resources, which you can then use to buy or barter for even better resources in a postive feedback loop. If you can manage to fully max out the fund reward even once, you can likely ride that massive windfall for the rest of the game. On the flipside, if you fall behind the curve, your punishing hunger and exhaustion meters will likely make you stay there, as you'll need to continually burn what little time and resources you have just to stay alive. This is made worse by death punishments, which permanently reduce your various survival meters, making you more likely to die again.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The Town in the prologue is ravaged by the Plague, the screams of the infected and dying can be heard, the military are killing townsfolk in the street, and amid all this carnage, you can see some children playing hopscotch in the light of one of the fires.
• Unusual Pets for Unusual People: Not that odd in-universe, but there are few video games where you get to buy a pet bull, and the Haruspex is definitely an unusual fellow.
• Urban Segregation: The poorer districts in the Earth Quarter are immediately visually different from the more well-off Stoneyard Quarter.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: The Kains' driving motive. And as it turns out, Isidor was aligned with the Kains on this as well, deliberately infecting the town as a means of revolutionizing it.
• Video Game Caring Potential: One of the game's primary themes is finding a balance between helping others and looking out for yourself, which lends itself to plenty of situations like this. Outside of quest events, things like giving your medicine and food to folks in need qualifies, especially if you put yourself at risk doing so. You can even save innocent townspeople from attacking robbers, if you're brave enough.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: On the other hand, you can just as easily screw people over for your own personal gain. Your reputation will tank, but you can absolutely go on a rampage if that's what you want. Break into people's houses and steal their food, kill innocents in the street and take their organs, leave the sick to die so you can save your precious medicine for yourself. There will be consequences, of course.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Stealing from, attacking, or killing people will tank your reputation in the region. If it gets too low, shops will refuse to sell to you and townsfolk will refuse to barter; drop it further, and townsfolk will attack you on sight. (Nobody cares if you callously ignore sick NPCs, though.)
• Video Games and Fate: An important theme present in the game. The game discusees fate in the opening, with the Fellow Traveler and the first dream Artemy has on Day 1.
  • Aglaya Lilich is implied to know that she is a character in a game and fights against her fate. After talking to her, Bad Grief realises that as a character he has no real agency, which upsets him greatly.
• Video Game Stealing: The consequences for looting houses differs based on the status of the district the house is in:
  • In normal districts, stealing from houses results in huge drops in reputation.
  • Houses in infected districts can be looted without any reputation loss, but the player must contend with plague clouds and infected occupants.
  • Houses in post-infection burnt districts can also be looted without any loss in reputation, but generally contain knife-weilding bandits doing the same thing as you.
• Video Game Time: One in-game day is roughly two hours at first. This speeds up with every in-game day.
• Voiceover Letter: How the contents of Isidor's letter to Artemy are revealed to the audience.
• Wham Episode: Really, any day once districts start getting infected can be this if the Random Number God dislikes you and a slew of characters get infected. However, there are a couple plot stand outs.
  • Day 3, "in which the alarm bell tolls". While players might suspect things will be going bad based on what they find in Isador's house the previous day, two whole districts becoming infected can be a shock.
  • The Abbatoir quest reveals that the Plague is indeed caused by the Earth as a punishment for humans becoming too individualistic. After this, Artemy has a dream in which Isidor reveals that he was patient zero for the Plague and wanted bring the infection to the Town on purpose as a test. And then the Plague breaks all its rules and infects all the children.
• What the Hell, Player?: If you fail to complete the story by the deadline, you're not treated to a scene depicting your failure to save the town as in the original game. You're instead brought back to the theater where Clara, Daniil, Mark Immortell, and the Executors admonish you for your incompetence and inability to finish the play on time.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Capella, Khan and Notkin take their positions of leadership very seriously and make more mature, grounded and less self-serving decisions than most of the Town's adult leaders.
• Witch Hunt: The game starts with one, with the villagers first harassing women they think are Steppe demons responsible for killing Isidor (going so far as to burn an innocent herb bride at the stake). Then they start thinking you did it.
• Womb Level: Plunging into the depths of the Abattoir brings you to the guts and eventually the heart of the earth itself, all of which look just as fleshy and organic as they do in any regular animal.
• A World Half Full:
  • The Diurnal Ending feels this way. Characters are shaken by the recent events, but are cautiously optimistic about what the future holds.
  • More broadly, the plague itself exists not because the world lacks wonder, but because it has so many that Earth can't hold them all. There is no official ending that doesn't involve preserving something beautiful.
• The World Is Just Awesome: Artemy feels this way after climbing to the top of the Polyhedron.
• Worthless Currency: The in-game currency can only be used in shops and not in bartering, but as the game goes on, changes of item prices and rules about buying food render money even more situational.
• Wrong Side of the Tracks: The Crude Sprawl. Slightly averted in that the train tracks go through this district instead of seperating it from the Town.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: Time works differently in the Abattoir than the rest of the town. Given how important time is in this game, it's really noticeable.
• You Monster!: If you mess up a quest or otherwise screw someone over, you can expect them to give you an earful about it. For example, on Day 2 you can encounter a group of Kin who ask you to give Big Vlad money from them in exchange for refuge in the Termitary. If you fail, they'll be disappointed, but they'll be quite unhappy with you if you fail and keep their money. Giving them their money back earns you their thanks (and an achievement).
• Your Normal Is Our Taboo: Any kind of digging and cutting is deeply taboo in the Town owing to the townsfolk's absorption of Steppe practices surrounding worship of the Earth as sacred.
• You Wake Up in a Room: A train, actually. Multiple times. Or maybe only once. It's unclear.

DLCs

The Marble Nest

• Attending Your Own Funeral: It's a hallucination. And you're almost dead yourself.
• Downer Ending: The Bachelor is dying of the infection, and the Executor asks him if he wishes to repeat the day or finally be claimed.
• Dying Dream: The whole game after the first encounter with the Executor. Sticky "wakes you up" after you collapse, and you hallucinate your previous day. If you feel you haven't adequately solved the puzzles you've been given, you can choose to hallucinate it again!
• Enraged by Idiocy: The Bachelor can either react with some measure of compassion to the disasters that befall the Stone Yard or lash out at the people he encounters. The latter is often funnier.
• Extremely Short Time Span: The demo takes place across a single day.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: The gist of the demo, with a morbid twist. You replay the day's scenario upon refusing to give in to death.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Your character now has a backpack with twenty storage slots and four small "pockets", two with five slots and two with four; different items take up different amounts of space. Some items, like nuts and needles, can be stacked. Others, like scissors, can't.
• Multiple Endings: The first one can be attained almost immediately in the first conversation with Death, just by having an exhausted-sounding Daniil agree that it's his time. Death, and the ending title card, are a bit disdainful of that quick answer.
  • The second is to demand another try. It's a "Groundhog Day" Loop where each loop is initiated by the character trapped in it, who can break it at the end of any given day.
  • The third is similar to the first in that Daniil, having learned more, agrees to die, but this time it's more of a Face Death with Dignity and allows something of him to go on.
  • The fourth is Taking a Third Option and departing from the fiction altogether.
• The Problem with Fighting Death: Discussed at length. Aspity in particular seems to believe that the Bachelor is fighting a losing battle, failing to understand and accept death. Given that the demo is his dying hallucination, she has a point.
• Secret Test: Invoked by Georgiy Kain, of all people. He is the one who ordered your painstakingly erected barriers to be lowered, seeing the Plague as an "exam" to be taken by the Stone Yard—or maybe just by you. It's hard to tell. You discuss this at length with him and he stands firm in his assertions.
• Taking a Third Option: during the day, some Tragedians will tell you that the only way to win a losing game is to break the rules. During the final confrontation, you can avoid the last choice (dying for real, or repeating the day) by telling the Executor that death can actually be defeated in the dream world (or maybe the videogame world) because after all it's not real and therefore you are in control. The Executor will then compliment the player, while the game implies that this was all a reminder that in the real world you will have to face a similar choice eventually.
• The Snark Knight: The Bachelor could display a snappy wit in the original game, and the same holds true here. In fact, his quips are more frequent and more injurious than before. He even tosses a few barbs at an Executor, who is all but stated to be death personified, upon being asked whether he is ready to die.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: According to a Tragedian inside, time seems to stand still inside the Cathedral, and thus those stuck in it will never perish from the Plague. However, if you check your menu, you'll find that your time is still moving.
• You Wake Up in a Room: In a coffin, it seems. When you return to the room at the end of the day to face the Executor, the coffin is replaced with a bassinet.

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