Get ready to get weird in Pathologic 3: Quarantine, a free ‘prologue chapter’ about a young doctor looking for immortality in the world’s most miserable town

Announced in October 2024, Pathologic 3 promises to blend the notorious weirdness of the Pathologic series with a new twist: Time travel, enabling players to “revisit key events and alter them” in hopes that things will turn out slightly less awful than they did the first time around. We still don’t have a release date, although it’s slated to be out in 2025, but we’ll soon be able to get a taste of what’s coming in Pathologic 3: Quarantine, a free prologue chapter that’s set to arrive in March.

Pathologic 3: Quarantine follows the tale of Daniil Dankovsky, a doctor from the capital who travels to a distant small town in search of immortality. This irritates his superiors, who take him to task for his presumed missteps, but did he really do (or not do) the things he’s accused of? And if he did (or did not), can he go back in time to change his choices and correct his mistakes?

Normally, I would say no, you can’t go back in time so you might as well learn to live with it, but this is Pathologic, so probably a little bit of chronological hopscotch is in the cards. Your task sounds grim regardless: You’ll have to examine and diagnose patients to fight the Sand Plague, but also dig deeper into their lives “to find out the unpleasant truths they may hide.” Is that relevant to a medical diagnosis? Again, in Pathologic, I’m going to say probably yes.

Courtesy of a recently posted developer’s blog, here’s a closer look at some Pathologic 3 gameplay—note that it does have some “spoilers about gameplay mechanics,” so if you really want to go into it cold, maybe give it a pass.

Pathologic 3: Quarantine is set to come out on March 17, and as mentioned, it’s free. You can snag it from Steam.