Shortly after you finish celebrating the arrival of next year, a plague will rock up. Well, the full version of Pathologic 3, a game in which you play a doctor tasked with saving a town from a mysterious contagion will rock up. I’m sure that if you turn off all of the lights and pay someone to sit in the next room coughing every two minutes, the difference’ll be negligible.
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This full release has taken a tiny bit longer than developers Ice-Pick Lodge initially planned, but it’s just barely slipped out of 2025, with January 9th, 2026, being the freshly revealed release date. “That date is nailed down, screwed in, wrapped in commitments, and it isn’t moving,” the studio wrote in a Steam post.
Alongside this announcement, they’ve released the first in a series of trailers, because apparently Pathologic 3’s far too “hard to explain with keywords” for a single video to do it justice. Multiple trailers apparently aren’t enough to accomplish that task either, as the studio have opted to release a second demo – following Pathologic 3: Quarantine’s arrival this March – as part of the latest Steam Next Fest.
“This demo is a slice from the beginning of the upcoming game,” Ice-Pick Lodge explained. “Daniil Dankovsky, the Bachelor, arrives in the City-on-Gorkhon. He wants to meet an immortal man. And then everything goes sideways.” Sounds like the average trip into town.
As Brendan discussed when he delved into the plague doc sim’s Quarantine demo, Pathologic 3 treads a more detective-coded plague-doctoring path than its scrappier predecessor Pathologic 2. Here’s an extract from his impressions:
For all its stitched-togetherness, the Quarantine demo remains good at building atmosphere. As a taster menu for the unreliable narrator story that is planned for the full game, it is flavourful and stacked with familiar names and faces for long-suffering fans. As a showcase for what the player will be doing it’s also something of a disjointed mess. I’m writing out many of its features in simple terms, but the demo itself doesn’t always deliver them that way, with minimal tutorials and a UI that mostly lets you figure things out yourself.
Pathologic 3’s also the first entry in the series the studio’ll be releasing after the departure of founder and long-time Pathologic director Nikolay Dybowski, who left amid allegations of kidnapping and abuse earlier this year.
The game’s Next Fest demo can be found on its Steam page.
