Soon after you finish celebrating the arrival of next year, the plague will begin. Well, the full version Pathological 3the game, in which you play as a doctor tasked with saving the city from a mysterious infection, is set to gain momentum. I'm sure if you turned off all the lights and paid someone to sit in the next room and cough every two minutes, the difference would be negligible.
This full release took a little longer than the developers at Ice-Pick Lodge. originally plannedbut it barely made it out of 2025, with the recently announced release date being January 9, 2026. “This date is set, locked in, wrapped in commitments, and it is not moving,” the studio wrote in a release. Message on Steam.
Along with this announcement, they released the first in a series of trailers, because apparently Morphological 3 is too “hard to explain in keywords” for one video to do justice to it. Many trailers are clearly not enough to accomplish this task, since the studio decided to release a second demo – after the release of Pathologic 3: Quarantine in March of this year – as part of the latest Steam Next Fest.
“This demo is a clip from the beginning of the upcoming game,” explained Ice-Pick Lodge. “Daniil Dankovsky, the Bachelor, comes to the City-on-Gorkhon. He wants to meet an immortal man. And that’s where everything goes wrong.” Looks like a normal trip to the city.
As Brendan said when he delved into the Quarantine Plague Doctor demo, Pathologic 3 is on track a more detective way of treating plague than its messier predecessor Pathological 2. Here is an excerpt from his impressions:
For all its cohesion, Quarantine's demo still excels at creating atmosphere. As a tasting menu for the unreliable story teller that's planned for the full game, it's vibrant and filled with familiar names and faces for long-suffering fans. As a showcase of what the player will do, it's also kind of an incoherent mess. I describe many of its features in simple terms, but the demo itself doesn't always deliver them that way, with minimal tutorials and a user interface that basically lets you figure things out on your own.
Pathologic 3 is also the first game in the series that the studio will release after the departure of founder and longtime Pathological director Nikolai Dybovsky, left due to allegations of kidnapping and abuse earlier this year.
A demo version of the Next Fest game can be found on its Steam Page.
