Summary
Magnificent, depressing plague colony fable Pathologic 3 has received a sizeable game update that adds some new difficulty modes, a photo feature, and some new, worryingly folkloric methods of defeating a murky embodiment of disease. Developers Ice Pick Lodge have also staunchly refused to remove an invisible apple tree, describing this apparently “famous” bug as a hallmark of a game whose “symbolic nature has almost overtaken its function as a product”. This appears to be the last major update for Pathologic 3, so that invisible apple tree is staying in the game forever. I confess, when I first read the Steam blog in question, I doubted. The thing about invisible apple trees is that they are quite easy to confuse with apple trees that are simply not there. Pathologic in general is a house of lies: as Quintin Smith (RPS in peace) put it in his legendary Butchering Pathologic trilogy, “absolutely everybody has an angle, everyone’s bending the truth and trying to twist you round their fingers.” Pathologic 3 especially is a purgatorial time travel story that must be continually rewritten, a crock of festering rumours enclosed by an enormous, phantom theatre. As such, I read Ice-Pick’s typically professorial account of the “invisible apple tree” with intense suspicion. “Roger Ebert, the famous film critic, once argued that video games could never be art,” the devs write on Steam. “It’s curious, then, that urinals and bottle racks achieved that status with hardly any struggle, thanks to Marcel Duchamp. So Myst, StarCraft, or Pathologic can’t be art, but a urinal can? The distinction, perhaps, lies in function. A urinal placed in a museum stops being plumbing and becomes a symbol. A video game, on the other hand, remains a functional object. We still have to use it. “But enough about urinals,” they go on. “Let’s turn to another famous work: Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs. In this work, a chair is no longer simply something to sit on. Whether it’s comfortable hardly matters: as a work of art, it still functions. A video game can also become a symbolic chair. But you still have to sit on it. There’s a running joke that Pathologic is a great game that nobody actually plays. Somehow, it really has become something like Kosuth’s symbolic chair, one nobody is obliged to sit on. Which raises a question: should we even fix Pathologic if its symbolic nature has almost overtaken its function as a product? “Take visual bugs, for instance. Are they broken chairs you can’t sit on, or artistic decisions?” Ice-Pick continue. “Consider our famous invisible apple tree. Oh, apple tree! Why are you here? What are we supposed to do with you? This is probably the most famous bug in Pathologic 3. We’ve received more complaints about it than almost anything else. We have to admit there were moments when we genuinely hated that tree. Are we going to fix it in this update? Perhaps not. “After all, it’s a creation of the machine,” they conclude. “Somehow, the game’s code produced this impossible object. And over time, our annoyance at it has begun to turn into a strange affection. Sometimes an artistic act lies not in creating something, but in the artist’s decision about it. Maybe this apple tree is trying to tell us something. So the tree stays.” Aside from making me pine for a world in which, say, EA add a “hypernormalisation” slider to The Sims, or Ubisoft redefine Assassin’s Creed parkour as a Situationist dérive (yes, I too have read books), the blog post filled me with confusion. I couldn’t remember any invisible apple trees in Pathologic 3. I also couldn’t find any English language mention of Pathologic 3’s avowedly “famous” ethereal vegetation on Google or the Steam forums, save for in stories covering the game’s latest update. My weakness for talk of symbolism notwithstanding, I began to worry that Ice-Pick might be winding us up. And by “us”, I specifically mean pathetic videogame reporters, hunting for a cool bug anecdote to wrap a headline around. Pathetic videogame reporters who are subject to the wiles of Google Search, which has recently become an AI-driven abomination that subsumes and rewords all knowledge while starving actual information sources of traffic. There have been efforts to screw with Google’s AI summaries, planting nonsense on Reddit and elsewhere in the hope of skewing or outright sabotaging the chatbot’s datasets. Perhaps Pathologic 3’s “invisible apple tree” was one such poison apple, I mused to myself, offered to Gemini in the manner of a cackling forest hag thrusting suspiciously plump and juicy fruit at cherubic village children. Associations foamed in my brain: Ice-Pick Lodge are based in Kazakhstan… where apples first grew in the wild. Breathless, I contacted Ice-Pick Lodge for a clarification, and – bah, it turns out there is an invisible apple tree in Pathologic 3, after all. “The slightly longer story goes like this,” producer Alexander Souslov told me over DM. “At some point (nobody remembers exactly when), one of our tree assets - an apple tree, to be precise - started rendering incorrectly and became invisible. The leaves were still there, but the trunk was gone. We tried to fix it, but ran into the classic game developer’s dilemma: is this really important enough to spend resources on, rather than, say, making another cutscene or putting together another quest?” Souslov says the apple tree drove him “absolutely nuts”. (I feel like he could have rolled with some line about “one bad apple spoiling the barrel”, but hey, I’m not one of those stuffed shirts over at Edge Magazine - I don’t mind interviewees mixing their arboreal metaphors.) Eventually, however, he made peace with the exasperatingly trunkless tree. “I started thinking: wait a minute, this thing basically came into existence all by itself. Do I really have to fix it? “And that’s when I remembered Marcel Duchamp and his ideas, and suddenly I began to feel that we’d accidentally created something beautiful,” Souslov went on. “Invisible trees next to the Cathedral, where time flows in different directions. There’s a strange kind of beauty in that, in the very act of creation without a creator. “So I made an executive artistic decision: we’re keeping the tree, and we’re officially declaring it part of the world. So no pranks involved! Just a happy accident elevated to the status of artistic intent.” With Souslov’s guidance, I fired up an old Pathologic 3 save and tracked down the invisible apple tree in-game, right next to the aforesaid Cathedral. Please find a picture of the thing’s spectral foliage below – poetically captured by moonlight at the dead of 1am, through a fog of in-game Apathy. I also belatedly checked Reddit, and yep, there’s a paper trail, though Souslov added that the bug is inconsistent: “their whimsical behavior makes it even better as an artistic expression - the apple tree may decide it won’t meet with you today.” I remain compelled by the idea of developers telling dirty great porkies in their patchnotes, if only to excite and upset games journalists who really don’t have this much time to spare. Mojang used to do that thing with Herobrine, remember? Given the escalating chatbotification of everything, I think we are entering an exhilarating new age of lying on the internet, in which deceit and doublespeak have become weapons of resistance against the algorithm. But I also just think videogames and their creators are often more fun when they are two-faced, providing there’s some fundamental benevolence involved. Videogames are all about sleight of hand, and devs should take more pleasure in that. Thank you to Pathologic 3 for planting this seed.