22 // delusional // pathologic mostly // man-of-letters is my thoughts-tag
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Let me answer this with an essay for some goddamn reason.
The resource management mechanics have always been a source of comedy. Sometimes it’s from taking a mechanic extremely literally, eg. does Artemy rush and crush his tinctures in P2? Is that the arbitrary reason why the bottles can’t be reused (it’s probably more to do with not contaminating them, but it’s not super consistent what contents count as contamination)?
Or sometimes it is absurd without needing to nitpick, eg. in P1 you can catch rats in a bag and race them for money. Yes it’s silly, but it’s kind of a metaphor for the three protagonists competing to cure the town in their own ways. You’re meant to consciously or subconsciously realize, watching your rat double back on itself and miss the obvious goal in front of it, that you’re the rat. Put a pin in that thought.
When it comes to the mental health mechanics in P3, they’re still taking feedback on them and tweaking them to make them challenging but also immersive, so there’s time to let them know if anything is too absurd. But if done right in the final release, it will emphasize how important Daniil’s mind is for him to function. You’ll be constantly reminded that this isn’t something to take for granted.
I also have a feeling that Daniil’s apathy death represents the constant urge to kill himself he’s dealing with, but the fact it turns everything into black and white film suggests it’s not “canon” that he literally could shoot himself in any circumstance, right in front of anybody. The time travel mechanics involve him replaying his memories, chopping them up, and editing them as if they’re a tangible film reel (for some reason that makes me think about famous incidents of Soviet censorship of physical media, and the supernatural turn that takes in Disco Elysium lore? maybe there’s a connection here). If you let apathy sink in, that represents him—or you the player—giving up on playing this particular section, on editing this section of the film. He gives in to the suicidal impulse in part because you’ve relived this part of his ordeal wrong, and he abandons that reality to try a new one.
Which brings us to the strychnine. It is a poison, but a very small amount can make you high, and historically, people took that risk. It seems like there isn’t a sensible limit to how much of it you can ingest as Daniil Dankovsky, though. Daniil’s mind is fracturing more and more as he relives and rewrites his own memories. Keeping him immersed in the reality of each memory involves feeding him poison to get him high. What does that tell us? That he’s not reliving these events so that he personally can survive them. Even if giving up on trying to fix the past is a suicidal act, the effort of trying to fix the past is also suicidal, self-sacrificial. This is how it was in Marble Nest. He wasn’t reliving the day over and over to escape his own death—at one point he considers shooting himself to contain the infection.
The comedy of Daniil eating “rat poison” is in the impression that he, like suggested by the P1 rat races, is in fact one of the rats. His time looping seems so futile and doomed, and he is forcing himself to do it anyway by overdosing on a stimulant that was used in his time by athletes and academics, to the point where it transforms into its other, more dehumanizing use, killing vermin.
Banging my head against a wall over the concept of Ersher again. Crazy how a single line can add that much more depth. Artemy’s already contending with questions of, does he have the right to determine the future of the Kin? Of the other half of town? Of the whole town? And now, he isn’t even the original heir. Artemy doesn’t seem like a “what if” kind of guy, but if Ersher survived, he’d be the Haruspex; he’d be the one making decisions as the son most likely to become the Menkhu. And for a family that’s entrenched enough in cultural traditions, surely that’s a weight on Artemy’s shoulders.
Artemy’s “does it matter?” response is so true in that, whether he’s Ersher or Artemy, he’s still the Haruspex and the man doing work around town. The title, position and the role matter more than the name. It really contributes to Artemy not expressing his grief very plainly in the game, to stretching himself thin around the town, to his own de-personalization.
And now here I am making assumptions, but the name Ersher sounds more culturally closer to the Kin than Artemy does. I wonder if Ersher more closely resembled Isidor. I wonder if, when the boys occupied the same house for however long that was, they were made into a dichotomy. The Kin-inclined, father’s son Ersher and Artemy, whose friends are all from the town and who looks more like his mother. But then Ersher dies, and so does this dichotomy. Now Artemy has to contain them both - or, really, has to choose between one or the other. I wonder if part of Isidor realizing they had to embrace either the past or the future was the death of his son.
(And can you imagine… being Rubin… who has always been Isidor’s “second choice,” his reserve son if you will, but he’s not even that. Artemy not being the original heir makes Rubin feel that much closer to slotting himself into the Burakh family, but he’ll never be enough.)
