RPS: When I reviewed Pathologic for RPS the overwhelming response from the people who then went out and bought it was that they could glimpse what you were trying to do, but couldn’t bring themselves to face the drudgery and confusion of it and stopped playing after an hour or two. Is that something you were expecting when you made the game?

Aleksey: No, of course not. You see, “Pathologic” is just our first attempt, and it didn’t turn out like it was meant to be in many respects. It’s our lack of experience that stood in the way. The fact that Pathologic was developed as a “uncomfortable” game doesn’t forgive our game design mistakes. Or the horrible English translation, which we, unfortunately, didn’t have much influence over. With Tension/Turgor/The Void we decided to do the English translation in-house and pretty much succeeded — the people who played the Russian with English subtitles were positive about the quality (here I would like to thank hydra9 for all the help he offered with proof-reading and stylistic fixes! Without you, the translation wouldn’t be nearly as good! — The LxR). [my emphasis]

So, if we were to remake Pathologic (and we’re thinking about it) — we’d do a lot of things differently.

Pathologic Classic HD will be available in English, Russian, and Polish, since the Polish translation, courtesy of Jakub and Aldona Derdziak, is widely regarded to be of high quality (unlike the original English one).

Now may be a good moment to reiterate that this is not the remake, which is still in the works, but rather a thing that we heartily call “Pathologic Classic HD: Now Comprehensible”.

[...]

— So, a new translation, huh?

Yes; the new translation was actually another major reason for this re-release.

See, we’ve promised the old Pathologic as a reward for some of our Kickstarter backers, and it was bugging us, too. We are still not entirely sure as to how our English-speaking players have managed to enjoy the game at all; sometimes the dialogue of the original release made no sense. We hesitated to offer this mangled beast as a reward to anyone, but after we did, it quickly became apparent that we cannot in good conscience simply provide them with the game as it was.

So we’ve endeavoured to at least make it readable—with the kind assistance from General Arcade and Gambitious. The translation effort was in-house, but we’re positive it wouldn’t have become possible without their guidance. And it was actually General Arcade that did the heavy visuals-updating lifting (thus winning our eternal gratitude).

[...]

There are also some perks available to the non-Russian-speaking gamers:

∙ you can finally find out what the hell happened there;
∙ like seriously, Maria used to say that there “is a ‘bog’ in ‘Utopia’” completely disregarding the fact that no, there isn’t;
∙ we mean it, some plotlines are obscure enough even with proper translation;
∙ you’ll also get to see restored content.