"Creation without a creator": Pathologic 3's devs have refused to patch an invisible apple tree, and for a blissful moment, I thought they were lying to poison Google's AI

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.

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