Pathological

About the game

Marbles roll along pipes, and your job is to catch them. Every level is a board of wheels connected by paths. A wheel has four slots, and when you catch four marbles of the same colour in one wheel, the marbles vanish and the wheel turns dark: it is complete. Complete every wheel on the board and you move on to the next level.

You never touch the marbles directly, only the wheels. A right click turns a wheel a quarter, which changes which way the marbles that arrive will go, and a left click on a marble inside a wheel lets it out again. Around the wheels there are gadgets that change the game: buffers that hold a marble, directors that force one direction, filters that only let one colour through, painters that change a marble's colour, replicators that make copies, shredders that destroy marbles, switches that change direction every time, teleporters, triggers and stoplights.

Two clocks watch you. The board timer is the total time you have, and a blue bar on the left shows how long a freshly launched marble may stay in the launch area. If either one runs out you lose one of your three lives, and you win another every 5000 points. The boards go from easy to fiendish, and the levels keep a high-score table.

Playing it here

The first time you click Play the page downloads the Python runtime and the pygame library (about 23 MB), which takes a few seconds; after that a "click to start" message appears, and one more click opens the menu. The download is kept by your browser, so the other pygame games on the site open faster. Nothing is loaded from other sites. Your high scores are saved in this browser only. Careful with that first click: it lands on the game, so it may press a menu item.

The game is played with the mouse. If your mouse or trackpad has no right button, hold Shift and click a wheel to turn it (on a trackpad, a two-finger tap also works). The "Fullscreen" line of the menu does nothing here, because the page already has its own full-screen button, and "Quit Game" simply returns to the menu.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Think before you turn. A wheel only turns when no marble is entering it, and the active marble limit stops you from ejecting more marbles while the board is busy. Wait for the right moment.

Watch the launch timer. It resets every time a new marble is launched, so a stuck marble that keeps going round is a danger. Keep the marbles moving.

Use the colours. Filters and painters let you choose which colours reach a wheel, and a "crazy" marble counts as any colour.

Frequently asked questions

Does it save my progress? Only the high-score table, in your browser.

Does it work on a phone? It was made for a mouse, and we have not tested it with a touch screen.

Is it free? Yes: the game is free software under the GPL.

Credits and licence

Pathological was made by John-Paul Gignac in 2003. The soundtrack is by Matthias Le Bidan, the logo by Carrie Bloomfield, and the in-game graphics are partly based on artwork by Mike Brenneman, who also designed boards with Kim Gignac; a few sound effects come from the GPL games CannonSmash and Gnibbles. The game is released under the GNU GPL. This version is the one that Debian packages for Python 3 (their patches are included), with a few more changes to run in a browser and the music converted to Ogg Vorbis; the complete source, the changes and the licence texts are linked from the Licenses page. The game runs on pygame-ce (LGPL-2.1) and CPython, whose licences and source are linked there too.