The Pathless, by Giant Squid, is really an enjoyable game to go through. The scenery and art direction in general is amazing to look at when you are just gliding through the grass. The puzzles you encounter are engaging, but not too difficult. The movement and the boss designs might be my favorite part of the game in general. Petting the eagle is always a joyous time. There is a bit of haptic feedback on the DualSense when shooting arrows, which is a nice touch, but do wish there was more. The game runs well, minus when the game crashed a few times on me. However, the auto-saving is very forgiving, and I was right back where I was when I restarted. Definitely recommend it!

Well, I do at least appreciate the honesty this time around.

I was actually quite excited for The Pathless, even though my adventure of exploring Journey-likes throughout the last two years has not been great. I’ve been trying to elucidate exactly why I’ve been so consistently disappointed by all of the spiritual successors in the time since, and I think I’ve figured out why. To put it simply, it’s a matter of focus and cohesion.

The more I’ve written about various video games on Backloggd, the more I’ve come to realize that these are the two qualities I treasure the most when discussing what makes a good video game. With focus, you need a game where every element is fine-tuned to achieve the same overall goal, with a clear and same intent expressed and achieved by every item. That however, is not to be confused with cohesion, which deals with how these pieces fit together. There needs to be a sense of community and harmony amongst all the different elements; often, different elements in games clash not just from opposing intents, but also from clashing rhythms. That doesn’t mean you can’t change the tempo throughout of course, but there has to be some sort of underlying glue to justify this tempo shift with purpose. In other words, focus keeps the destination within sight while cohesion keeps everything moving towards said destination.

Most Journey-likes actually have the issue of too much focus and cohesion in my opinion. They’re so dead-set on becoming the next Journey, copying the ambience, game structure, and storytelling to a T, that despite the golden formula “working” since it was already proven in 2012, these games all feel rather uninspired since their lack of ambition fails to elevate the final product to anything more than yet another indie copycat, forgoing any sense of identity. For what it’s worth though, The Pathless is an antithesis of the usual formula because it is at least trying to do something different.

In this iteration, you get to play as the Hunter, who has traveled to a mysterious island afflicted by a curse, and must traverse the wilderness to free possessed spirits from a malevolent warrior dubbed “The Godslayer.” You can think of The Pathless as a combination of Journey, Breath of the Wild, and Shadow of the Colossus: the overall narrative strikes many of the same beats as thatgamecompany’s magnum opus, as do the visuals (courtesy of Matt Nava, creator director of Giant Squid and one of the main artists behind Journey in fact) and the original score (composed by Austin Wintory, who also composed Journey’s OST), while the exploration loop borrows heavily from BOTW’s open world structure and the boss fights seem heavily influenced by the epic dances of death of SOTC. I think you can see where this is going; it’s a combination of some of my favorite trends (and in fact, some of my outright favorite video games), and it’s like your favorite band from your high school days got revived for a world tour to play all their greatest hits.

It's such a shame, that Giant Squid’s ambition led to this jumbled mess lacking in focus and cohesion.

Let’s start with the most noteworthy positive: the core movement within the overworld. I admit I wasn’t too impressed at first, since I originally thought that all you need to do is just hold down the right trigger and release as soon as you finishing locking onto floating talismans with the outline turning red to refill and maintain momentum in your dash gauge. However, as wondermagenta points out, there’s actually more to this: if you release your trigger as soon as the outline is about halfway filled, you’ll fire a golden “skillshot,” which not only flies faster (so you can fire at even more targets), but also provides an even larger speed boost. This becomes even more important if you’re firing while airborne, as nailing successive skillshots means that you’ll spend less time free-falling (since you can’t glide while charging your arrow) and thus gain more overall distance. So, there’s two levels of optimization here: planning your path amongst the talismans to avoid firing arrows that get blocked by obstacles like hills and trees and jumping/gliding over rivers and gaps that would slow you down, and reacting on the fly by charging and releasing the arrow to chain skillshots and maintain momentum and the dash gauge. You can absolutely just autopilot and rely strictly on a full red outline + context sensitive aiming to get by of course, but nailing this skillshot over and over turns simple overworld traversal into quite the engaging exercise instead of just holding the control stick forward.

The problem then, is just about everything else.

We'll begin by considering the puzzles that serve as the “destinations” between the core movement. They’re an intentional slowdown from the freeform travel for sure, but unfortunately, I find this change of pace rather unwelcome. You need to solve a certain minimum of puzzles in each area to unlock emblems to activate spirit towers, so there are plenty of puzzles you’ll be forced to tackle. Unfortunately, despite all the different combination of elements (torches, ring switches, weighted switches, etc) interchanged throughout, they all begin to bleed into one another by the end because they’re all absolutely tedious affairs.

Your AI companion is one key reason here: you essentially have to keep an eye on your falcon and guide it closely to switches or while dragging around hoops. Waiting for the falcon to finish is not particularly engaging, and positioning gets particularly annoying in some circumstances such as this where you not only have to stand in the right spot to get the falcon to drag it to the appropriate height, but also quickly swap targets by again getting into the right position (for the context sensitive prompt and for the falcon to “come” to you) before quickly letting go and getting into position for the shot. Speaking of which, the game also often feels far too finicky about being in the right position when taking shots for switches and torches, such as this example. It looks like I’m in the vicinity to shoot an arrow at the first torch to light the 2nd behind it, but the game is rather stingy about factoring in the perfect height for a shot, not just the specific direction itself. You also have to be the proper distance away (if the shot is made too close, your arrow will just clang and disappear), and this gets further complicated since many of the torches/switches must be shot properly in mid-air with a full charge/powershot. As a result, it’s rather obnoxious constantly adjusting your player model and taking potshots at what should be a simple line of sight aim to get your wanted trajectory to properly register. Finally, a lot of these puzzle sections are large enough to justify dashing between objects of interest, but in many scenarios, no talismans are around to refill your dash gauge; as a result, you’ll most likely have to spend most of your time slowly walking around the area, a far cry from the enthralling dashing and sniping that The Pathless exemplifies.

Some of these “puzzles” are actually cursed shrines that immobilize your falcon as the main condition, and that brings us to the next major nitpick: The Pathless often tries to be a precision platformer, and it really does not succeed because the game was not built for verticality. You see, in these cursed shrine sections, you are often reliant upon shooting talismans while airborne to nail specific long and extended jumps, and this doesn’t quite work because the Pathless’s vertical movement is split between a simple standard high jump with little horizontal momentum, and talisman shot-boosted jumps with tons of horizontal momentum. You’ll constantly find yourself undershooting with the former, and often overshooting with the latter. There’s no gimmick to these areas besides the lack of a usable eagle, and the only other formality attached is that you have to waste more time rubbing your eagle to purify it of its curse afterwards, resulting in these shrines feeling rather like gimmicky padding.

It gets worse though: this issue also translates to the overworld, because a good chunk of the hub levels relies heavily upon scaling cliffs and buildings that can’t be easily covered with the sub-par standard jump and thus require you to expend wing flaps for that quick vertical boost (since shooting mid-air talismans gives little vertical height, instead focusing on a quick forward horizontal boost). Since flaps are also a finite resource that must be recharged by remaining grounded, cliff/building traversal requires a fair bit of waiting around for full recharges; I’d like to say that this issue gets alleviated as you progress, but that would also be misleading since while you will have more flaps to work with from collecting flight crystals from optional puzzles/exploration and defeating bosses, the heights themselves also gradually increase and will require more flaps as is. This issue could have actually been more properly tackled if shooting talismans in mid-air restored flaps, or if the blue crystals that provide significant vertical boost that are introduced in the 4th area were introduced earlier for this specific purpose; as it stands, I think those crystals are a great addition, but stands as a case of too little and too late when the majority of the game feels stunted by how awkwardly verticality is handled.

To expand upon this further, players often need to rely upon Spirit Vision to figure out points of interest, marked by orange glows when the radar wave rolls over the landscape. There’s two major issues here. Firstly, much of the landscape is obscured by tall environmental objects (cliffs, towers, hills, etc), which can make it quite difficult to make out exactly where all the glows are and if everything’s been covered, unless you get to a high enough height yourself to pick out every point; as we’ve established, this is a pain in the ass because traveling up and down just to temporarily spot points of interest is extremely time consuming. Secondly, not every glow is created equal: many of these glows are smaller exploration points with simpler one-note solutions that reward you with yellow experience crystals, and it’s not as easy to pick apart smaller and larger/more prominent glows when smaller exploration points are often clustered together. For what it’s worth, these puzzles are quite diverse in nature and include activities such as lighting all the torches, playing Simon Says, and platforming from one end to another while “the floor is lava.” Unfortunately, the reward is just not there; the only thing that these experience crystals give you is more flaps with your eagle when you level up, which again is not a great incentive because flying often feels removed from the established momentum-based running. There’s no “dash” when flying, so forward momentum has to be preserved by shooting talismans that are scattered rather loosely in the air, and aiming your bow will result in vertical drop because your eagle can’t hold you while you aim, in a way defeating the original purpose of flying. The result is that movement potential is actually somewhat stunted by the amount of flying required throughout, and that exploration feels tedious at times because figuring out exactly where to go is not necessarily simple nor rewarding. I think this feedback loop could have been better handled by allowing players to invest experience towards stat growth of their choosing (higher jumps, faster movement speed, a larger dash gauge, etc) rather than just funneling all experience towards more flaps.

Speaking of frustrating gaps interrupting continuous movement, did I mention the forced stealth sections? That’s right, The Pathless has mandatory forced stealth segments, my favorite addition to any great video game. Every time you enter a new area, a red cyclone will appear and swarm the player, chucking your eagle buddy off into the grass several feet away while you must inch your way towards retrieving it and avoiding detection from the searchlights of the possessed spirit demon. While getting caught doesn’t result in dire consequences (you just lose some progress on your experience bar and are thrown out of the cyclone), actually getting caught isn’t much faster than doing the task properly, so you might as well try. That doesn’t remove the red cyclone however; it remains within the area as this malignant tumor that seems to follow you around and will shove you back into another forced stealth section if you get too close to the eye of the storm. It especially loves showing up at the most inconvenient times, such as when you’re trying to solve puzzles for emblems or clearing up that last small orange glow for EXP, which again breaks up any built-up momentum and limits player choice because you’re running away if you don’t want to sit through another playable cutscene and there’s nothing you can do about the situation except solve puzzles more quickly for faster tower activation to rush towards the next phase to get it off the screen. And even that’s another case of limiting player choice: why situate the mandatory boss encounter in the center of the area where there’s other exploration I might want to tackle first, instead of isolating the red blob without encapsulating anything else of interest?

Boss fights usually have two distinct sections: the chase, and the arena. The first phase is actually quite thrilling: you spiral around the red storm pursuing the now fleeing beast, shooting the talismans in your path to maintain momentum, and must land enough hits on the beast in the form of eye targets before letting your eagle get the final takedown. It’s not free thankfully, due to the need to keep refilling the dash gauge while hunting and because the beast will spew pulsing fireballs and leave behind flame walls that must be circumvented or jumped to avoid getting stunned and falling further behind. If this was the entire boss fight, then I would have been left quite satisfied.

But, there’s more. Once your eagle knocks the beast down, the fight gets transported to the arena at the center of each area for an epic showdown. Or so it seems, but these fights actually lack any teeth. They essentially become rhythm game segments where you just have to aim and fire your bow whenever you see the flashing white context-sensitive prompt while you walk around in circles and jump occasionally to dodge attacks. Not only do I feel like these fights fail to utilize the full toolkit of The Pathless (namely, the smooth ground momentum-based movement), they’re also quite trivial in that once you’ve figured out the first phase, that is basically all there is to it. These fights simply have no stakes involved; if you happen to take too much damage and get knocked out of the arena, all you have to do is walk right back in and resume the fight in the exact phase where you left off. It’s what separates the one-dimensional fights of this game from the intimate dances of death of Shadow of the Colossus. In the latter, the sense of scale is fairly apparent because you are this ant crawling up a giant hulking stone creature, clinging on for dear life while the screen shakes wildly and the frames spiral out of control as you scale this magnificent artifact, plunging your sword into its weaknesses while it writhes in agony. In the former, you get to take a few potshots at a slightly oversized animal here and there while tilting your joystick to the left/right against a beast that’s all bark and no bite, letting go of the right trigger whenever you see a flashing white box on screen and once in the blue moon, getting the chance to shoot a crystal to regain dash gauge or jumping and hovering with your eagle to dodge the ground for a bit. Summed up, it’s a far cry from what originally inspired it in the first place, and it’s just too scripted and too straightforward for any emotion to be properly conveyed in the first place.

At this point, I think I’ve gone into enough detail regarding the lack of focus. Giant Squid wanted to introduce so many different elements into the game, that looking back upon this, so many of these different elements feel rather undercooked and require far more polish to really stand out on their own.

That said, there’s also a lack of fluidity throughout the whole experience; the clean ground movement across the overworld is consistently broken up due to the middling and sluggish puzzles, and in fact the dashing and shooting is often stymied by how much verticality is required for travel as well. The exploration loop gets broken up over and over due to the glowing red storm following you and interrupting any puzzle solving, while the loop itself is really more of a frayed tangle of threads since much of the exploration leads you to unrewarding mini-puzzles. Even the boss fights themselves are more of a nuisance than a highlighted destination because they goad you to stop whatever you’re doing just to get rid of the possibility of forced stealth segments, and go from an exhilarating hunt to a glorified cutscene. The gameplay elements all feel at odds with one another, and momentum isn’t preserved because the game insists on shifting the player back and forth with little purpose. What really seals the deal though, concerning the lack of cohesion, is that the underlying narrative to tie everything together just isn't there.

I think there’s two lines of reasoning regarding the weak storytelling. The first reason is that the execution doesn’t live up to the premise, both in terms of the characters and the worldbuilding. The forced relationship between the eagle and the hunter has been pointed out by many before me, so I won’t go into excess detail here; needless to say, I concur that at no point does the eagle ever feel like a separate entity. Almost all of your interaction with the eagle revolves around the eagle as a gameplay mechanism: send your eagle to move around weights and targets, shoot off your eagle to knock down the boss, go after your eagle in the forced stealth segment to be rid of the storm temporarily and then rub it a few times so you can flap again, etc. The eagle never gets a chance to do anything of its own volition; it’s essentially stuck as yet another “thing” you have to account for to avoid getting stuck and nothing more.

I also have to question the writing behind the main villain himself, and whether or not his personality really fits with the overall tone set. Much of the worldbuilding is included within the exploration loop; you wander about the vestiges of a ruined civilization, and scattered throughout the decaying buildings and forgotten relics are memories of a society torn asunder, with some lost souls praying for a release from their supposed doom while others give in to madness and pray to their new “savior” only to find themselves on the receiving end of the gods’ anger. It’s such a promising (albeit somewhat tropey and clichéd) idea to run with… which is why I was left quite disappointed by how over the top and comically evil the main villain comes across at the end. Are you kidding me guys, this is the supposed Godslayer that you were all looking towards for direction? He was literally spouting lines like “wItTNeSs My aScEnSiOn” during the final confrontation, how did he ever get this far on the storyboard for what was supposed to be an introspective and spiritual tale? Maybe this civilization deserved its demise if this was the best they could muster up.

Even more importantly though, beyond all the loose-fitting gameplay mechanisms and the dissonant writing, is the lack of cohesion beyond the narrative and the gameplay itself. The way I see it, video games have great potential as a medium, because they’re capable of marrying storytelling and gameplay through interaction in a way that other mediums cannot; when done properly, the gameplay should serve as a vessel for the narrative. Thus, there should be both mechanical meaning and narrative/metaphorical meaning behind actions in a game to tie everything together. However, the Pathless has a lack of narrative purpose behind much of what is going on in game. Mechanically, it makes sense why smaller puzzles are scattered throughout the areas to help guide players’ attention and keep them engaged with smaller tasks, but it's never really explained in-game why this came to be. Why do I suddenly get one more additional “flap” whenever I get enough of these crystals, and why do I now get to “mega-flap” when I’ve beaten this particular boss? The best example of this disparity between gameplay and narrative however, has to be the secret ending (obvious spoiler alert from clicking on the link, you’ve been warned) that is unlocked once you collect every talisman in all the areas and activate the golden switches in the purified arenas. Again, it mechanically makes sense for there to be some kind of reward for finishing every major puzzle in the game, but it bothers me that there’s nothing in the world-building or story hinting at the possibility of another end; I never even knew there was a secret ending until I looked it up. I have no problem justifying mechanical purpose for elements within the game, but if they can’t be justified within the narrative itself… then how is my sense of immersion supposed to remain intact?

I’ve deliberated upon writing this particular review; I don’t particularly enjoy writing negative reviews, especially ones of indies emulating my favorites, and my feelings have only become more and more complicated as I’ve pondered over these past few weeks. In the past, I’ve gone from feeling sheer disappointment and anger while reviewing Journey-likes, to mostly indifference and acceptance that this was just the way things played out, and that industry would continue to pump out palette-swaps of one of my favorite games until the death of the sun. This time though? I just feel bummed. There was so much shaping up to be a success here: it had all the right inspirations in all the right places, the “glue” that was supposed to hold everything together seemed solid enough, and Austin Wintory’s score is phenomenal. But this just… isn’t it. The lack of detail tying everything together more than shows when you try to dive deeper into the pool, and ultimately, this could have easily been the next Journey, but now it will never be anything more than yet another spiritual successor living in the shadow of its idols. I didn’t want to be this harsh, but I suppose I get this emotional towards the things I love. Maybe it’s time I moved on and finally got around to that long delayed replay of Journey. Sometimes, you just can’t beat the classics.

Uma Arqueira vai para uma terra, onde os deuses vivem, para parar um guerreiro que quer acabar com os vários caminhos da “verdade” que existem. Ele acredita que esses vários caminhos mais atrapalham do que ajudam, e que os deuses só estão mais preocupados com eles do que com a humanidade. Nessa busca dele para criar a sua verdade e, impor ela a outros, esse guerreiro corrompe quatro deuses animais que habitam essa terra, e o objetivo da personagem arqueira que controlamos é purificar esses deuses e parar a cede de poder do guerreiro. Não sabemos se a arqueira está lá pela própria vontade dela ou se foi enviada.

Durante o trajeto encontramos vários guerreiros caídos que podemos ver um registro dos seus pensamentos, e muitos desses pensamentos são de dúvidas sobre o que eles estão fazendo ou sua absoluta certeza. Num desses registros até encontramos um guerreiro que se pergunta o porquê eles sempre se sacrificarem pelo líder, mas o contrário nunca acontece. Pois é.

A ambientação do jogo é bem bucólica, com cores bem saturadas e a sensação de que estamos numa terra intocada a gerações. O design do jogo é lindo. Encontramos animais durante nosso trajeto, mas não podemos interagir com eles, eles só estão por lá mesmo. Os cenários são gigantescos e nos locomovemos atirando flechas em “olhos” espalhados pelo cenário que nos dão um impulso para correr mais rápido pelos cenários. Em cada platô que estamos podemos ver uma doma vermelha, que fica migrando de lugar de tempos em tempos, onde o deus corrompido da área está vasculhando. Quando adentramos essa doma a águia vai ser arremessada longe e temos que salvar ela enquanto o espírito corrompido fica nos procurando. A forma como ele nos procura é um cone de visão, uma luz, que não podemos deixar nos ver, mas como você não morre na gameplay então só serve para colocar uma sensação de urgência artificial na gameplay.

A jogabilidade, no começo, é um pouco “dura”, mas conforme você vai se acostumando com os comandos vai ficando mais fluída. Uma das ferramentas que o jogo te dá é uma águia que nos acompanha durante o trajeto e nos dá o “poder” de planar e impulsionar para o alto, assim conseguirmos alcançar lugares de difícil acesso. O Jogo consiste basicamente em resolver puzzles simples, porém são bem repetitivos. O ponto alto são as lutas com os bosses, os deuses corrompidos, que dão mais desafio ao jogo, apesar de serem repetitivos também.

Em geral é um jogo lindo, mas que peca na sua repetição constante e na falta de criatividade para inovar nas batalhas com os chefes de área. O jogo também se estende demais artificialmente, que dá aquela sensação de enfado por não terminar logo, e nem é por pressa ou coisa parecida, é por ser repetitivo mesmo. Joguei a versão do Nintendo Switch e não está muito polido o jogo para essa versão, com várias quedas de frames e lentidão, mas nada que atrapalhe de jogar. Em conclusão é uma experiencia até que agradável, com partes que você para só para apreciar o cenário ou escutar a excelente trilha sonora incidental do jogo. Fico curioso sobre o próximo jogo que a Giant Squid vai publicar, é um estúdio que vale a pena ficar de olho.

Completed with platinum trophy earned. While mechanically fairly simple, The Pathless is a beautiful open-world adventure from the creators of Journey and ABZÛ, casting the player as an archer seeking to lift the curse on an island. Largely the gameplay is based around puzzle-solving, making significant use of an eagle companion as part of the necessary interactions - and while these puzzles are never overly challenging, they still manage to evoke a wonderful feeling of satisfaction. These puzzle challenges are scattered around a series of five expansive areas - perhaps somewhat too expansive, as it can at times become difficult to find a few particularly well-hidden. I understand the intention behind the game not including a map or any HUD waypoints, as this does genuinely bring benefits to immersiveness, but it also makes navigation more difficult that I'd like - instead, you're forced to make use of an alternative vision mode that highlights points of interest, but this requires line-of-sight. Judicious use of a guide helps to offset this, thankfully.

Despite these navigational frustrations, between each puzzle area, traversal across the world comes with a fantastic fluidity of motion, especially later in the game as you earn upgraded abilities. Boss encounters that become accessible after reaching a minimum threshold of solved puzzles in each area are also a definite highlight in this regard, initially seeing you chasing after each creature, challenged to make use of your movement abilities to catch them.

Les mouvements sont le gros point fort du jeu avec une grande fluidité qui augmente au fil de la progression. Les affrontements sont magnifiquement animés et offre un vrai sentiment d'épique. Contrairement à Abzu les environnements sont peu variés ce qui renforce le sentiment de répétitivité dût à une boucle de gameplay qui n'évolue pas, heureusement le jeux ne s'éternise pas et sa durée permet d'apprécier le travail fourni dans la construction du monde, les mouvements du personnages et les affrontements avant que le gameplay minimaliste devienne lassant. Les bonus optionnel sont corrects et aident à fluidifier encore plus les mouvements du personnage. En revanche certaine aurait je pense dût être inclue dans les compétence de base du personnage, notamment le remplissage automatique de la jauge de stamina lorsqu'on marche car se retrouver sans stamina dans une zone où l'on na pas accès à une cible nous force à marcher très lentement et ça peut rendre de petite sections très pénible sans raison. De manière générale une bonne expérience mais pas meilleur qu'Abzu selon moi car visuellement beaucoup moins intéressant.

The game is far too in love with its movement system and doesn't consider that it's incredibly cumbersome to make precise actions which are required for multiple puzzles that get super annoying. There's also many places where they strip half your moves and expect you to hobble into solving some puzzles. There's also tons of minor annoyances like how much time it takes to pet your eagle, having to aim at every single talisman all the time (which probably single handedly used up the lifetime of my RT switch), the massive environments that don't really have much going for them, how time slows when you use detective vision, the completely unnecessary stealth sections and so on. The puzzles also really aren't particularly challenging or complex. One boss battle in particular is also incredibly irritating to get through and requires that you know that you don't always have to fill the arrow bar to shoot and hit the target. The story is also nothing to write home about and is bog standard, tropey, hero's journey through and through.

That said, it's a beautiful, well scored and fairly engaging open world puzzle platformer that's mostly pretty good. None of my complaints are offensively bad and I was invested enough to keep going. If you're just looking for a relatively short, open world, checklist type adventure game then this might be for you

[Reposting and updating my review from another site for the archives. Originally posted in December 13, 2020]

This went above my high expectations. It started pretty slow, but as the world opens up more, and I begin to grasp the game's mechanics, at some point it just clicked. It's interesting enough that I felt compelled to get the platinum trophy, which is something that I rarely do these days, and I definitely loved it more because of all the side content that I did.

Let's start with the game's most unique element, the movement system. You basically need to shoot orbs that are scattered all over the map in order to boost yourself forward, and you have to keep shooting them in order to maintain the speed. If you shoot these orbs at the perfect time, you'll get a bigger boost. It's a delightful system that is a bit challenging to master, but it's worth it, as the sense of speed and style that the game exudes is a most satisfying reward.

The game's open world is filled with fun puzzles and interesting lore, mostly placed in well-designed points of interest. The puzzles are mainly based on figuring out where to shoot your bow at, and thinking about the arrow's trajectory, which is a three dimensional task that I had a lot of fun with. While you can make an educated guess of the main story if you just focus on the main content, piecing together the truth from all the lore texts is quite satisfying, and I like that many of them are not directly tied to the most important events, but rather divulge history that makes you care more about the game's world. There's a hint of fascination towards mysticism, spirituality and mythological beings, which reminds me of games like Fumito Ueda's trilogy.

Having a detective vision-esque ability in place of a traditional map for navigation is a cool idea, and it's well executed here, since exploring felt more natural and in-the-moment because of it. It's most useful only at certain times, like when you reach a high enough vantage point, and this is more than enough to discourage mindless usage of this ability.

Other than the exploration, the game's other main segments are the boss fights, which starts pretty decent with the first boss, but the later ones gets not only more epic in presentation (the soundtrack especially pops off), but also more engaging gameplay-wise. It's not the most complex boss fights, think of them as interconnected rhythm puzzle mini-games, but they're more than engaging enough. Not to mention, each boss fight ends in a touching manner, as you disarm the corruption that overwhelms these beasts, and be able to communicate with their true, best selves.

Overall, this was quite a surprise. I think the game could benefit from more types of puzzles and objectives, and I feel that more of the optional lore could be told in more ways than just text, but as it stands, it's still an incredible game. This is already one of my favorite open world games ever.

Pros:
Great looking bosses and boss fights. Few as they are.
Graphics are pretty. Kind of.
Great OST.

Cons:
Everything else is just mediocre.
Slow, repetitive exploration.
Non-existent story. The lore is only presented through hard to find collectibles. Which is one of the worst sins of game design.
Cliche af ending. Though I've seen much worse.

In 2020 after my dreams of playing Cyberpunk 2077 were dashed by the glitches, I went to the PS Store in search of one more game to play before the new year. On a whim I bought The Pathless completely unaware that this game was from Creative Director Matt Nava, the mind behind beautiful games like Journey and Abzu. If I had known this I would've bought this game straight away. Once I picked it up I couldn't stop playing it. I was surprised at how much I thoroughly enjoyed my time with The Pathless.

The Pathless is an open world game where you explore a mysterious land, on a mission from a voice in the sky, and fight giant monsters who reside within the land. If that sounds familiar it's because it's the same framework as hit game Shadow of the Colossus, but instead of climbing on the monsters you chase them with sick parkour moves and a bow until they tire out. These monsters are gods who've become corrupted by The Godslayer, a man who wants to destroy the world and recreate it in his vision. Y'know... like Thanos.

In this open world game you have no map. You see the theme of this game is about making your own path. Nobody will travel the world the same way you do as you strive to bring light back to this dark land. However, I do think the game itself sometimes battles against its own theme. I may be running around the way I see fit but the island is very much split into sections, and you have to defeat each monster before you can traverse onto the next which means you don't have free range on this open world. You're given a section of the land and once you complete this section's main objective a new section opens up. It's more of a nitpick I guess but that's why it doesn't have much effect on my opinion of the game.

Now you may be thinking "Oh god, no map. I'm gonna get so lost looking for everything." No worries mate, because you're given a mask that has the "Sight of Truth." When using this sight, puzzles and important areas of the land glow so you can more easily find them. The Sight also keeps track of everywhere you've traversed, highlighting wherever your feet have touched the ground. However your feet are only going to be touching the ground half of the time because you have a companion Eagle with the strength to hold onto you as she glides.

This birdie's a stronk-boi because she's the reincarnation of The Mother Eagle God, here to help you revive her children. At first this power seems like it only helps a little but as you power up you'll fly like an eagle, to the sea, fly like an eagle let your spirit set you free (sorry I had to). As monsters attack you they will harm your feathered friend, and you must heal her by giving her well earned skritches. That's right, you can pet the eagle, and it's an important mechanic.

The simplistic yet stylized flair of Journey and Abzu is back at it again with a beautiful forest environment that is stunning to take in, along with another breathtaking score from Austin Wintory. Wintory and Nava go together like peanut butter and jelly, man. I luv em. They mix together seamlessly to always give you a great experience.

In essence this game is Shadow of the Colossus meets Journey, so it makes sense that 2 fantastic games would make a wonderful combination.

Beautiful-looking movement that somehow felt obtuse for how simple its mechanics are.

Points of interest are pretty far apart, so you're expected to glide along the landscape picking up speed boosts. There's no challenge to it, yet it's easy to hit a dead zone and find yourself waiting a few seconds until you can hit the next boost. In that little pocket of time, you feel like a dipshit walking on the side of the road because your car ran out of gas. It sounds like a nitpick, but this is the majority of the gameplay.

It's otherwise a pretty simple Journey-like exploration experience that doesn't ask too much of you, but I didn't find the story or aesthetics compelling.