The Pathless (PS5)
While The Pathless is only developer Giant Squid’s second game, it actually represents a break away from what its creators are known for. Giant Squid was founded by former members of thatgamecompany who worked on titles like the Flower where you control a flower petal drifting in the air and Journey where the focus was on a social adventure with someone you couldn’t speak to, and even under the Giant Squid name their work continued to carry on the nonviolent focus with the relaxing scuba diving puzzle adventure Abzû. Right away with The Pathless though you’ll notice the lead character, a nameless woman known as The Hunter, wields a bow and arrow as a weapon. Needless to say I was curious what would spark a shift towards focusing on combat ideas, but I didn’t expect the main purpose of the bow to actually be movement.
When The Hunter travels about the different regions of the island, she can spot small talismans floating all around in the air at predetermined spots. While The Hunter can manage a good run for a bit, her stamina runs out quickly unless she takes aim and fires an arrow through a talisman, the energy flowing into her and immediately invigorating her so she can not only keep running, but pick up the pace of her movement. Areas in The Pathless are large and open to navigate as you please, but despite there being so much ground to cover, chaining together talisman shots will allow you to fluidly sprint around the island in an exhilarating manner. Even in the opening area where there is not much to do but get acquainted with the controls, there is still a tangible thrill to maintaining your speed as you run, and the controls for doing so are fairly simple. The game will notify you when you have a talisman in your sights and you need only draw the arrow for a second to ensure it flies true. Too little pressure on the R2 button and it won’t fire, and if you’re not careful as you dash around the forest, snowy mountains, or other areas, your arrow might hit an object and risk you losing your momentum.
The seamless arrow shooting to maintain speed already makes the simple act of moving around The Pathless’s island enjoyable, but there are a few more tricks to help you get around its world. If you shoot a talisman while jumping it will give you a boost through the air, The Hunter also able to chain together aerial shots for repeated acrobatic leaps. Blue talismans introduced later in the adventure give an even larger vertical boost when shot, and the yellow talismans boost your speed instantly to allow you to reach top speed much more easily. An assistant during your journey soon increases your capabilities as well, an eagle joining you as a companion who will fly around beside you and assist by grabbing your hand and allowing you to glide over long distances. This eagle can also flap her wings to carry you higher up in the air similar to a blue talisman, but as you progress in the game she’ll gain the ability to flap her wings more and more to get you even higher.
As for what you’re doing with all these satisfying movement options, The Hunter’s goal is to help rescue the gods of this land after a being calling themselves The Godslayer corrupted them. These divine spirits, known as The Tall Ones, all have their own region of the island, The Hunter needing to find Lightstones around the spirit’s stomping grounds so she can weaken the Godslayer’s hold on them and confront them to properly purify them. While there are only a few scenes where the heroine speaks directly with the main antagonist, you still get a good sense of the Godslayer’s motivations, rejecting the uncertainty of trusting in divine beings and hoping to find a path in life regular people can follow to achieve assured success. His rejection of the gods lead him down darker and darker paths though, and as you explore the island you can find the bodies of the people who got caught up in the conflict. Their lingering spirits give you brief glimpses at the thoughts of people who remained pious and those who stood beside the Godslayer, and since these spirits can often be found near the ruins of places of importance, you can get a pretty good picture of how disastrous things became during the conflict.
The first part of any new region involves you searching the area for Lightstones, the game giving you a skill known as Spirit Vision that greys out the world and sends out a pulse that highlights potential areas of interest briefly with smoky red clouds. If an area contains a Lightstone, it will often ask the player to solve some sort of puzzle with their bow. You may need to arrange ring statues so your arrow can pass through a certain amount before hitting a designated target, light your arrow on fire and bounce it across torches, or simply find the way to properly navigate a platforming challenge with the talismans available or in a set amount of time. Every area features more of these puzzles than you need to solve so you can skip ones that you might struggle with, but most of them are cut of a similar cloth so its more often about finding out how to arrange familiar objects or time your movement right than puzzling out some new mechanic.
Once you gather enough Lightstones you can start activating the towers that clear away the corruption cloud in the region, but if you gather all of the area’s stones you can eventually redeem them for special perks like your stamina recovering over time even without shooting a talisman. Similarly, there are also smaller puzzles littered around the game world where you can earn yellow crystals that will eventually add up to an extra flap of your eagle’s wings to grant you more height, and with it being fairly easy to traverse the world and stumble across such diversions, its easy to spend a little time putting in the extra effort for those crystals at least. The extra Lightstones involve more time spent with slower puzzles or harder to find locations, but whether or not you choose to invest time in the optional collectibles, you’ll need to watch out before the corruption is cleared.
The Tall Ones patrol their lands while cursed, a red storm traveling with them and potentially enveloping you if you don’t escape its grip. In here, you lose your bow and your eagle is wounded as it is thrown aside. The Hunter needs to find the eagle without being caught by the Tall One as it scours the ground for you, the player needing to pause if they’re in the spirit’s sight so they don’t get attacked. Unfortunately, this is perhaps the weakest moment of the adventure as it can be slow going and tedious depending on how the creature is moving around or looking about. You need to clean your eagle’s feathers after as well, but it’s a short and simple bonding experience and your companion is endearing enough that spending a few seconds to rub her clean is certainly not a bother.
Once the towers have been activated and the spirit’s dark power has waned, you can now enter that storm cloud without worry. The beast is now on the run, the player needing to make use of talismans to catch up with the spirit and shoot its weak spots to slow it down and force a confrontation. This is certainly the most natural implementation of the arrow supported sprinting in the fight and really helps to serve as the payoff to honing your craft, but once the chase has ended you’ll start to move into either a rather straightforward boss fight where you just shoot the right spots when they are available or perform some puzzle or platforming task until the spirit is vulnerable again. The spirits do all have different approaches to the actual fight portions, the Tall One known as Nimue executing different attacks with its hydra heads that you need to identify and dodge and the giraffe like Sauro boxing you in a ruin where you must only move when it isn’t belching flames down the tight hallways. The spectacle of taking on these corrupted spirits is certainly more memorable than the actual substance of the fight and the same can be said about encounters with The Godslayer, but the portions where your movement options can factor into the fight usually turn out better than the mild puzzle solving and platforming portions that the Tall Ones like to slip in for the sake of variety.
THE VERDICT: Mastering the fluid movement system of The Pathless is definitely its strongest feature. The bow is simple to use to activate boosts and maintain speed but requires good timing and consistent execution to ensure such momentum, the satisfaction in mastering the system allowing the island exploration to become the biggest thrill in a game where you also face off with enormous corrupted spirits. The boss fights can feel a bit like they’re more about the presentation of fighting something dark and powerful rather than providing something that really tests your built up skills and the puzzles can admittedly slow things down a little too much despite being decent brainteasers. While the exciting movement mechanics never get put through their paces as much as they deserve to be explored, The Pathless still builds an interesting little world worth exploring with the right amount of story detail and variety to keep you engaged in the adventure.
And so, I give The Pathless for PlayStation 5…
A GOOD rating. It’s clear the movement with the bow and the talismans was the primary focus of Giant Squid’s efforts here, and when that element is allowed to shine it definitely steals the show. It definitely does need to be tested in ways beyond just getting around the island effectively and some ideas like the boss chases and certain puzzles focused on getting around an area effectively engage with it well, but the moments where you’re sneaking around in the storm clouds or need to solve a puzzle by lugging things around and adjusting object placement definitely feel like they contrast that high speed play a bit harshly. It’s good to give the player a break at times and the ideas The Pathless has for some challenges and boss battle segments are often good enough in concept, but The Pathless’s road to greater success certainly feels like it would involve getting the aerial acrobatics and high speed sprinting more involved in how you complete the game’s still enjoyable tasks and side challenges.
Despite making a game where the development team’s history of nonviolence is put aside, giving the heroine a bow doesn’t just turn The Pathless into a simple action game. Movement and puzzles are the bigger focuses than hitting the spirits with your purifying arrows. With an art style that draws out the loveliness of nature and builds up the intimidating presence of the Godslayer’s corruption with hazy distortions and the oppressive use of red and yellow light, The Pathless further cements its focus isn’t so much on combat but on the world you’re in, your role in it, and how you navigate the unwritten paths that will take you to purifying it of its dangerous evils.