Often when I finish a game I’m left with an emotion that begins to shape the narrative of the review I start typing in my head.. Sometimes I’ll be exhausted and glad the game is over, other times I’m thrilled and excited for a sequel or elaboration. Occasionally, I’m left emotionless, left to the notes I’ve written down and my memories to shape how I feel about a particular game. The Pathless was a very interesting game, and while it isn’t going to make my Game of the Year list, I think most audiences will find something to love about it.
The Pathless
Developer: Giant Squid
Price: $39.99
Platform: PC (Epic Games Store,) Playstation 4/5, Apple Arcade
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
The Pathless is primarily an adventure game with some minor action notes. The player will spend most of their time either solving small puzzles or gliding around an island locking onto, and shooting, red diamonds to grant themselves a boost of speed and regenerate some of the player character’s energy bar. It’s a bizarre gameplay loop, one you don’t find often nor one I’m usually fond of, but one I enjoyed. It reminded me of Link rolling around Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and how annoying that was comparatively. If Giant Squid did anything with The Pathless it was almost solving any issue I had with movement in exploration games. I say almost because the energy bar would run out from either simply running for too long or getting hit by a boss enemy and walking in The Pathless is downright painful.
Another addition to the movement equation is the baby eagle that accompanies you on your journey. This beast would sometimes become a liability but not unintentionally. The eagle allows you to glide around the island and once you start collecting yellow diamonds (not to be confused with the red diamonds) you’re able to get a boost from the eagle, reaching higher and higher places. Unfortunately, there are parts of the game where you become separated from the eagle, and — because you’re so used to its assistance — I felt like I was playing a new game. Luckily, the times away from the eagle are few and far between because The Pathless doesn’t feature many enemies. A more judgmental and crass gamer might refer to The Pathless with the “Walking Simulator” pejorative if it weren’t for the boss fights.
There appear to be three primary stages in The Pathless. Stage one simply being that you solve puzzles around the island. You’ve come to this island to reclaim the light that has been stolen from the world or some such, and there’s some evil Godslayer who wants to ascend and become a tall one. You know that old chestnut. As a result, the four children of the great eagle have been corrupted by the Godslayer’s chaos. (Which is black by the way. Remember we’re reclaiming the light and are now evil kinda). So you go to a region of this island and there’s a burly red and black cloud that you need to cleanse.
I found these red and black clouds, which shall henceforth be known as chaos clouds, to be quite annoying. Visiting this chaos cloud will consume you and bring you to a rather striking visual of a plain covered in chaos. The color palate is phenomenal and though The Pathless player character herself is red and black, the colors seemed to clash in a way that made her stand out. Once inside, our eagle pal is consumed by the chaos and carried away from the player. The player must then evade the corrupted child of the great eagle that currently plagues this land in order to save the baby eagle. The first few times this happens, it’s brilliant. It was fun, exciting, and offered a layer of stealth that wasn’t required for the rest of the game that I found enjoyable. However, the chaos cloud can move. As you traverse the region collecting the symbols that represent the child of the eagle that’s inhabiting this region to cleanse chaos towers, more on that in a moment, the cloud follows you. So, if you’re perhaps mid-puzzle and the chaos cloud comes about, you have to evade the child, save the bird, and get back to the puzzle just to forget what you were doing.
Interestingly when you retrieve the eagle you’re not able to use him again. He’s been plagued with chaos and despite being back with its best friend (you,) it still needs to be cleansed of the chaos. For this to happen, the player is required to hit a button and run their hands over the bird and remove the chaos. It’s a beautiful scene, and when the bird shows gratitude by nuzzling the player character’s neck you’ll get some warm cockles. But with that chaos cloud following you all about the damn island, even that scene gets a little grating.
It’d be one thing if there was some progression or expanding the narrative by going through this chaos cloud, but it serves no purpose other than to hinder the player’s progress and potentially annoy them. I got nothing from it, and it would often sour my experience.
Chaos cloud aside, you’ll be running around looking for puzzles to solve to collect emblems of the animal that resides in the region you’re cleansing. An emblem is rewarded for solving a puzzle, but also the yellow diamonds that grant you more eagle boosts are also given for solving a puzzle and not at the same time. There are two types of puzzle, one that grants an emblem reward and one that grants a yellow diamond reward. Unfortunately, there’s no discernable difference other than the fact that when you get to the puzzle itself, the emblem can be seen ensconced in chaos if an emblem is to be granted. In order to find puzzles, you press a button that tickles your pathless-sense, I think. This allows you to see some things you wouldn’t otherwise see, and shows you red clouds where there are puzzles to be solved.
This is something else that’s a little frustrating because there is no difference when you’re however far away from the puzzle itself. I had an absurd number of boosts at the time when I was looking for my last emblem for one of the eagle’s children when I kept coming across puzzles that wouldn’t reward me with an emblem. It’s tiresome. I have absolutely no idea why the developers decided to make them the same and perhaps my old eyes aren’t as good as they used to be and there is some difference but if there is, I couldn’t tell. Likewise, it seemed like the chaos that ensconced puzzles would go away if you got too close to the puzzle. So sometimes, I’d travel across the map looking for a puzzle that I had seen at one point but was no longer showing itself. Fortunately, most puzzle placements are very obvious so this only happened a few times.
And quite frankly, I loved the puzzles. I thought some of the puzzles were novice and very boring and others were elaborate and quite fun. There wasn’t a single puzzle that made me give up. This fact might turn some players away but it was a breath of fresh air for me. Once the towers were cleansed of their chaos they’d shoot some crazy light beams into the chaos cloud thus making the eagle’s child vulnerable for attack and the boss fight would begin.
Another aspect of The Pathless I really enjoyed was the boss fights. The first stage of every boss fight had you perilously traversing that chaos cloud enshrouded plot of land with pockets of fire and the eagle’s child running amok. As the player character gains speed you’ll soon be running alongside the eagle’s child and firing arrows at the weak points until you’ve hit them all and are transported to an arena. There in the arena, the eagle’s child will hit you with fireballs or parts of its body in a more traditional boss fight. Some of the boss fights even had the boss breathing fire into a series of rooms you had to run through unscathed before you could progress. Because in The Pathless there’s no health bar, there are no lives, you simply get knocked down, get up, and try again.
The Final Word
It wasn’t until I was a considerable way through the game that I realized that was the message being sent. Because throughout the game you’re given glimpses at the deaths of The Pathless before you and it’s very clear that you are the last Pathless, the last hope. So you don’t have any other option other than falling down, getting up, and trying again. The Pathless may not be my favorite game, I found quite a bit wrong with it, but the messaging was clear and resonated with me. I hope Giant Squid can take their own advice, because while The Pathless is by no means a bad game, I do hope they dust themselves off, get up, and try again.
MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
