Adventure into the strange unknown with Pathway, a strategy RPG set in the 1930s great desert wilderness. Outwit your enemies in daring turn-based combat, raid occult tombs and make tough choices in a procedurally generated grand pulp expedition!
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Epic
God damn it Pathway I really wanted to like you.
Okay so for context I played Halfway, the first game made by these guys, earlier in the year and enjoyed it despite its flaws. After finishing it, I saw that they made a rogue-like turn based strategy game and I was sold! Maybe they could learn from Halfway and make something really cool!
So, 5 years later, what have the fellas over at Robotality got for us?
Pathway is, like I mentioned earlier, is a top-down rogue-like turn based strategy. It's like if FTL, watched an Indiana Jones movie, while playing XCOM. The game takes place in a alternative timeline of World War 2, with your stereotypical adventure set pieces for that time.
Undead zombies, witch doctors, vast dry deserts, possibly alien's(?), and of course: Nazis. A whole lot of Nazis.
The pixel art style is done really really well here, and is a definite improvement on Halfway. The narrator coming in to kick off and close each mission also really sold me on the vibe that this was supposed to be some sort of grand adventure. Very very Indiana Jones. I wish they had spent that extra time to narrate the entire game as well, I think it would have done a lot of good.
Because the rest of the game is a bit of a mess unfortunately.
Okay so the game is divided up into different missions or chapters. You select from a roster of a number of big-personality characters and go off to save a friend, fight nazis, etc etc. You proceed through a map FTL-style, going from node to node trying to make it to the objective.
Okay so Combat and Game Time:
So the first issue is that the maps are too big for this kind of game. Unfortunately, by design, combat in a turn based games are s l o o o o o w w w w. FTL gets away with this sort of map progression because, assuming that the player is doing well, fights in FTL are between 2-5 minutes. In Halfway, these combats can be double or triple that amount, which leads to the SHORTER runs being close to one to two hours long. I emphasize SHORTER because the second mission I unlocked was secretly THREE MAPS IN ONE, exploding the run time massively.
I feel like this should go without saying but rogue-likes are not meant to be a put-down-and-finish-later kind of game. When was the last time you quit half-way through a run of Hades or Binding of Isaac? By the time you come back, did you say 'hey yeah I'll finish this' or did you come back and immediately end the run to start a new one because that's what you were excited about?
Okay, so outside of combat, what are the rewards like:
Well, you typically get Fuel, which is required to traverse the map. If you have no fuel, your run is basically dead in the water. Without fuel you're trekking barefoot through the desert, and your entire party takes damage per tile traveled. If you don't stumble across fuel quick you're fucked.
Another resource you get is Gold, which can be used in-run to buy items from (weirdly) rare shop tiles on the map or can be used outside-of-run to upgrade your jeep and storage. We'll talk about the issues with gold and shops in a bit.
Lastly it is possible to get new weapons, but they're weirdly rare, and suffer like every other game in the genre from being boring as shit. They're your generic take on decades of RPG weapons you've seen before. A Sniper Rifle that can hit things far away, an SMG that lets you fire a lot of bullets, Knives that let you do more melee damage. And they're all tied to an MMO style rarity system so you know you're just going to sell the one you have later down the line when you find a better one.
Okay so what else is there?:
There are two other kinds of tiles you'll find outside of encounters and combat, and those are Shops and Campsites.
Campsites let you turn another resource, food, into a full heal for your team. These are a staple of these kind of games, so its inclusion shouldn't come as a surprise. Food is a resource that you never have to worry about, because outside of a select few special events, you will never need to manage it. It's a default reward for many combats and serves no usage outside of Campsites, so if you keep your parties health high you'll basically never need to worry about it.
Shops, I mentioned earlier, let you pay gold for resources and items. Unfortunately, I end up seeing shops as a 'fuel' tile because I only ever buy fuel from them and pass up on the items/weapons. There seems to be some sort of balancing issue with Shops in that they are not weighted towards the characters in your party.
The shops really like to try to sell you stuff you're often already using, instead of an upgrade to what you have. Additionally, sometimes they'll sell you items that nobody in your party can use. If you have a full party, which you will 99% of the time, this is a dead shop option. Worse still, sometimes you'll pull into a shop and they'll be selling you a primary weapon that can only be used by a character you haven't even unlocked yet. I don't know if this was meant to be some sort of 'tease' for future character unlocks, but it really killed any desire to go to shops outside of the fuel options.
And all of this is exacerbated by the fact that this is basically the only reason to hoard gold for your run. If the shops are garbage then gold has no in-run usage, and can only realistically be used to upgrade your jeep or storage.
It's also worth noting that, unlike other games in the genre that use this traversal design like Slay the Spire, the game does not mark these tiles on your map ahead of time. This means that planning your route from the start of the map to the end, is largely just which route is the shortest. You can't play around these tiles, and expecting to run into one on chance is a risky endeavor.
So why does it all fall apart?:
I intentionally this out earlier, but there is actually a third kind of resolution to traversing an event tile and that is: Running away. A surprising amount of encounters that would normally turn into combat can just be completely ignored by picking the "Fuck Right Off" option.
Okay, let me spell this out real quick. Your characters health does not reset after combat ends. Your run ends if all of your characters die. You have a limited amount of Fuel, and you can see exactly how many tiles you need to traverse to get to the end of the run. There is also no in-run progression, meaning that the team that you start a run with, if well equipped enough, can easily beat the final level of any run.
So the dominant strategy to winning a run in Pathway is: Get enough fuel to get to the end of the map, and make a break for it. Don't do any combat that you're not forced to, and don't investigate any event tile no matter how tempting the reward is. This is a surprisingly easy strategy to pull off, and though it's boring as hell, you'll win games with it. But this strategy also HAS TO EXIST because the design of the game is fundamentally flawed.
Because your characters health does not reset between tiles, because the only resource that matters in-run is fuel, because you HAVE to traverse the map to win the game, because you can't see where Shop and Campsite tiles are ahead of time, and because any amount of any other reward is largely useless, the game rewards you for taking the absolute least amount of risk possible.
Why participate in combat? All it does it hurt your characters, and you might not get a campsite this run. Why take the risky option in a special event? If the reward isn't fuel, you've just hurt your party members and made it harder to win the final encounter. And I think this kind of game CAN work, it just seems like every single design decision made, whether intentional or not, negatively impacts the players willingness to take risks in this game. Without taking risks, what's even the point?
The out-of-run progression isn't that much better either. It took two runs with the same team for one of my characters to 'level up' and unlock new abilities. In Pathways defense, these abilities ARE interesting. I AM compelled to continue playing the game to unlock them, but unfortunately they take too long to acquire, often multiple runs with the same character. They also happen to be entirely combat centered so, paradoxically, you won't be using them too much in a run.
So that's Pathway. Runs take to long because the maps too big. Combat varies in difficulty but ultimately you don't care because the dominant strategy is to not engage with the games core gameplay loop at all. And lastly the meta-progression is too slow to acquire, and to centered around combat to matter greatly in a run.
What's such a shame is that I think with a number of tweaks this could have really been a banger game. Add some critical tiles on the map and hide the objective tile until you visit one or all of them to make you actually plan a route. Mark shops and campsites on the map so you can plan around them, or lose the persistent HP mechanic all together. The presentation of the game is great - it's easily the best part of the game - there just isn't a game worth playing underneath it.
Okay so for context I played Halfway, the first game made by these guys, earlier in the year and enjoyed it despite its flaws. After finishing it, I saw that they made a rogue-like turn based strategy game and I was sold! Maybe they could learn from Halfway and make something really cool!
So, 5 years later, what have the fellas over at Robotality got for us?
Pathway is, like I mentioned earlier, is a top-down rogue-like turn based strategy. It's like if FTL, watched an Indiana Jones movie, while playing XCOM. The game takes place in a alternative timeline of World War 2, with your stereotypical adventure set pieces for that time.
Undead zombies, witch doctors, vast dry deserts, possibly alien's(?), and of course: Nazis. A whole lot of Nazis.
The pixel art style is done really really well here, and is a definite improvement on Halfway. The narrator coming in to kick off and close each mission also really sold me on the vibe that this was supposed to be some sort of grand adventure. Very very Indiana Jones. I wish they had spent that extra time to narrate the entire game as well, I think it would have done a lot of good.
Because the rest of the game is a bit of a mess unfortunately.
Okay so the game is divided up into different missions or chapters. You select from a roster of a number of big-personality characters and go off to save a friend, fight nazis, etc etc. You proceed through a map FTL-style, going from node to node trying to make it to the objective.
Okay so Combat and Game Time:
So the first issue is that the maps are too big for this kind of game. Unfortunately, by design, combat in a turn based games are s l o o o o o w w w w. FTL gets away with this sort of map progression because, assuming that the player is doing well, fights in FTL are between 2-5 minutes. In Halfway, these combats can be double or triple that amount, which leads to the SHORTER runs being close to one to two hours long. I emphasize SHORTER because the second mission I unlocked was secretly THREE MAPS IN ONE, exploding the run time massively.
I feel like this should go without saying but rogue-likes are not meant to be a put-down-and-finish-later kind of game. When was the last time you quit half-way through a run of Hades or Binding of Isaac? By the time you come back, did you say 'hey yeah I'll finish this' or did you come back and immediately end the run to start a new one because that's what you were excited about?
Okay, so outside of combat, what are the rewards like:
Well, you typically get Fuel, which is required to traverse the map. If you have no fuel, your run is basically dead in the water. Without fuel you're trekking barefoot through the desert, and your entire party takes damage per tile traveled. If you don't stumble across fuel quick you're fucked.
Another resource you get is Gold, which can be used in-run to buy items from (weirdly) rare shop tiles on the map or can be used outside-of-run to upgrade your jeep and storage. We'll talk about the issues with gold and shops in a bit.
Lastly it is possible to get new weapons, but they're weirdly rare, and suffer like every other game in the genre from being boring as shit. They're your generic take on decades of RPG weapons you've seen before. A Sniper Rifle that can hit things far away, an SMG that lets you fire a lot of bullets, Knives that let you do more melee damage. And they're all tied to an MMO style rarity system so you know you're just going to sell the one you have later down the line when you find a better one.
Okay so what else is there?:
There are two other kinds of tiles you'll find outside of encounters and combat, and those are Shops and Campsites.
Campsites let you turn another resource, food, into a full heal for your team. These are a staple of these kind of games, so its inclusion shouldn't come as a surprise. Food is a resource that you never have to worry about, because outside of a select few special events, you will never need to manage it. It's a default reward for many combats and serves no usage outside of Campsites, so if you keep your parties health high you'll basically never need to worry about it.
Shops, I mentioned earlier, let you pay gold for resources and items. Unfortunately, I end up seeing shops as a 'fuel' tile because I only ever buy fuel from them and pass up on the items/weapons. There seems to be some sort of balancing issue with Shops in that they are not weighted towards the characters in your party.
The shops really like to try to sell you stuff you're often already using, instead of an upgrade to what you have. Additionally, sometimes they'll sell you items that nobody in your party can use. If you have a full party, which you will 99% of the time, this is a dead shop option. Worse still, sometimes you'll pull into a shop and they'll be selling you a primary weapon that can only be used by a character you haven't even unlocked yet. I don't know if this was meant to be some sort of 'tease' for future character unlocks, but it really killed any desire to go to shops outside of the fuel options.
And all of this is exacerbated by the fact that this is basically the only reason to hoard gold for your run. If the shops are garbage then gold has no in-run usage, and can only realistically be used to upgrade your jeep or storage.
It's also worth noting that, unlike other games in the genre that use this traversal design like Slay the Spire, the game does not mark these tiles on your map ahead of time. This means that planning your route from the start of the map to the end, is largely just which route is the shortest. You can't play around these tiles, and expecting to run into one on chance is a risky endeavor.
So why does it all fall apart?:
I intentionally this out earlier, but there is actually a third kind of resolution to traversing an event tile and that is: Running away. A surprising amount of encounters that would normally turn into combat can just be completely ignored by picking the "Fuck Right Off" option.
Okay, let me spell this out real quick. Your characters health does not reset after combat ends. Your run ends if all of your characters die. You have a limited amount of Fuel, and you can see exactly how many tiles you need to traverse to get to the end of the run. There is also no in-run progression, meaning that the team that you start a run with, if well equipped enough, can easily beat the final level of any run.
So the dominant strategy to winning a run in Pathway is: Get enough fuel to get to the end of the map, and make a break for it. Don't do any combat that you're not forced to, and don't investigate any event tile no matter how tempting the reward is. This is a surprisingly easy strategy to pull off, and though it's boring as hell, you'll win games with it. But this strategy also HAS TO EXIST because the design of the game is fundamentally flawed.
Because your characters health does not reset between tiles, because the only resource that matters in-run is fuel, because you HAVE to traverse the map to win the game, because you can't see where Shop and Campsite tiles are ahead of time, and because any amount of any other reward is largely useless, the game rewards you for taking the absolute least amount of risk possible.
Why participate in combat? All it does it hurt your characters, and you might not get a campsite this run. Why take the risky option in a special event? If the reward isn't fuel, you've just hurt your party members and made it harder to win the final encounter. And I think this kind of game CAN work, it just seems like every single design decision made, whether intentional or not, negatively impacts the players willingness to take risks in this game. Without taking risks, what's even the point?
The out-of-run progression isn't that much better either. It took two runs with the same team for one of my characters to 'level up' and unlock new abilities. In Pathways defense, these abilities ARE interesting. I AM compelled to continue playing the game to unlock them, but unfortunately they take too long to acquire, often multiple runs with the same character. They also happen to be entirely combat centered so, paradoxically, you won't be using them too much in a run.
So that's Pathway. Runs take to long because the maps too big. Combat varies in difficulty but ultimately you don't care because the dominant strategy is to not engage with the games core gameplay loop at all. And lastly the meta-progression is too slow to acquire, and to centered around combat to matter greatly in a run.
What's such a shame is that I think with a number of tweaks this could have really been a banger game. Add some critical tiles on the map and hide the objective tile until you visit one or all of them to make you actually plan a route. Mark shops and campsites on the map so you can plan around them, or lose the persistent HP mechanic all together. The presentation of the game is great - it's easily the best part of the game - there just isn't a game worth playing underneath it.
muito bom
Pixel art e o sistema de combate em si é exatamente o tipo que eu gosto, amei.
A história não me prendeu, achei bem genérico.
Depois da primeira aventura (de 5) eu já não tinha mais saco pra ler nada, só passava os olhos por cima pra saber sobre o que era.
Tem vários personagens, cada um com suas peculiaridades e habilidades, o que te dá liberdade pra escolher como abordar os desafios e encontros.
Num geral, foi legalzinho, com campanhas curtas que permite jogar sem muito compromisso.
A história não me prendeu, achei bem genérico.
Depois da primeira aventura (de 5) eu já não tinha mais saco pra ler nada, só passava os olhos por cima pra saber sobre o que era.
Tem vários personagens, cada um com suas peculiaridades e habilidades, o que te dá liberdade pra escolher como abordar os desafios e encontros.
Num geral, foi legalzinho, com campanhas curtas que permite jogar sem muito compromisso.
One of the most beautiful 2D games I've ever seen. Metal Slug aesthetic x Indiana Jones pulp nazi zombie schlock. But innocent. Sweet-ass oboe melodies in the soundtrack too.
Only five levels but it still manages to get a bit repetitive (too many temples and bunkers). I won't replay but no regrets.
Someone really cared about making this.
Only five levels but it still manages to get a bit repetitive (too many temples and bunkers). I won't replay but no regrets.
Someone really cared about making this.
A serviceable tactical RPG roguelike that didn't do anything to draw me in. Nothing about this game appealed to me. I tried to play it multiple times and never got into it. Your mileage may vary.