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.