"The Pathless" Review

Available for: Playstation 5, Playstation 4, iOS, MacOS, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Playstation 4

It could be considered an act of hubris to purchase a current-gen version of a game clearly meant to be a technical showcase launch title for a next-gen console. Nonetheless, currently having no way of getting my hands on a Playstation 5, I've committed this act of hubris in order to experience The Pathless, the latest game from the people who made the exceptional 2012 masterpiece, Journey, and the...other high profile game they made, Abzu. As a big fan of Journey, I always look forward to experiencing whatever Giant Squid has next on the docket, but after expecting too much of Abzu, I've learned to never expect anything close to that original masterpiece. I want to be clear that I went into The Pathless with that kind of mindset: expecting quality from the devs but not necessarily the same kind that I experienced 8 years ago on the PS3. But when it comes to differences between current and next generation versions of the same game, there are two "scenarios," if you will. Scenario #1 is that the differences are pretty minor (take the likes of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, for example), and this is the more common scenario. Usually when a next generation game isn't a launch exclusive, there's not much difference between it and its current-gen counterpart. Scenario #2 is the Dragon Age: Inquisition scenario in which the current-gen version is riddled with bugs and technical blunders nowhere to be found in the next-gen version. This scenario doesn't necessarily mean that the current-gen version is bad, just that it's technically an inferior product. The Pathless is a clear example of the latter scenario: not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but an inferior product on the current-gen systems to a noticeable degree. We'll be touching on all of that in due time, but for now, let's get started with a high-level look.

The Pathless takes place on a cursed island that serves as home to animal deities known as "the tall ones." You play as a female "hunter," a bow-wielding human who has come to the island to try and succeed in curing this nondescript curse where many other hunters have failed. After rescuing the eldest tall one in the form of a young eagle and crossing paths with the spreader of the curse (a being known as "the godslayer"), you set out on a journey across the island to purify the obelisks of the tall ones and cleanse the spirits of these once-noble deities so that you can ascend to the floating island in the center of the area, confront the godslayer, and end the curse once and for all. It's all very folklore-like, so if you're into that kind of thing (which I am), you'll likely find this world interesting from a conceptual standpoint. But this is why I emphasize that I didn't (and you shouldn't) go into this game expecting a Journey-like experience: there's not much in the way of emotional impact. Certain reasons for this will have to wait until the technical section, but what I can say at this point is that this lack of real impact largely stems from that aforementioned folklore coat of paint. Folklore is almost never epic narratives and tearjerking drama: it's things like "they say the deer spirit who lives in the woods is responsible for good harvests!" So, while The Pathless does try its hand at a more sweeping set of stakes with all its talk of curses and deities, just keep in mind that it's doing so on a limited scale. "But Journey was kind of folklore-esque," you might be tempted to say. Fair enough. But another difference between the two games is that Journey relied on visual cues and sounds to tell its story while The Pathless actually has voiced cutscenes. The voices are either in Mongolian (which I only guess because that seems to be the inspiration for a lot of the cultural aesthetic you see on the island) or gibberish, but these cutscenes are nonetheless voiced (by Laura Bailey and Troy Baker, no less). So rather than being told the story in sweeping, well-directed cutscenes that show the narrative, you're just plain told the story. There's nothing wrong with this, as a lot of the cutscenes in The Pathless are pretty cool, actually, but there's no doubt that it contributes to the disappointment you're bound to feel if you go into it expect a Journey experience. 

Thus far in this review there's been a lot of talk about how The Pathless differs from Journey (which is perhaps inevitable), but there's nowhere in which the topic is more relevant than in the gameplay department. Why? Because The Pathless actually has gameplay, which is essentially divided into 3 parts: travel, puzzles, and bosses. 

The travel part is easily the best part of the game, which makes it no wonder that it was the most heavily showed-off portion of the gameplay in the Sony events leading up to the PS5 launch. You get around the world by running with a stamina gauge, and this gauge is charge by shooting floating talismans in the world with your bow. These talismans are literally everywhere and your stamina gauge drains pretty quickly, so basically every second you spend getting around the world will be spent holding down R2 for a second and unleashing, getting a boost of speed, then rinsing and repeating. If that sounds mundane, it isn't. It really isn't. You may not actually do any aiming with your bow, but that just makes it all flow better. Everything comes together to make traversing this large world smooth, elegant, and satisfying, and when you're just sprinting across the grass like a stone across water, shooting arrow after arrow and getting faster and faster each time, it's an incredible experience. Thankfully, this is also what the vast majority of the game consists of. Sadly though, there's a couple flaws that take away from the experience when in traveling mode. See, you have an eagle companion with you that you use to glide. Say you jump off a cliff and are trying to make your way down to a landmark you see on the other side of a valley. In such an instance, you'd use your eagle to float your way down as far as possible, likely shooting talismans along the way to make the eagle glide faster. But another thing the eagle can do is "flap," which essentially means "ascend a sizable amount." When you press the button to flap, the eagle flaps its wings once and hauls both itself and you further up in the air (because the glide itself just gets you forward and slowly descends). The amount of times you can flap increases with the story and as you collect crystals found in the world, so you can conceivably get quite a few flap opportunities and be able to scale mountains without having to find a high enough vantage point to start the process. The problem is that the whole flap mechanic just feels...heavy. That is to say there's a noticeable lag between when you press the flap button and when the eagle actually does it. This is a realistic way to portray it, seeing as how it's a small eagle carrying a grown woman in a suit of armor, but when compared to the ridiculously fast speeds you'll find yourself dashing along the grass and gliding through the sky, the act of gaining altitude grinds the pace to a screeching halt. In my humble opinion, replacing the current flap system with like an instantaneous jump through the air or something like that would've kept things consistently smooth. Do you know what else might've kept things consistently smooth? If the devs hadn't littered the landscapes with trees...or at least if they'd made the arrow AI smarter and had them fly around the trees. I mean, it would be one thing if there were aiming involved, but it seems counterintuitive for there to be obstacles in the way of targets when you don't control what you aim at and when your firing process in the first place is holding down a button to make arrows automatically fly at it. As a result, there'll be times where you'll end up walking for a second instead of running because you accidentally shot a tree. Not the most horrific thing in the world, but a noticeable one by virtue of the speed the other 99% of the time. 

While the puzzle parts of the gameplay also slow things down to a crawl, they're enjoyable at best and inoffensive at worst.  In each area you have to purify 3 obelisk towers, and in order to purify a tower, you need to find 1 or 2 emblems of the area's deity. These emblems are sometimes just out there in the open, but most of the time you acquire them by solving a puzzle (meaning that in the later areas, you might have to solve, say, 6 puzzles). Every puzzle requires a little bit of observation and a little bit of thought, but never so much of either that you'll be tearing your hair out. I think the best way to convey this to you, dear reader, would be to explain a possible application of a common puzzle element that might make your heart sink upon hearing it: shooting arrows at movable angled mirrors in such a way that the arrow eventually passes through a fire on the south side of a tower and then sets a target down and to the north of that flame on fire by way of another set of movable angled mirrors. Does this sound like it would require a lot of trial and error and precise positioning? In any other game, it would. However, in The Pathless, all you really need is to conceptually understand the puzzle and put the pieces about where they ought to be, and most of the time you'll solve it. In the rare occasions where you didn't quite get the positions right, the arrow provides plenty of visual feedback when it hits the wrong spot, so you'll likely be able to look at that and think "ah, more to the right!" Likewise, if you see that you're going to need to weigh a pressure plate down with something, the weight will always be somewhere nearby, you'll just need to do a little bit of looking. The more difficult puzzles are the best ones because they still aren't difficult per-se, but they do make you think a little bit. On the other hand, the mind-numbingly simple ones are the inoffensive ones because they don't sit there and waste your time. All around excellent puzzle design from a company that doesn't really do puzzles, that's something I wasn't expecting. 

Finally, there's the bosses, though I guess it would be more accurate to say that the final topic on gameplay is the final two gameplay aspects that make up bosses. Firstly, there are the boss segments that occur before you purify the relevant obelisk towers. While an area is still corrupted, a single giant, red, dome-shaped cloud will appear and grow to massive sizes at a point in the area, and when it reaches maximum size, it'll restart the process somewhere else in the area. If you become engulfed by this cloud, you'll be transported to an evil red version of the area and your eagle will suddenly be blown away by the wind. From there, you'll have to sneak by the boss that you'll eventually end up fighting after purifying the towers to reach your eagle and free yourself from the cloud. You do this by not moving when the grass under you is lit up (either by the boss's gaze or by anything else), though it isn't quite as simple as that. The boss will always walk a certain distance before dissolving and respawning somewhere else in the immediate vicinity. When it respawns, it always respawns either directly on the path you're obviously planning to take, or somewhere else that ensures they're going to run into you if you don't move decisively to avoid them. It's always challenging, and if you get caught, you get freed from the cloud, but you lose some of the crystals that go towards another flap and you have to spend some time doing a small minigame to brush off your eagle. If you don't get caught, you get freed from the cloud without losing crystals, but you still have to brush off your eagle. This is clearly in the interest of showing off the haptic feedback on the PS5 controller, but since I played on PS4, there was no haptic feedback, so it just meant having to do a small, clunky minigame every time I got engulfed by the cloud no matter whether or not I succeeded. In other words, these little stealth boss sections prior to purifying the obelisks are a complete waste of time every single time. As a result, these growing clouds of doom, which are meant to be a ticking clock element to add tension, just became irritating to me. The real joy of these bosses comes when you actually get to fight them. There are a handful of bosses (prior to the final one), and they all start out the same: with a chase. Once you've purified three obelisk towers in an area, the red cloud will once again be formed, but this time, you'll jump into it yourself and give chase to the boss that has spent the past however long period of time stalking you. Each boss has a couple of targets on each side of its body, and your goal in the chase segment is to build up enough speed by shooting talismans to reach one side of the body and shoot all the targets. Then you do it again for the other side. Different bosses will have slightly different attacks that they shoot off as the chase progresses, but otherwise, these segments are the same throughout. Once you've completed the chase, however, the bosses go on the offensive. From that point on, no two of the bosses are remotely the same, and they're easily some of this game's best sequences. Yeah, they all involve shooting your bow, but I'm kind of amazed by the creativity on display once the bosses turn around and start fighting you. So, while it takes slogging through some truly subpar pace-killing encounters in order to get to the good bits, the boss side of gameplay is pretty good overall. 

That brings us to the technical side of things, which is unfortunately where this game suffers the most. Keep in mind that I played on a current-gen platform and these issues likely aren't going to be present on the PS5, but as I make a habit of saying, I can only report on my own experiences. Let's start with the obvious thing first. The only times I ever found this game graphically impressive were in combat encounters with the godslayer. This being a current-gen copy, it was never going to be as astonishing as its next-gen counterpart, but that doesn't change the fact that for most of the game I just found the graphics unappealing. 3 of the 4 areas in this game are bog standard forests, and the final of the 4 areas is a bog standard snow area. That's it...just uninteresting forests and an uninteresting snowy mountain. The little abandoned ruins you find scattered throughout the world are designed interestingly enough that I felt compelled to explore them, but really? The artistic minds behind Journey and Abzu couldn't think of anything other than these environments to surround those ruins? I tried to go into The Pathless not expecting the same kind of killer art direction behind those aforementioned titles, but I did expect some artistic direction. I mean, compare the snow in The Pathless (which came out this year) to the snow in the PS3 version of Journey (which came out in 2012). With all the funding necessary to produce a product worthy of launching the next-generation Playstation console, Giant Squid couldn't produce visuals that remotely stand up to something they put out on a significantly smaller budget during the last console generation? I know, I know, I'm harping on this point. Initially I was just going to offhandedly mention that the environments were uninspired, but as I typed and thought at the same time, I realized just how odd the whole thing is. Before I move on to the rest of the technical negatives, let's first discuss what this game gets right. The framerate is solid, the controls are responsive (except for the flap delay I mentioned earlier), and I never experienced any hard or soft crashes. That's kind of it, unfortunately. I did occasionally experience a bit of texture pop-in, and in one particular instance, I ended up sinking into an unloaded texture for a couple seconds until it popped. During the third boss, any time I landed a hit during the chase phase, the camera would completely spazz out and send me flying off to the side for a time. The arrow would hit, the boss would roar, and then all of a sudden I'd practically be facing behind me for no discernable reason. But by far the biggest issue I experienced was the consistent audio stuttering/static. I haven't seen anybody else complain about this, so the temptation might be to blame my audio setup (which is basically just mixing headphones plugged directly into the PS4 controller)...but this is the only game I've played this year with this problem. Not even Genshin Impact, with all of its many technical flaws, has the audio stutter/static problem. To explain in better detail, every second or two, there's a little static noise that briefly interrupts the audio. It doesn't seem to happen in the big cinematic moments that the devs obviously wanted to highlight, but during vanilla gameplay, it's pretty consistent and it annoyed the living hell out of me. It's almost like the audio of this game was being poorly streamed instead of baked into the game itself, in other words. It may very well not be a problem in any other setup, but the fact of the matter remains that something in this game's programming saddles it with a serious audio problem if you make use of one of the audio options directly offered to you as a Playstation user. If this were one of Giant Squid's previous projects, this would've been downright unforgivable, and it still is...but it's not like the audio stutters were really interrupting anything of substance. That's because the final technical complaint to mention is the one that hurts my heart the most. The soundtrack to The Pathless is composed by none other than Austin Wintory, the Grammy-nominated composer of the soundtracks to both of Giant Squid's prior titles...and were it not for that signature Austin Wintory violin tone on certain tracks, you wouldn't even know it was him. Why? Because it really seems like this soundtrack was phoned in. The Pathless's soundtrack is essentially a collection of forgettable ambient tracks, forgettable mongolian throat-singing tracks, and an equally forgettable closing track seemingly sung by the same woman who sang "I was born for this" from the Journey ost. I wasn't at all a fan of his work in Abzu, but at least that soundtrack had an identity of some kind, even if that identity was a poor man's Eric Whitacre. I kept hoping and hoping that as the plot progressed the soundtrack would be better, but it just never reached that point even at the game's most emotional moments. Remember what I said about the lack of impact in the story? That could've easily been turned around by the ost, but the legwork just didn't get put in here. 

For the conclusion to this review, I'd like to remind you of what I said in the introduction, dear reader. Concerning the two types of current-gen versions of next-gen launch titles, the type that comes with a myriad of issues isn't necessarily bad, it can just be an inferior version of a good game. Such is the case with The Pathless. It feels like I've spent as much time criticizing it as I have praising it, but in spite of that, I was never bored with this title. Sure, there were times when I'd be rolling my eyes at the prospect of having to do another stealth segment, but on the other hand, I'd try to get the stealth segments out of the way as quickly as possible so that I could go back to playing the rest of the game. Sure, I hated having to stop to flap, and it was annoying when an arrow would run into a tree instead of a talisman, but these interruptions to the flow of the gameplay wouldn't have stood out so much if that aforementioned flow weren't so satisfying. Sure, I experienced technical issues just about every second that I played, but these issues never made me stop playing. Provided you don't go into The Pathless expecting something akin to Journey, I'd say you'll probably have a decent time (or a more than decent one if you play on the PS5, I'd imagine). 

Let us review:

Travel hiccups (flapping/trees): -0.5

Annoying ticking clock element: -0.6

Technical flaws: -1 

The final score for The Pathless is...

7.9/10 - Pretty Good

Decent work, Giant Squid, decent work