After knocking it out of the (water) park with its debut in 2016, Giant Squid landed The Pathless on PS5 just as the console launched in November 2020. The game delivered the kind of audiovisual spectacle that would satisfy early adopters eager to show off their gear. next-gen, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Switch port is completely amazing. However, here we are and Giant Squid, along with publisher Annapurna Interactive, has brought us another massive open world lovingly squished onto a handheld screen.
The plot of The Pathless isn’t exactly fantastically original, but it provides a more than sufficient excuse to run really fast around a field doing cool things. Long story short, an evil force has invaded a mystical land and your job, as the standard savior of all and sundry, is to overcome it by shooting arrows at the massive haunted creatures. There’s more to it, of course, but despite all the snippets of text found on stone tablets or fallen NPCs in the remnants of a Breath of the Wild-like battle, the story feels pretty contrived. The result is that the creatures you have to kill/rescue are each roaming their own part of the world in the eye of a huge red fireball storm. To fight them, you must first collect magic tokens by solving puzzles throughout the region. These tokens can be used to unlock three towers, allowing you to begin your hunt. Clearing the boss then grants access to the next region.
The distinguishing mechanic of The Pathless is its rapid movement through vast open spaces. What’s new is that your movement speed increases and your sprint size regenerates by firing arrows at targets floating in the air around the lands you explore. Aiming is automatic, so shooting becomes a rhythmic hold and release of ‘ZR’ to stretch and pound the bow. HD Rumble quivers as the arrows fly and pulses as they hit, reaffirming the cadence. The companion eagle represents the gift of flight, which is also enhanced and extended by shooting arrows. The result is thrilling chases, leaping through grass, winding through trees and soaring off cliffs as epic environments fly across the screen. Stacking a sprint movement on top of your run, a boosted sprint on top of that, and a flight on top of that that makes this fast in a way that could not be achieved with just a “Run” button.
If the heart of the game is sprinting at the speed of a cheetah past a massive landscape, perhaps the Switch port was a risky move. However, performance on the Switch is generally good. There are moments of slowdown or stuttering, but they’re uncommon – especially given the size of the environments. The art style uses relatively simple models and textures, which suit a portable system, and if you have an OLED screen then you can feel good about it while watching vivid colors.
While getting from point A to point B in The Pathless is a joy, the actual events at points A and B are unfortunately not that exciting. These are simple puzzles about arranging rings to shoot arrows through, moving blocks to pressure switches, and so on. And these puzzles are of different quality. Some work to expand established ideas and challenge your thinking; others are just a case of hitting a switch to get to another switch.
Giant Squid took on the huge challenge of building a player character that could move smoothly on a macro level to move around the landscape, then seamlessly transition to the finer movements of shuffling blocks and looting tombs. It sort of works, but there’s no doubt that the feel of a slow jump and slippery walk in close quarters is outweighed by the rush of circling forests and plains. This doesn’t help the puzzle parts, where sometimes we solved the puzzle in our heads but felt our hearts sink as we realized we actually had to perform a slow and restless series of actions to get our reward.
Once enough of these puzzles are completed and the three towers are unlocked, the local beast of the kingdom’s curse is ready to hunt. This begins with an exciting dive into the swirling destruction of fire that circles the map. The scale of these storm balls is terrifying, and their approach really gave us goosebumps every time we did. Once inside, combat is based on almost non-stop firing of arrows, first to hunt down the beast at high speed and then to pick off targets on its body. Again, aiming is trivial and failure is treated leniently with just crashing before trying again.
The tension, therefore, is created mainly through the sheer spectacle of these furious creatures. This is aided by a magnificent musical score, which ranges from strings and throaty singing of the open plains to fiery brass in the heat of battle. Although the boss encounters are bombastic, they are basically quite simple and also very long. Fortunately, they mostly require large-scale action, the freewheeling kind that best suits the game. While the retries aren’t a joy, they could have been worse if they were based on the restless challenges the game struggles with.
Conclusion
Pathless does one thing exceptionally well, and that is create a sense of racing – almost dancing – through its vast open world. The player’s journey is largely about getting to know that feeling and learning how to use it to navigate epic environments. However, the protagonist’s journey has little to do with that feeling, which is perhaps why the story doesn’t end. The game sounds exceptional and looks great in this impressive arc. However, the puzzles rarely stimulate the imagination and are demanding to play, while the boss encounters are too long and repetitive. Although it has notable successes, The Pathless unfortunately fails to become more than the sum of its parts.
