Solar Ash and The Pathless define a new kind of open world game

Blame the job or my memory, but I tend to take notes when playing games. And how I’ve played Heart Machine and Annapurna Interactive Sun ash In the past few days, these notes became a list of ways the game might resemble another Annapurna game: The pathless one.

Both are open world games on a budget, where platform challenges and fast, smooth movements take precedence over combat and custom story missions. In Sun ash, you slide around on futuristic roller skates, boost and slide in all directions; in The pathless one

, you propel yourself forward with a magical bow and arrow. Both games feature environmental puzzles, heavily vertical areas, masked characters, and huge bosses, with a loose narrative that sums it all up.

Both take place at their core in relatively empty open worlds, filling their space with unique forms of movement rather than endless amounts of content, and this simplicity allows you to appreciate the surroundings without feeling overwhelmed. You don’t have crowds or a multitude of enemies. In fact, they would probably work without someone to fight. Play through one of the games and it often feels like enemies aren’t there to add enough to the story that they signal that you are going in the right direction. (At least until you get to the bosses.)

In The Pathless, the main character runs away from a huge wall of fire — A scene from *The pathless one*.

I can imagine budget issues at play here, like Heart Machine and The pathless one Developer Giant Squid employs far fewer people than the studios that make high-end open-world games, and it takes less time to create fewer enemies, fewer quests to design, and fewer faces to animate. Neither of these games comes close to the animation level of something like Insomniac’s Spider-Man games. But whatever the drive is, the result works for me. What I like about them is the lack of excessive stuff inside of them – and what their respective developers have done with movement, platform, and world design to fill that void.

They are not overwhelming. They don’t contain hundreds of hours of content. They give you a sense of exploration and adventure, they say thank you and leave you satisfied so you can move on to the next game. You’re big enough to get lost in but small enough to stay focused. And they have allowed me to enjoy open world games in ways that I haven’t had in the last few years with a lot of things on a big budget.