Giant Squid, a hit out of (water)park with ABZÛ debuting in 2016, has landed The Pathless on PS5 just as the console launched in November 2020. With their next-gen kit showing off, you can be forgiven for thinking that a Switch port is highly unlikely. But Giant Squid has teamed up with publisher his Annapurna Interactive to bring us yet another of his giant open worlds lovingly squashed to handheld screens.
The Pathless plot isn’t the most fantastically original, but it provides enough excuses to run around the field really fast while doing cool things. bottom. Your job, as the savior of everyone and all standard issues, is to unleash the overwhelm by shooting arrows at giant cursed creatures. The story feels pretty contrived for all the text snippets found on stone tablets and fallen NPCs in the wreckage. You roam each part of the world in front of a red fireball.To fight them, you must first solve regional puzzles and collect magic tokens. Using these tokens he unlocks three towers so he can start his hunt. Clearing the boss grants access to the next region.
A distinctive mechanic of The Pathless is the ability to travel through vast open spaces at high speed. The novelty is that shooting arrows at targets floating in the air around the land you are exploring will increase your movement speed and refill your sprint gauge. ZR’s rhythmic hold and release to extend and twist the bow. HD Rumble quivers when the arrow flies, pulses when it hits, and reaffirms the rhythm. The Eagle Companion introduces the Gift of Flight, which is also boosted and extended by firing arrows. The result is a thrilling rush of skipping through grass, weaving through trees and jumping off cliffs as epic environments fly across your screen.Layer the sprint movement on top of the run, layer the boosted sprint on top of it, layer the flight on top of it or Makes this feel fast in a way that the ‘run’ button alone couldn’t achieve.
If sprinting across vast landscapes like a cheetah is at the heart of the game, porting it to Switch might have been a risky move. However, performance on the switch is generally good. There are moments of slowdowns or pop-ins, but they are rare, especially given the scale of the environment. If you’re using it, seeing vibrant colors can make you feel better.
Getting from point A to point B in The Pathless is fun, but what actually happens at points A and B is sadly not all that exciting. They are simple puzzles such as placing rings to fire arrows or moving blocks to pressure switches. And these puzzles are of varying quality. Some work to expand established ideas and challenge your thinking. Others are just a case of pressing a switch to reach another switch.
Giant Squid took on the big challenge of building a player character that could move fluidly at the macro level, move powerfully across terrain, and seamlessly transition into the micro-movements of block shuffles and tomb raids. It almost works, but the slow jump feel and slippery gait at point-blank range definitely outweighs the rush of swooping around forests and plains. It doesn’t help the puzzling section that made my heart sink when I realized I had to actually perform a series of slow, fidgety actions to get my prize.
Once these puzzles have been satisfactorily completed and the three towers unlocked, the realm’s local Hex Beasts are ready to hunt. This is kicked off by a thrilling plunge into the swirling fiery devastation that races around the map. The scale of these Storm Balls was intimidating and really gave me goosebumps every time I got close. Aim at the target on its body. Again, aiming is trivial and failures are treated leniently, just knocking them down before trying again.
The tension is created primarily through the sheer spectacle of these ferocious creatures. Helped by sheet music. Boss encounters are pretentious, but basically very simple and very long. Luckily, they mostly require the kind of large-scale, free-flowing action that the game is best suited for. Retrying isn’t fun, but it can be even worse if the game is based on nasty challenges you’re struggling with.
Conclusion
Pathless does one thing very well. It’s all about creating a dancing racing feeling through its huge open world. The player’s journey is largely about getting to know that feeling and learning to use it to traverse epic environments. That’s why not. The game sounds exceptional and looks great in this impressive port. However, the puzzles are rarely imaginative and tedious to play, and the boss encounters are overlong and repetitive. It cannot be greater than the total.
