Directed by Matt Nava

Developed by Giant Squid

Published by Annapurna Interactive

Open world games are a dime a dozen, and there’s been no shortage of them from the Triple A industry these past few years. It’s easy to feel fatigued with the structure, especially given how many developers reduce their worlds to just a big errand board. Yet The Pathless manages to do more in a smaller, but more open world than most of the big studios. They primarily accomplish this by embracing the original Zelda philosophy: exploration.

In The Pathless, players are dropped into this open map and given a brief tutorial explaining movement. And then, they just leave you alone. No interrupting tutorials beyond that. No warnings that you can’t reach such and such place yet. They don’t even put a map on your screen. It’s just you and the world. Every once in a while, they inform you that you’ve received a power up, but that’s it.

The end result is a game that treats the player as a vaguely intelligent being capable of figuring things out on their own. It’s not a game about overcoming a challenge (indeed, while it’s a much more interactive gameplay system than the studio’s previous game Abzu, it also isn’t a game you can “die” in). Quite literally, it’s about navigating the world yourself. The game itself is “pathless.” There are no roads or trails to not-so-subtly guide you to your next destination. There really isn’t a “next destination” either. There are goals and objectives to accomplish, but it’s not rocket science to figure that all out.

There lies the strength of the game, and what makes it a strangely more gratifying experience than something like a Rockstar game. There is an ability in which you can sense where something of interest is, but it doesn’t communicate what exactly that is. It could be the next token you need to free a light tower. It could just be some power up source. Either way, there’s only one way to know for sure! And that is you go there yourself and find out.

Puzzles aren’t particularly difficult, and there are enough throughout each stage that if you are stuck on one, moving onto the next one will allow you to advance in the story. Some require players get a firm handle on traversal skills, which itself is a shockingly fun and engaging system. (More of this, by the way. Look at The Pathless or something like Spider-Man, where the way you travel around the open world is almost more fun than the world itself.) Basically, the game clearly wants you to succeed and advance, and they want you to play at your own level or pace. Want to spend the time to find all the tokens? Go for it! Want to just get the required number to advance to the next stage? That’s fine, too! Stuck on a particularly tricky puzzle or lay-out? Hey, feel free to skip it! You do you.

The moment it all clicked for me was when I stumbled upon a secret power-up, but I couldn’t quite jump up to it. Using a mixture of my eagle’s flying ability with the boost you get shooting nearby tokens, I spend fifteen to twenty minutes trying to finagle my way up. It started to seem impossible, but I was tantalizingly close! Eventually, I successfully pulled off a couple of trick shots and managed to get up there, unlocking the power-up. About half an hour later, I received another power-up that let my eagle fly me twice as high, and I realized: oh…if I had waited, that secret would have been substantially easier to get. I bet they wanted me to get that after I got that eagle upgrade. And yet, they didn’t block that secret off. And it was, in fact, possible to get it before I got the upgrade.

That level of freedom is shockingly rare in open world games. Yes, there’s not a ton of things to do in The Pathless. You find puzzles that require some assortment of moving mirrors, shooting arrows, and lighting torches. But the fact that you can do any of them at any moment, or that there aren’t always just one way to do something makes it feel more entertaining and compelling that something like a Ghost of Tsushima, which often forces players to use a single, specific play style for story missions.

And, as one might expect, the game is just visually gorgeous. It’s a colorful and beautiful art style featuring large spirit animals almost reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki. The boss fights are fun and can be tricky, but the game isn’t about that. Hence, you can’t be killed by them; only knocked back to restart. It does so much with comparatively little. They’ve created yet another great addition to a series of games that includes Flower, Journey, and Abzu. Of course, it’s complete with a stunning string-heavy score from Austin Wintory.

If you were into thatgamecompany games, and if you were into Abzu, and if the idea of bringing light to the world via archery and eagle hunting sounds appealing to you, then this is an absolute must. Honestly, it was one of my favorite games of the last year.

Reductive Rating: It’s great!

Available On: PS4, PS5, Windows, macOS, iOS