Unfortunately, playing through these segments is an utter bore. The light and shadows are visually stunning, and the fire emanating from the beasts is absolutely radiant. You must avoid the cursed beast’s line of sight and stick to the shadows while making your way to the poor, helpless bird. Sometimes the game can be a very chill experience.Įach area’s infected god wanders around the map, potentially ensnaring you in this blood-orange instance wherein you have to recover your eagle. Each level of plateau also contains a wandering, red, fiery elephant in the room: a traveling stealth section. They don’t evolve past their first iterations, and instead just get a bit longer. My issue with the puzzles is less that they’re easy- after all, it is supposed to be a blissed out, more casual experience - but more that they repeat themselves. The solutions are obvious almost immediately in most cases and, even if they’re not, you can pretty much solve every puzzle by shooting at the first thing that looks like it’ll affect the next thing. Essentially, you’ll be tasked with lining up different rings or torches to fire at with your arrows, or using your pet eagle to carry a pot from one pressure pad to another, or a combination of the two. The puzzles are rudimentary and repetitive, and I found myself challenged only once.

You just need to know where each pocket of butterflies spawns by using the scanner. There is one optional puzzle in which you have to follow butterflies to different spots before a ticking clock winds down, but these only serve to increase your maximum flaps and you don’t actually need to move fast to finish them.

As far as I could tell, none of the puzzles relied upon movement or speed, and just took you to a screeching halt. There are two types of puzzles: ones that give you the resources to activate the game’s towers and more optional ones that fill up a meter that will eventually earn you another flap on your eagle. I often found myself shooting things in the wrong order while standing still because the target just kept moving around. The targets are inconsistent, too, especially when you’re in a puzzle area. As it is, most of your time is spent cruising at a medium pace to a puzzle area. I would have liked these littered throughout the game from the start. In the game’s final, ice-laden area, this changes a little, with certain targets boosting you up. Even in the most open areas of the game, your top speed is relatively low, and you’re only traversing vertically by slowly gliding with your eagle buddy. Given the marketing of the game, I was expecting the experience to be more reliant on movement, speed and flow, but that isn’t really the case. Some targets line up to points of interest, and some are just there if you’d like to keep your momentum going.

These targets add to your boost meter, which expands significantly after beating one of the game area’s bosses. You sprint and glide around the world of The Pathless by shooting at targets which litter every nook and cranny of landscape. The Pathless wears its influences - Breath of the Wild, Shadow of the Colossus, Ico - on its sleeve, but perhaps veers a bit too heavily from homage to imitation. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. A mysterious echoing voice speaking an unfamiliar language guides you on your journey. You and your companion eagle must solve a number of puzzles to activate towers, therefore allowing you to fight and cure a god and progress. You play as the Hunter, and you’re trying to cure four animals that were gods - called Tall Ones - that once defended the land, but are now cursed by someone called The Pathfinder. The Pathless attempts to inject a long tradition of minimalist fantasy Zelda-likes with a focus on movement and casual play.

The pathless forest plateau puzzles