The Pathless

iOs, PC, PS4, PS5

The pace slows to exasperating levels as your nimble hunter trots around awkwardly, solving a range of challenges

Developer Giant Squid Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Release Out now

We dart through a thicket of trees and take aim at another target. The arrow zips through the air with the sound of a firework’s whistle, the tension in the DualSense’s trigger slackening along with the bowstring. It’s a bullseye, as they usually are, so we draw our bow once more; again, it lands true. A third hits home, and we’re now either sprinting so fast our environment is a blur or gleefully sliding on our knees like a toddler on a wedding dancefloor as we pull back and loose off another arrow, and another. Then our auto-targeting goes awry and our next arrow thunks harmlessly into a tree when we’ve clear sight of our mark. We shrug it off, little realising that it’s the first sign of trouble; we don’t hear that thunk too often afterward, but both sounds resonate throughout The Pathless from hereon. Whistle and thunk; exhilaration followed by disappointment.

There is the germ of something special in the way you explore most of The Pathless’ sprawling forest setting. Your veiled hunter and their eagle familiar rush across its expanses of land, as you squeeze one trigger to sprint, and another to draw back your bow before releasing to fire at floating talismans. Their presence isn’t fully explained, but no matter – not when each provides you with a burst of speed and a top-up for your stamina meter that quickly ebbs away as long as you keep running. Your aiming reticule will lock onto the nearest target, and on open ground it rarely matters whether it’s the one you had in mind, since they all do the same job and here there’s nothing in the way. Sometimes you’ll jump, not because you need to, but because it feels good. Leap, aim, fire, somersault and repeat: here is a chance to showboat in a game that otherwise prizes momentum and flow over player skill.

You’d hope The Pathless would take you across rolling plains, hills and valleys, perhaps letting you run up and slide down. But the environment is layered, a series of plateaus effectively gating progress, and so that momentum stalls. Your eagle can lift you into the air – just a short way at first, but gradually higher, each laboured flap carrying you up in fixed increments. It takes some effort, the bird grabbing hold and lifting you some time after you press the button, communicating the strain on its wings and talons. Yet in a game that makes ground movement feel exhilarating, it breaks the flow, slowing things down or bringing them to a nearstandstill when you’re hurtling towards a rock face and you hit X a split-second too late. Gather enough light crystals and the bird gains the ability to flap more times, letting you stay airborne for longer. But it never makes the action faster, nor more fluid; the symbiotic relationship between bird and hunter should surely see the two steadily become like one. But in effect, the flaps are little more than a key to unlocking more of the world, not to let you move more freely through it.

The process of obtaining these is similar to the method of progressing the story, which is so similar to Breath Of The Wild it beggars belief. Your journey to destroy an ancient evil involves completing a series of environmental puzzles at the behest of a whispering deity, giving you the chance to tame four divine beasts, all of which need ridding of a curse before they’ll yield their powers to you. The world also invites you to climb tall towers, from where you can spot landmarks to glide down to. Here, the pace slows to exasperating levels as your nimble hunter trots around awkwardly, solving a range of pedestrian challenges involving braziers, mirrors, pressure plates and stone glyphs in varying combinations. The Pathless never entirely trusts you to find your own way there, which is probably wise since the world design isn’t strong enough to naturally indulge your curiosity – and besides, many of these ruins look awfully similar. The best way to navigate, then, is to activate your hunter’s detective-vision equivalent, with the all-important light stones giving off a pulsing glow to guide you. With those in hand, it’s time to return to the towers, slotting them into place to activate an obelisk. Three of these and you’re ready to take on the beast. Repeat all this four times and the ultimate evil awaits.

This repetitive structure takes the shine off what should be the most exciting part of the game. With the beacons’ light unlocking the way, you descend into a storm cloud through a web of crackling electricity and into a world set ablaze by the creature’s elemental power. You give chase, firing at those talismans once more to gain on the beast, swerving patches of flame and incoming fireballs to get a bead on your quarry. And when your lock-on deigns to shift to the weak points on their legs and flanks rather than the nearest speedboosting target, you’ll eventually bring them down. Yet they’re still not done: you’re magically whisked away for a grandiose but anticlimactic arena battle, any tension punctured by the knowledge that you can’t die.

Annapurna’s first dud had to happen sometime, you might think. Yet The Pathless feels too good too often to be dismissed as such. Nevertheless, it’s a game that’s constantly, exasperatingly getting in its own way: its movement mechanics seem to belong to something entirely different, before being fudged into a sparse yet sprawling world that’s never quite open enough to satisfy. When its strangely old-fashioned puzzles hold you up, you’ll wonder why you’re bothering, and when you’re sprinting and sliding to Austin Wintory’s percussive score, you’ll be hounded by thoughts of what might have been. It’s in these moments that its title feels most apropos; it bespeaks a game that must surely have lost its way in the development woods and never truly found its way out.

ABOVE The puzzles aren’t terrible, just terribly familiar, often mistaking long-windedness for ingenuity. Firing arrows through a series of narrow holes, however, is curiously satisfying, even given the generous course correction on their flight.

RIGHT Sometimes you encounter a challenge that suggests the puzzle designers took the day off. One involves sending your eagle to three pressure plates, each one revealing a lore dump. Read all three and the light stone’s yours

BELOW Defeating one cursed beast reveals more talismans that give you a bigger burst of speed, while later on you negotiate a mountain by shooting at airborne tags that act as a powerful updraught

ABOVE Laura Bailey voices the hunter. The story takes itself so seriously that we welcome the light relief of a pop-up telling us we’ve gained a ‘super flap’ ability that “consumes a large number of flaps”