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. Either way, there’s only one way to know for sure! And that is you go there yourself and find out. It could be the next token you need to free a light tower. There is an ability in which you can sense where something of interest is, but it doesn’t communicate what exactly that is. There lies the strength of the game, and what makes it a strangely more gratifying experience than something like a Rockstar game. There are goals and objectives to accomplish, but it’s not rocket science to figure that all out. There really isn’t a “next destination” either. The game itself is “pathless.” There are no roads or trails to not-so-subtly guide you to your next destination. Quite literally, it’s about navigating the world yourself. 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). The end result is a game that treats the player as a vaguely intelligent being capable of figuring things out on their own. Every once in a while, they inform you that you’ve received a power up, but that’s it. They don’t even put a map on your screen. No warnings that you can’t reach such and such place yet. In The Pathless, players are dropped into this open map and given a brief tutorial explaining movement. They primarily accomplish this by embracing the original Zelda philosophy: exploration. Yet The Pathless manages to do more in a smaller, but more open world than most of the big studios. It’s easy to feel fatigued with the structure, especially given how many developers reduce their worlds to just a big errand board. 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.
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