The Pathless

The Pathless feels like a statement. Coming from developer Giant Squid, the studio behind the serene underwater ballet of ABZÛ, this is no surprise. The team has a clear pedigree in crafting experiences that prioritize atmosphere and elegant interaction over brute force. Yet, where ABZÛ was a gentle, contemplative dive, The Pathless is a frantic, soaring sprint. It enters a crowded open-world market not by adding more, but by stripping almost everything away. There is no mini-map, no complex inventory, no skill trees, and combat, in the traditional sense, is virtually non-existent.

Instead, the game offers a simple, powerful proposition: an archer, an eagle, and a vast, corrupted island. The goal is to cleanse the land by reigniting ancient obelisks, which in turn allows the player to confront the colossal cursed spirits causing the decay. The entire structure is built around a striking traversal system. You don’t just run; you flow. By shooting floating talismans scattered across the landscape, you gain bursts of speed, creating a rhythmic loop of shooting and dashing that turns navigation into its own reward. This is a game built for the player who finds more joy in the journey than the destination—one who, after long stretches in games like Assassin’s Creed, has grown weary of icons and checklists. Giant Squid bets that the satisfaction of chaining together boosts, gliding with your eagle, and solving environmental puzzles is enough to carry an entire adventure. It’s a bold, minimalist gambit that positions The Pathless as the antithesis of the genre’s maximalist trends.

• Kinetic Traversal: The core of the game is a momentum-based system where shooting scattered talismans with a bow grants a burst of speed. Chaining these shots allows for near-constant, high-speed movement across the open world.
• Eagle Companion: An eagle follows the player, enabling gliding, providing extra flaps to gain altitude, and assisting in environmental puzzles by moving weights or activating switches.
• Spirit Boss Encounters: Progress is gated by multi-stage boss fights that begin as dramatic, high-speed chases and culminate in arena-style battles that test the player’s archery and timing.

The Gameplay Loop

At its best, The Pathless is less a game you play and more a rhythm you enter. The “dash-and-shoot” mechanic is intoxicating by design. Your stamina bar for sprinting is also your “combo” meter for shooting talismans. Hitting one fills the meter, letting you sprint longer or chain another shot. It creates a hypnotic, self-sustaining loop of action: sprint, jump, glide, aim, shoot, land, and repeat. There is no auto-run; the player is an active participant in every moment of traversal. The world, sparse and open, is designed as a playground for this system. Forests, plains, and crumbling ruins are laid out to reward fast, flowing movement through them. Early on, the design feels genuinely fresh.

However, the loop’s brilliance is also its limitation. The primary activity between traversal and boss fights involves solving environmental puzzles to collect “Lightstones.” These puzzles, while occasionally clever, fall into a limited set of archetypes: light braziers in the correct order, use your eagle to move weights onto pressure plates, shoot arrows through hoops. While the world’s geography changes, the fundamental challenges do not. As GamesRadar’s review noted, a sense of repetition begins to creep in. The game doesn’t evolve its core ideas so much as it asks you to repeat them in a new location. The feeling of movement remains, but the intellectual engagement wanes.

World and Discovery

The choice to omit a traditional map is bold and, for the most part, successful. Navigation is handled by “Spirit Vision,” a pulse that highlights points of interest in red. This encourages the player to read the landscape, to climb to high places and survey their surroundings, fostering a more organic sense of discovery. The island is beautiful, rendered in a striking style of bold, primary colors and cel-shaded simplicity. Yet, for all its beauty, it can feel strangely empty. It is a world built as a racetrack first and a place second. The narrative, delivered through interactions with your eagle and lore found on dead explorers, is minimalist and evocative but lacks a strong pull. The focus is so squarely on movement that the world itself can feel like an elegant but ultimately hollow backdrop.

Visually, The Pathless is a strong showing of art direction. It rejects photorealism for a stark, illustrative style that feels like a graphic novel sprung to life. The corrupted spirits are huge infernos of red and black, magnificent and terrifying. The animation of the Hunter and her eagle is fluid and expressive, selling the fantasy of a master archer in perfect sync with her companion. Speed is the heart of the design, and the art style is built to read clearly at a sprint — bold shapes and strong color contrast that keep the high-speed traversal legible. The aesthetic is strong enough to paper over the relative simplicity of the world’s geometry.

How you experience this kinetic journey depends heavily on your hardware.

• Steam (PC): This is the definitive version on paper. A controller is the natural fit, mapping the rhythmic shooting and dashing to triggers and buttons in a way that should become second nature. A 3D game of this stylistic simplicity is light on hardware, and PC is where the visual fidelity has the most room to shine.
• Nintendo Switch: A portable way to play, but with compromise. A game built around sustained high-speed movement is demanding for the Switch’s hardware, and the resolution takes a hit as a result, pointing toward a softer image, especially in handheld mode. The core mechanics remain intact, but the visual splendor that is so integral to the game’s appeal is diminished.
• iOS: Playing on an iPhone or iPad is a curious novelty. The controls are intelligently simplified, with aiming handled automatically by tapping and holding to draw the bow. It’s a clever adaptation, but the tactile feedback of a controller is lost. It’s an impressive technical feat but reads as a lesser version of the core experience.

The Pathless is an exercise in focused design. It stakes its entire identity on a single, strong idea—the hypnotic rhythm of its movement—and for the most part, the bet pays off. It is a beautiful and often exhilarating adventure that offers a welcome antidote to the feature-creep of its open-world peers. But its puzzle mechanics and world-building don’t reach the same heights as its traversal, and the repetition that sets in keeps it from greatness. We recommend it to players hungry for exactly what it does best: the simple, unadulterated joy of flowing through a graceful world.