You use your bow to shoot totems that are absolutely everywhere, which allow you to run faster.

You have a vision pulse that shows where you need to go, marking key points in red, but beyond that, there’s no map, and you have to find anything of note yourself. The world and the manner in which you interact with it evoke similar feelings to that of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Shadow of the Colossus. The rest of the game is focused around myriad puzzles and archery at the most basic level. Even more interesting is the fact these boss fights are the only combat in the game. All four – technically five – sections of the game adhere to this formula, but it never gets stale. Barring one segment, the boss fights are exhilarating and interesting, particularly the first stage, which delivers an intense chase sequence through a fire-ravaged wooded area.

Upon locating them, you engage in multi-stage boss encounters that are all fantastic. By collecting these totems, you can then purify the towers which help to pinpoint the corrupted deity for you to cleanse. You have to find locations around different “plateaus” to unlock totems. Once the rules of the game start to coalesce, however, it becomes a wondrous, freeing experience. We found it pretty overwhelming at first, and honestly, we’d have welcomed a little more guidance in the prologue. An open world with virtually no handholding, the title drops you in and just lets you stumble your way into figuring everything out. Not to be outdone by your feathered friend, the gameplay exceeds expectations as well. It’s an aspect of the title we had no real expectations for, but it’s one of the standouts. The relationship only grows stronger as the game progresses and you help one another achieve more and more. And that’s when we decided our heart belonged to this eagle. The bond is established instantly, as you help the bird nurse a wound, brushing the “curse” – which looks akin to fire and soot – off of their wings shortly before he nuzzles you affectionately. Each location has a story tell, and should you want to find that story, all the pieces are there to do so.Not only does the eagle allow you to jump higher, fly further, and solve more complex puzzles, but the relationship between you and this bird evolves and grows as the game goes along. All the abandoned structures and monoliths combine intricate beauty and haunting disrepair to present one of the most “lived-in” empty worlds we’ve ever seen. The art direction in general is exquisite. The environments are littered with high contrast set-pieces, making many encounters - especially all of the aforementioned boss fights - visually impressive. This goes double for the use of colour, with the title making incredible use of the power of HDR. Every tree, every brick feels deliberately placed in the world, and the stylised look works splendidly here. Like ABZÛ before it, The Pathless is downright stunning. So much so that the boss fights could have consisted only of those moments and been great anyway.īut the real star of the game is the art. The “chase” sequences that open all of the boss fights, in particular, are exhilarating. While the fights are the only real moments with any kind of combat, all the systems you need are already core pieces of the game, just utilised differently. The game also does an exceptional job of integrating its boss fights into the experience.

The pathless ps5