4/5 ★ – dylancaudill's review of The Pathless.

PLATFORM - PS5 LENGTH - 6h One of the things that a game can do right away to hook me is give to make movement interesting and fun. In The Pathless, navigating the world IS the game, and it does it well. Movement in The Pathless is quick, snappy, and overall a blast. Moving from one location in the world to the other by shooting arrows at "boosts" scattered across the world makes you feel like a total badass, and it makes the act of navigating to key locations fun on its own. It also helps that the world you're exploring is stunningly beautiful. When Breath of the Wild released, it was pretty much the antithesis of modern open world games. BotW did away with the endless checkboxes and instead made the world fun and worth exploring on its own, and it was only a matter of time until other games started taking that ideology and iterating on it. The Pathless feels like one of those games. Many of The Pathless' components feel like they can fit into a more traditional open world game, where you have a map and navigate to the puzzles, navigation challenges, and boss battles. Instead, The Pathless does away with the map entirely. The only guide you have is an Assassin's Creed style eagle vision which will highlight areas of interest you have a direct line of sight to. While exploring the world is the star of the show for me, the areas of interest are fun in their own right. Simple navigation challenges test your skills, and some of the puzzles are fairly clever. That said, none of the puzzles were very challenging, and the solution is typically quickly found. They're still fun, but its worth noting. The final component of the game comes in the form of boss battles. Like the puzzles, there really isn't much of a challenge here, but they make good use of the bow and platforming mechanics and are a nice break from the exploration. I haven't mentioned the story yet, and honestly there's a good reason for that. It's extremely light on story, and the story that's there is pretty simplistic. Stop me if you've heard this one: A Bad Guy has obtained great power and is trying to become a god in order to shape the world in his image. That's mostly all there is too it. There is some cool lore scattered throughout the world that adds nice flavor, but ultimately the story didn't do much for me. One last quibble I had with the game --- I really wish it made use of the DualSense. The movement and bow and arrow could have really been enhanced with the DualSense, but nothing is utilized besides some basic rumble. It doesn't take much away not having it, but it could have been a cool addition. The Pathless doesn't overstay its welcome, I wrapped it up at about 6 hours which felt like a pretty good length for it. It can be extended if you go for 100% completion, but I didn't feel compelled to do that here. I didn't hear much talk about The Pathless in 2020 since it came alongside new consoles and was overshadowed by bigger games. That said, it is probably the best game I've played on my PS5 yet, and it is definitely worth a look.