During PlayStation's recent State of Play, game developer Giant Squid unveiled a six minute gameplay demo for their upcoming release The Pathless. This open world game emphasizes immersion over traditional game mechanics, and a recent post by the creative director displayed how much Giant Squid is trying to avoid breaking the fourth wall.
The Pathless was first announced at The Game Awards in 2018. In it, users will play as a character known simply as the Hunter, who, along with her eagle companion, will travel about a large island, searching for a way to rid the place of a curse that has corrupted the spirits that live there. The Pathless is currently scheduled to come out Holiday 2020.
In a recent post on the PlayStation Blog, Giant Squid Creative Director Matt Nava (who served as Art Director on the critically-acclaimed game Journey) emphasized how much they want players to truly lose themselves in the world of The Pathless. That meant finding ways to reinvent common gameplay mechanics that jar an immersive experience. There's no mini-map with quest markers, for instance. Instead, players will put on a spirit mask that creates a different view of the world around them, highlighting areas they've been to and showing pings for locations they haven't visited. Like in the real world, a higher elevation will allow players see further, encouraging them to explore vertically. Despite having a premise that involves the player character hunting dangerous spirit beasts, there's no way to die or trigger a Game Over screen. Instead, if they lose a fight with a spirit, they will take away crystals, depriving players of the currency needed to upgrade their character.
The Pathless Wants to be a Meditative Experience
The Pathless seems to be trying to evoke the same zen-like feel that comes with games like Journey, whose traversal puzzles had players floating about the sky. In The Pathless, players dash by shooting talismans, but hitting those talismans is a matter of timing, not aim, and Nava believes that travel in the game "can even become meditative when you get in the rhythm." If the developers succeed in providing an effortless feel to the Hunter's movement, it's easy to see how players could lose themselves for hours in The Pathless, choosing a destination in the distance and dashing, leaping and flying to that location. This could be especially true on the PlayStation 5, where Giant Squid has promised there will be no loading screens to interrupt game flow.
The commitment to immersive gameplay means that The Pathless is an open-world game with no fast-travel, meaning a lot is riding on making the traversal mechanics fun and engaging. If dashing about the island becomes too much of a chore, it could lose a player's interest quickly. It also remains to be seen how these more "meditative" elements will tonally work with a game that will still have some level of boss fights. Regardless, with games such as Journey and Abzu on the resumes of the game developers, The Pathless promises at the very least to be an interesting experiment.
Source: PlayStation
The Pathless will be available Holiday 2020 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, and iOS.