The Pathless opens with its protagonist arriving on a mysterious island, intending - as a narrator explains - to lift a curse that’s killed the numerous others who’ve set out to do the same. From there, The Pathless takes off with surprising speed, revealing a game that’s more about movement than exploration, putting it in close conversation with games like Journey or developer Giant Squid’s previous title, Abzu. Published by Annapurna Interactive, The Pathless is an odd blend of speedy gameplay, rote puzzles, and gorgeous sights and sounds that doesn’t always blend its disparate elements successfully, but hits more often than it misses.

In The Pathless, the player character is equipped with nothing more than a bow, which is used more for traversal than fighting off enemies. At its core, The Pathless is all about moving deftly around the environment. Floating talismans dot the game’s landscape, and shooting one with a bow will give the player a boost of speed and fill their stamina bar, letting them continue moving at high speed as long as they keep shooting talismans. Aside from providing an unconventional turbo boost, the bow is also used to solve puzzles and take down bosses. Early in the game, the player also gains an eagle companion (who they’re free to pet at any time, for anyone wondering), which becomes an essential part of navigating its vast environments by letting the player glide through the air.

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Zooming around The Pathless’ beautiful island setting and timing arrow shots to keep the stamina bar filled feels incredible, especially after the game doles out its first few upgrades, which let players sprint and glide longer. However, The Pathless isn’t just about taking a high-speed tour of its island. The goal is to lift a curse that’s afflicting both humans and gods, and to do that, players will need to cleanse the godly inhabitants of the game’s world. Doing that involves solving puzzles to break the seals on towers scattered throughout the island before defeating each god to break their curse. It’s in these puzzles and boss battles that The Pathless starts to lose its way.

The Pathless Review Slide

Aside from running and flying with reckless abandon, most of players’ time in The Pathless is spent solving puzzles. The main character has a helpful ability that highlights the items that need to be collected to break each god’s seals, making them easy to find. To actually claim them, though, the player will usually have to solve a short puzzle. While they can be fun to solve, there’s nothing particularly novel about them, and it quickly becomes apparent that there are only a few main types. Players should get used to using their eagle to move boxes onto switches and line up targets to shoot arrows through, because most of the dozens of puzzles they'll solve by the end follow these same basic patterns. Once the basic forms of puzzles become clear, solving them becomes less about figuring out the answer and more about searching the area for familiar items and putting them in the right place.

A similar issue emerges in boss fights. While the first boss fight in the game is an incredible rush, the rest are less of a thrill when they turn out to follow a very similar pattern. Each boss fight starts with a wild chase as the player pursues the boss through the forest, using talismans to keep up and dodging projectiles. It’s a lot of fun, but loses its luster with repetition. After catching up to the boss, an arena-style battle commences, with the player dodging attacks and waiting for a chance to strike back.

The Pathless Review Floating Island

There’s nothing about the puzzles or boss battles that feels outright bad; it’s just that repeating essentially the same steps over and over gets old quickly. Even more than that, the problem is that they don’t play to the strengths of The Pathless. Neither puzzles nor bosses really take advantage of the incredible feeling of speed that makes just exploring the island so satisfying.

Whether in a boss fight or out in the wild, one area where The Pathless does deliver consistently is in its score. The music by Journey composer Austin Wintory is somewhat sparse, but never fails to ramp up the game’s feeling of danger and adventure whenever it swells up. The Pathless may have a bit of an identity crisis, with its disconnected segments never really combining to their full potential, but its impressive presentation and exhilarating speed make it worth a try nonetheless.

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The Pathless will be available on PS4, PS5, and PC on November 12. Screen Rant was provided with a digital PS4 download code for the purpose of this review.