The Pathless is visually and audibly stunning, and has a unique and fun movement system, but that's about it. In my opinion this could have been a two hour game, not seven, and communicated all it had to share in that time. I think it's very clear this game took inspiration from LoZ: Breath of the Wild. A big, open map largely empty but with pockets of puzzles - some obvious,

The Pathless is visually and audibly stunning, and has a unique and fun movement system, but that's about it. In my opinion this could have been a two hour game, not seven, and communicated all it had to share in that time. I think it's very clear this game took inspiration from LoZ: Breath of the Wild. A big, open map largely empty but with pockets of puzzles - some obvious, others hidden - where both required and optional collectibles are obtained. Much of the smaller puzzles are very reminiscent of "Korok Seeds", in that there's a small movement minigame to beat, or a thing-out-of-place to fix, resulting in a small reward. The similarities between the four divine beasts in The Pathless and the four Divine Beasts in BotW are also striking: they roam the map, invincible, until you complete the quest to make them vulnerable. There is a sequence by which you 'wrangle' the beast, followed by a boss fight. Similarly also as BotW, your exploration of the map is focused on ascending a dozen or so large towers. Unlike BotW though, there is no depth to The Pathless' world. You have no health, even during boss fights; you gain no new abilities, all of your powerups only affect world-exploration speed and all of them minorly at best. There are only two collectibles - required advance-the-plot macguffins with no alternative value, and extra jumps, which, while they make the world slightly more convenient to explore... that's about it. They don't expand your movement set, extra jumps are off-limits during boss fights, and you get them anyway when you defeat the required bosses. I realize it is not fair to compare BotW and The Pathless directly, as they're games of different scale, but at the price point for The Pathless, I don't think it's wholly unfair either. The puzzles are incredibly linear and all blend together once you learn the small handful of puzzle mechanics. The mechanics also offer no room for ingenuity - while they appear to be physics-based on the surface, they are in fact, all completely scripted, and the game will not allow you get a three-ringer-shot except in the one way it intends you to do so, from the precise area it expects you to shoot from. Several puzzles frustrated me to no end for a while because, while I had the correct solution, it didn't take because I was standing two feet too far from the target I was shooting (despite having the correction configuration of puzzle elements and shooting from the correct angle). The roaming beasts also do not meld well with the puzzles. Little is more frustrating in this game than seeing a puzzle in the distance, spending two minutes traveling towards it, only to watch the hellfire sphere teleport in front of you and completely block access to the puzzle, forcing you to detour and do something else for a few minutes, or enter the sphere and complete an extremely slow, boring sneak-sequence to force the sphere to relocate. Some puzzle areas appear to be shielded from the beasts at least, but far from all of them. Unlike the towers in BotW, there is no fast-travel mechanic in The Pathless, so detouring back to the other side of the map feels incredibly tiresome. The chase scenes for each boss are fun because they involve the unique movement system, but they are all the same; the bosses are far worse, as they are repetitive and stakeless. The player has no health, so there is no challenge, no penalty for taking a hit other than stun, and the hit boxes, particularly during certain scripted sequences, are not very precise. Aiming is automatic, where you position your cursor on the screen is meaningless. More importantly, all five bosses are more or less the same, with only slightly different attack patterns. Again, because your only abilities during the 'fight' part are slow movement, auto-aim shooting, and jumping, they are functionally identical. Your extra jumps - the singular optional collectible in the entire game - can't even be used during any of the boss fights! This includes the final new ability you receive, the super-jump, which is just... ugh. The lore is similar - I stopped reading the thoughts of the many, many corpses on the island once the main plot became clear, which was about an hour or two in. It's possible and maybe probable I missed some interesting nuggets of information, but I couldn't be bothered after so many of them said the same things - praises for their local ***, praises for the GodSlayer, or lamentations of their losses. TL;DR: Visually beautiful game, fun movement system with potential, but the content is repetitive and runs out after an hour or two. Puzzles are very linear and restrictive, bosses are not very engaging outside of their chase scenes. If you come seeking a beautiful visual story, you may be somewhat satisfied; if you come seeking a challenge in gameplay, you will not.