Created by indie team Giant Squid in California, this 2020 action-adventure game is a beauty to behold. It’s an open world type romp with a focus on Japanese historical lore and it’s available on all consoles and PC.

Giant Squid is responsible for the outstanding ABZÛ (2017), one of our favourite indie games. However, The Pathless (2020) is a bit of a mixed bag. Full of promise and great ideas, but there are some issues that make it a bit of an awkward romp. A shame, but there’s still stuff to enjoy here.

Trying to Make the Most of Romping in The Pathless

Now, we got this on Switch 2 as it was on a 75% sale. Otherwise, the asking price is £31.99 (about $35). That is a massive issue here as indie games are usually much cheaper than that.

We’re not quite sure why it has that inflated price, but it’s not a great look given the title is a bit of a disappointment (for us, anyway) after the wonders of ABZÛ.

Anyway, the core gameplay involves taking control of master archer The Hunter, who steps in to rid the land of a dark curse created by the Godslayer. The gameplay loop that follows takes a third-person perspective, allowing players to roam around very pretty landscapes whilst solving puzzles with your bow and arrow.

You also befriend an eagle early on and, with the bird, you form a puzzle-solving duo as you explore the landscape. The bird can pick things up and drop them, which becomes a core game mechanic where you have to trigger pads with items to unlock doors. You do this a lot. It gets old fast.

Here’s a gameplay intro from Giant Squid, crucially with a discussion point on The Pathless’ unusual control scheme (more on that in a moment).

The demonstration of the control scheme is all well and good, and full marks for trying something different, it’s just all far from being intuitive. You’re expected to pick it up and be away with it from the off, yet it takes considerable getting used to. It took us quite a while at adapt and even then we found it cumbersome.

You have to trigger these triangle things with your bow and arrow, but it’s not always clear where they are.

There’s no denying it’s a beautiful game world they’ve created. Lots of glorious blues, plus composer Austin Wintory’s score complements the game rather well. It’s regularly lovely.

The problem is, we just found the gameplay loop pretty damn dull. Gaming press reviews in 2020 were largely positive, we should add, ranging around the 7/10 mark. IGN gave it 8/10, although Edge magazine handed over 5/10.

We just found the repetitive nature of the world dull. You repeat the same thing over and over, which is collecting Lightstones, then lighting towers to progress, getting the eagle to dump weights on specific areas, and doing that repeatedly. There’s about six hours gameplay looping like that, which makes the £31.99 price tag even more confusing. It’s a big ask for what you get.

Whilst we’re being critical here, The Pathless is far from a bad game. We just found it monotonous and disappointing. Considering it’s from the ABZÛ team, we were hoping for so much more.

The devs have since launched Sword of the Sea (August 2025), which has excellent reviews and looks glorious. We’ll get to that eventually, but for The Pathless we can consider it a great idea lacking the ideal execution. Not a disaster, just a good game and one you may enjoy if you’re after something very casual.