The latter is safest but the former is faster but requires precise timing or the shot is missed, and it’s the one aspect that made me wish I was playing with a DualSense controller and its adaptive triggers. Luckily, there’s no aiming needed – holding the right trigger (or equivalent) locks onto the nearest talisman and fills a meter that registers a successful shot either at its centrepoint or at the end. It’s a unique mechanic that I’ll admit took me a minute to get used to, but goes a long way to making the otherwise-banal task of traversing the landscape a game all its own. Part of it comes from the Hunter’s moveset a ballet of dashes and jumps fuelled by a bar that fills by shooting talismans dotted around the landscape with their bow. There’s a beautiful rhythm to both its gameplay and the structure of its world and narrative that is so entrancing and so compelling that it’s hard not to just fall into it. There are a couple of reasons why The Pathless is so successful as a video game, but the biggest thing is that it very quickly stops feeling like one. Over the course of the five-to-six hours it takes to tread the critical path (you could easily double that by working towards uncovering its deepest secrets), you’ll see dense woods, open plains and snowy tundras and all manner of enormous, imposing gods to cleanse, and every moment of it is glorious. Doing so requires collecting Lightstones to activate special towers within each area to bring the corrupted Tall Ones down long enough to challenge them and purify them. After encountering one of these gods the Hunter, as they’re known, learns they must cleanse each of the land’s realms of evil and gain the power to ascend to the floating isle and help them reclaim the world. In a world plunged into darkness, a mysterious hero journeys to a floating isle to confront an evil being called The Godslayer who has corrupted the Tall Ones, the land’s godly protectors. And not all confined to the game itself, either. Giant Squid’s new exploratory indie adventure gave me the first Australia’s Got Talent guy moments I’ve had playing a video game in a while. Granted, I adored Abzû enough that I should have seen it coming but this is something far more significant than just a worthy follow-up. Out of everything about to launch in this next, very intense week of gaming, The Pathless may well be the biggest surprise for me.
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