The Pathless

A masked archer known only as the Hunter arrives on a cursed island to free it from a corrupting darkness, bonding with a giant eagle and hunting down the god-beasts responsible for the island's suffering. The Pathless comes from Giant Squid, the small studio behind the acclaimed ABZÛ, and reviewers immediately recognize the lineage: gorgeous, atmospheric presentation wrapped around a central mechanical idea the studio clearly wants players to feel in their hands rather than just watch unfold.

A movement system reviewers genuinely love

The dominant, most consistent praise in this review sample concerns traversal specifically. Building speed by chaining precisely-timed bow shots into sprints, then gliding across the landscape with an eagle companion, draws repeated comparisons to the best moments of Journey and ABZÛ, with reviewers crediting the system as genuinely satisfying flow-state gameplay rather than a simple fast-travel gimmick dressed up in fancy animation. The original soundtrack earns its own broad, enthusiastic praise as a highlight worthy of the developer's earlier acclaimed work, and the precision-archery mechanic used for both puzzle-solving and combat draws specific credit for feeling meaningfully distinct from typical open-world hunting or combat systems. Several reviewers also report the game runs well across a range of hardware, including specific, detailed accounts of flawless performance under Linux compatibility layers using a controller and keyboard together. More than one reviewer draws a direct comparison to the eagle-riding and gliding sections of Shadow of the Colossus, treating the sense of momentum and scale The Pathless achieves at full speed as a genuine successor to that lineage of movement-focused design rather than a shallow imitation of better-known games.

A puzzle and content complaint that recurs with real specificity

What holds this review back from scoring higher is a substantial, detailed complaint about everything built around that celebrated movement system. Multiple reviewers describe the actual puzzle content, largely built around lighting torches and activating switches across several zones, as simple and repetitive, with more than one reviewer directly comparing it unfavorably to the tutorial dungeon of a typical 3D Zelda game rather than crediting it as a meaningful test of the game's own mechanics. A related complaint concerns the open world itself: several reviewers argue the landscape feels barren and artificial outside its clearly marked points of interest, undercutting the game's own advertised sense of exploration and discovery since genuine off-the-path wandering rarely turns up anything meaningful.

A genuine split over the game's boss fights

Unusually for this review sample, reviewers are specifically and directly divided on one particular element: the boss encounters. A real share credits them as cinematic, well-staged spectacles that stand out as highlights even against an otherwise more repetitive middle stretch. An equally detailed and equally sized share of reviewers argues the opposite, describing the same encounters as formulaic and clichéd, following a predictable pattern that doesn't meaningfully evolve across the game's several boss fights. That's a genuine, substantive disagreement rather than a one-sided complaint, and it's worth flagging directly since it means expectations for this specific element should be calibrated with real uncertainty rather than confidence in either direction.

Length and value complaints worth naming directly

Beyond the content-design debate, several reviewers report the game is relatively short for its asking price, with multiple detailed accounts of reaching full completion, including all achievements, in roughly 10 to 12 hours. That's not an unusual length for the genre, but combined with the repetition complaints above, it reinforces a specific value argument several reviewers make explicitly: that the game's better moments would have landed harder in a tighter, more concentrated experience rather than one stretched across three broadly similar zones. A handful of reviewers push this argument further, specifically recommending the developer's earlier and shorter ABZÛ as a better first purchase for anyone deciding between the two studio efforts on a tighter budget, arguing that game's more compact runtime works in its favor precisely where The Pathless's greater length starts to work against it.

What the achievement data shows about completion in practice

Global achievement data is broadly consistent with a shorter game that a meaningful share of players do finish. Early achievements clear a healthy majority, generally in the 40 to 70% range, falling to under 6% for the hardest completionist goals — a gentler overall decline than many longer, more content-dense games in this lane, supporting reviewers' accounts of a compact experience rather than one so long that fatigue alone explains the drop-off.

A resentment toward the game's original exclusivity that lingers in the review sample

One more, smaller thread worth naming directly: several reviewers explicitly reference lingering frustration over the game's original year-long Epic Games Store exclusivity window on PC before it reached Steam, with at least one detailed review opening with pointed criticism of that arrangement before turning to the game itself. That frustration doesn't affect the score of the game as reviewed here, but it's a genuine, recurring sentiment in the review sample worth acknowledging, since it shapes the tone of a meaningful number of reviews independent of their actual opinion of the finished product once purchased.

Verdict

The Pathless succeeds unambiguously at the one thing it clearly prioritized: a genuinely satisfying, flow-focused movement system wrapped in gorgeous art direction and an excellent soundtrack, worthy comparisons to the developer's earlier acclaimed work. It settles at a middling score here because the content built around that system draws real, detailed and repeated criticism, puzzles many reviewers find simple and repetitive, an open world several describe as barren outside its obvious points of interest, and boss fights that genuinely split opinion rather than uniting it. Worth experiencing for the traversal and presentation alone, ideally on a sale given its relatively short length, but go in with tempered expectations for how much the puzzle and boss content will test the movement system that makes the game worth playing in the first place.