The Pathless Review (d3sirio)
Everything about this game feels good, and looks and sounds great.
Moving around the vast maps, beautiful and derelict and serene, quickly becomes second nature as you zip this way and that, blasting emblems with your bow to keep running and getting speed boosts. The world sounds raw and yet delicate, and the understated ambiance tracks give way to powerful drums when running through the fields or bombastic battle themes when dealing with major, spectacularly choreographed threats.
The ruins you'll visit, while they unfortunately look as if they were spread across the map by a designer and not really organically there for the most part, will still immerse you in a world that's old and abandoned but not quite dead yet. While the locales you'll visit will still mostly be forests and temples, there was enough variation in architecture and approach to remain fresh throughout.
The puzzles are simple but still fun to figure out. The most head-scratching you'll have will be caused by a button or door you didn't notice at first, but the solutions are still entertaining to figure out, and the musical stings and animations of everything will make sure you'll be hooked to every step of progress before long.
The story is significantly more explicit than it was in ABZU, at least as far as I remember, but it still doesn't get in the way of the gameplay and exploration if you're only here for the vibes. The broad strokes of the narration didn't feel particularly innovative, but the details and nuances of its protagonists, and their actions and interactions, were still able to strike a chord with me. The sparse voice acting — either a pseudo-language created for the game or a language I'm too ignorant to recognize and too lazy too look up — does a great job of bringing out the emotions in the script.
If I had to find a downside to this game, it would be that the areas generally look less interesting after they're liberated, but that won't even bother you unless you're aiming to collect everything in the game like I did.
All in all, you should really play this. Wonderful scenery and incredible music will accompany you on this grand adventure while telling a tale of divinity, of free will, of guidance, and lack thereof. The fact that it also feels great to play controller in hand makes it even better!