The Pathless: Light or Not?

BENGALURU : I get asked quite frequently for suggestions to play “Light games”. What is a light game? If light is correlated to lesser focus on combat, then The Pathless is a light game. But in the place of hack and slash action, it works in focused movements — flights, jumps, and archery. It combines the game dance with puzzles. Does that make it less straightforward than an unprepared dash and attack? The Pathless could be a light game.

That is, if light refers to a story that isn’t filled with dialogues and a universe that isn’t packed with too many details. Yes, the archer and the falcon don’t talk to each other. But they communicate seamlessly, and somehow convey their struggles to you as well. Archer glides through grass, and suddenly, without warning — jumps — but falcon carries them without a moments delay, allowing them to soar across a chasm separating two lands. Archer feels light. Player feels light. The Pathless is probably a light game.

If ‘light’ means easy — then I’m unsure. The game doesn’t give us the conventional main mission goals. There isn’t a map to guide us through the massive open lands of wherever this game is set. You feel lost, but comfortably lost. Like a toddler, curious about the world, and content with digging around dirt.

You are at peace, shooting random arrows and gliding across the lands in The Pathless without a goal in sight. In the process of exploring, you could just happen across the main mission, finish it, and go back to exploring. Gliding and shooting, as if all you were meant to do in this game was to shoot the arrows at the red diamonds, that sound like Deepavali whistle rockets.

Perhaps I should take the word ‘light’ literally. In that case, if The Pathless wasn’t a light game, then it wouldn’t have been released across consoles of different generations at the same time. Available for the PS5 and the iOS (and everything in between)? Graphics requirements and storage space are as minimal as decent games go for these days.

Anusha Ganapathi
(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)