The Pathless asks you to shoot an arrow at nothing and trust that it matters. That is the whole bet of Giant Squid’s 2020 action-adventure, and it pays off more often than it stumbles. You play the Hunter, a master archer who sails to a cursed island at the end of the sea to break a blight spreading across the world. There is no mini-map. There are no objective markers in the traditional sense. You run, you fire at talismans scattered through the world, and your dash meter fills, and you keep moving.
The Pathless came out in November 2020 for iOS and macOS through Apple Arcade, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Windows. It later landed on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S in February 2023. It holds a critic aggregate of 8.1/10 across nine outlets, and that number is about right.
Trailer, via Annapurna Interactive.
The Hunter and the Eagle
The Hunter is a nameless figure. She arrives on the island, claims a Spirit Mask that reveals hidden secrets, and meets the creator spirit, Eagle Mother, who is dying from the same corruption eating the world. Behind the blight stands the Godslayer, a powerful figure who cursed the ancient god-spirits known as the Tall Ones and now wants to reshape the world to his own will.
Laura Bailey voices the Hunter. Troy Baker voices the Godslayer. That is the whole cast of consequence, and the game keeps dialogue minimal on purpose. The story arrives through environmental storytelling and the remnants of a fallen civilisation, not cutscenes.
You learn about the Pathfinder, a man who believed the world the Tall Ones made was chaos, who wanted to find the “One True Path” so everyone would have a clear road to salvation. His followers committed terrible acts in their zealotry. When the Pathfinder finally collected the Mask of Ancients and put it on, he saw the world as the Tall Ones see it and understood there was no path at all. The world was pathless.
That is the game’s thesis, and it earns it by making you walk the thing rather than listen to it.
Shooting Talismans to Move
The core loop is archery as locomotion. You fire arrows at talismans dotted across forests, plains and ruins. Each hit fills the Hunter’s dash meter, which lets her bound acrobatically through the world at speed. It is a strange idea on paper — shooting targets to run faster — and it works because the targets are everywhere and the rhythm never breaks.
The eagle carries the Hunter in flight. It loses altitude while carrying her and gains it back by flapping. You are always trading height for distance and reading the terrain for the next place to land. The game runs from a third-person perspective and consists largely of puzzles that collect lightstones to activate obelisks.
Those puzzles take several shapes:
- Lighting fires
- Trick arrow shots using mirrors and targets
- Simon Says games with large bells
- Platforming to difficult locations
- Deactivating statues of the Godslayer
The eagle assists by moving targets, mirrors and weights to change the environment. Some puzzles hand out crystals that upgrade the eagle’s abilities, and you find those crystals scattered randomly across the world too. You lose the crystals you are carrying if the cursed spirits catch you, which gives the stealth sections real weight.
The Spirits That Hunt You
Invincible cursed spirits roam the island. They try to separate the Hunter from her eagle, and you avoid them through stealth rather than combat. You cannot kill them at first. You return light to the obelisks scattered through the world, which weakens the spirits and finally lets you defeat them. The boss encounters blend chases, aerial movement and archery.
This is the part of The Pathless that most games get wrong, and Giant Squid gets it right. The spirits are not a combat system bolted on. They are a pressure system. They push you to move, and movement is the thing the game does best.
The four corrupted spirits are the structure. The Hunter cleanses the first three — Cernos, the Elk Spirit; Sauro, the Lizard Spirit; and Nimue, the Snake Spirit — across the campaign. Each region belongs to one of them, and each ends in a confrontation that tests everything the traversal has taught you.
A Map You Have to Feel
There is no mini-map. To find anything of interest, you use Spirit Vision. That single decision changes how the whole game sits in your hands. You are not following a waypoint. You are reading a landscape and building a mental map, and the game trusts you to do it.
That trust is the best thing about The Pathless. It respects your attention. When you spot a ruin on a ridge and decide to go there, that decision is yours, not a marker’s. The island is dense forest, open plain and broken architecture, and it holds together because the art design gives every region a distinct silhouette. The soundtrack carries the same weight, and it is one of the reasons the game lands as well as it does.
The cost is repetition. The open world follows a formula — find the lightstones, solve the puzzles, activate the obelisk, weaken the spirit, move on — and by the fourth region you have seen the shape of it. Some critics argued the structure grew repetitive, and that complaint is fair. The puzzles vary in type but not much in difficulty, and the back half leans on the same tricks the front half taught you.
Where The Pathless Slips
The game is at its weakest when it asks you to slow down. The Simon Says bell puzzles are the clearest example. They break the momentum that everything else in The Pathless builds, and they arrive often enough to matter. The stealth sections carry the same risk. Avoiding the cursed spirits is tense the first time and routine by the fifth.
None of this sinks the game. It just means the parts that drag are the parts that abandon its own best idea. When the game lets you run and shoot and fly, it is close to untouchable. When it makes you stand still and remember a sequence, it is ordinary.
The narrative has a similar unevenness. The Pathfinder’s story is the emotional core, and it is told almost entirely through the ruins you find and the remnants you piece together. That is a bold choice, and it mostly works, but it asks a lot of a player who is moving at speed. The Godslayer is a real presence, and Baker gives him weight, but the game rations his appearances.
The Boss Fights and the Four Regions
Each of the four regions ends in a boss encounter, and these are the moments where The Pathless stops being a game about movement and becomes a game about composure. You are chasing a corrupted spirit through the air, firing arrows while the eagle keeps you aloft, blending chases, aerial movement and archery.
The encounters work because they never ask you to learn a new skill. They ask you to use the skills you already have under pressure. That is a harder thing to design than a new mechanic, and it is the reason the back half of The Pathless holds up better than its puzzle structure suggests.
Why the Score Holds
An 8.1/10 is a statement that a game is very good and not quite great, and that is where The Pathless sits. Its traversal is the best argument for archery-as-movement that any game has made. Its refusal to use objective markers is not a gimmick. It is a design position, and the game commits to it fully.
What holds it back is repetition and a handful of puzzle types that fight the game’s own rhythm. The Pathless knows what it is good at, and it does that thing with confidence for most of its run.
The eagle is the heart of it. The bond between the Hunter and the bird is the thing the game is actually about, and it earns that bond through play rather than dialogue. You feel it when the eagle carries you across a gap and loses altitude under your weight. You feel it when the spirits try to tear the two of you apart. That is craft.
The Pathless is worth your time on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PC, iOS or anywhere else it has landed. It is a game about finding your own way across a broken world, and it means it.
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