Pathways

4 Experimental Gem that's Surprisingly Moving
Pathways is an interesting but worthy game, and this one’s all about (obviously) what pathways you take throughout the game. It all starts off straightforward enough – you’ll explore the little town outside of your home by moving right and then taking paths up or down. The first most interesting thing you’ll note is that you cannot ever walk backwards, and it even comes up a couple of times (for instance when you face a dragon) where someone dares you to run away. But there’s no running away in this game – just pressing ever on, which is quite an interesting concept as to how it plays out.

As you venture out, you’ll encounter a variety of different scenarios (monster-slaying, infidelity, the trenches of war etc) but as you start to finish out each pathway, they’ll all start to build upon each other in interesting ways. After each one is completed, the screen goes dark and returns you to your home (rather like Every Day The Same Dream) where your wife says she misses you when you go out. So there’s a strong sense both of repetition as well as exploration and adventure at the same time.

But as you play, you’ll feel some sort of mysterious happenings going on around you. Likely, however, you’ll just have a sense of mystery without any real concrete surprise, other than, perhaps, the daily encounters with the strange woman outside of your door. When you start to finally complete all of the pathways available, something strange happens, and when it does it feels like you’ve entered a dream. The repetition stops, and pure search begins, and as all searches go there’s a great sense of loss that hovers through the entire experience.

To sum up, Pathways is another experimental game that excels at its vision. And thankfully, it fulfills it through well paced, mysterious, and sometimes quite sad repetition followed by event explosion. It’s a solid game that packs in way more than you’ll expect from the first minute of play. And don’t forget. What’s done is done – you can never walk backwards.