For what felt like years I kept spotting The Way while browsing the Switch eShop sales and thinking of that stupid Knuckles meme, but the moment I decided to take a closer look it resembled something I thought I might find compelling: an Indie throwback to the Delphine adventure games of the early '90s, in particular Another World and Flashback. In fact, it has elements of both: Another World's hostile alien setting where seemingly every fauna and flora are deadly, and Flashback's gunplay and forcefield mechanics and some of its cyberpunk aesthetic. Seeing that it kept popping up on the eShop at 90% off, I figured it was worth the gamble.

Throwbacks tend to walk a fine line between nostalgic and archaic at the best of times, where developers are cautious about making them too modern (because that would defeat the point) while keeping in mind that several decades of game development has also included a significant amount of vital quality-of-life improvements. As such, many of the old annoyances from those inspirations can be inadvertently brought over to the new generation as well. With The Way, death is a constant companion between some very mean trial-and-error monster encounters, traps, sudden pitfalls, and other lethal mishaps that are often impossible to predict. The game respawns you a few seconds before meeting a grisly end so these constant game overs are never going to derail a playthrough, but many of these deaths feel... well, gratuitously cheap. It made sense for those full price Delphine games that would take an hour to complete if not for the obstacles it throws at your face at lightning speed, but feels less necessary for an Indie game where a short runtime is expected to come with the territory. Worse is that the game's controls frequently feel a bit stiff and slow to react; the latter can be considered a fair sacrifice for the game's luxurious character animations, but platforming in particular comes off as very inaccurate and awkward. It doesn't help that the game then accentuates this awkwardness with a lot of narrow platforming sections.

On the other hand the puzzle design is decent enough, with a mixture of simple instanced puzzles and some more demanding types based on pattern recognition and lateral thinking. The initial scenario where the protagonist has to sneak into his employers' hangar to steal a company ship requires a few adventure game puzzles mixed with stealth elements, the latter of which ceases to be an issue once the player has found themselves a gun. It's a lot of tense sneaking past security systems and using the available hints to figure out how and when to complete the stages of the ship preparation and lift-off process. That early mix of platforming, stealth, combat, and puzzle-solving establishes a rhythm for the rest of The Way to follow. Later, the player acquires three additional technological abilities (but loses the gun, sadly, since that would make everything too easy) and even if the game doesn't do enough with them, you can see an echo of Flashback's gadget-based ingenuity at work.

The Way can also be maddeningly inconsistent. You eventually unlock a teleporter device which first leaves an "imprint" behind that you then teleport to on a second click. If you leave an imprint on a moving platform that's, say, passing through some insta-kill lasers, it will let you safely teleport back onto the platform once it has passed through the danger zone. Later, there's another platform that can be activated remotely; leaving the imprint on top of it in one position and moving the platform like last time doesn't work however, as the imprint just hovers in mid-air where you left it (and is far enough from the ground to kill you instantly, to add injury to insult). Some puzzles clearly have a specific path in mind for the player to take, but it's frustrating when it takes steps to establish the rules - the teleporter, like the other two upgrades, has a specific "trial ground" level that teaches you all its applications - and then decides to break them. This serves to make this puzzle and a few others less satisfying to solve than they might've otherwise been.

Narratively, the game does some intriguing things with its approach to worldbuilding and narrowing in on the central quest of the protagonist, Tom. Having lost his wife to illness and remembering various passages on "the gift of eternal life" that he discovered on an alien planet as part of a crew of corporate-funded space explorers and scientists, Tom concocts a desperate scheme to dig up his deceased spouse and put her in stasis, steal a ship, take it back to the planet, and use all the information he has feverishly translated since to open the way to whatever Shangri-La full of advanced technology these aliens used to preserve themselves forever. The worldbuilding is incidental to this: the protagonist will comment on points of interest as he walks by them, but only in sparse single sentences like he's not really paying much attention if they're not immediately relevant to his mission. You also get a sense of what his life was like previously with little optional flashbacks, and documents suggest that the corporation he works for is only looking for alien civilizations that might serve to benefit mankind or their bottom line specifically. It's a sci-fi setting with an evident amount of potential depth, but the developers wisely pare it down to only hints and suggestions so as to accentuate the protagonist's single-minded journey to be the galaxy's Ultimate Wife Guy.

I'm not sure if The Way is an amazing game. It certainly has ideas and displays ambition in both its mechanics and narrative, it's evident from the way it looks and plays that the developers have a lot of affection for the games being homaged, the pixel graphics are sharp and remind me of that Sword and Sworcery game with its elongated character models and use of lighting effects, and while most of its puzzles were straightforward there were a few that had me scratching my melon for a few moments in a mostly positive way. Per contra, it really went ham on Another World's cheap deaths, its level design is predicated on a lot of maze-like levels with ladders visually melting into the background or annoyingly precise platforming in an engine that doesn't really support it, and while aspects of the presentation are strong the localization and voice acting can be a little off in parts though within acceptable levels for an international Indie game (Puzzling Dream is, I believe, a Polish studio). Trying to accurately aim the energy shield to deflect lasers and enemy bullets to where you wanted them to go was easily the worst aspect, though that might have been an issue with playing the game on the Switch with its analog stick rather than the mouse and keyboard. I left the game feeling mostly ambivalent about my time with it, though I will say that it was definitely worth the single dollar I paid.

Rating: 3 out of 5.