This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

What a difference a week makes.. I missed a week, and while I know no one noticed, it was simply because I didn’t have any completed games to talk about. I was disappointed, but it is what it is, and it would have been unrealistic to think that I was going to make it 52 weeks beating a game every week with my system. Well not only do we have a game to talk about this week, but I have a little bit of a backlog of games I can talk about for at least the next month. Does any of this mean anything to you, the reader? No, of course not, but I like to share my trials and tribulations with you so you know that I am earnest in my pursuit to play through every video game in the known universe.

Today we are talking about a game I was very excited to play after seeing it for the first time (ages ago) on GiantBomb. We are talking about the game “Pathway,” a procedurally generated, turn-based simulation, rogue-lite which if you have read some of my series to this point, you will realize that this is right up my alley. If you haven’t seen the quick-look, no worries I got you covered. Pathway is built like an Indiana Jones side adventure. Each scenario has a different “story,” but in reality you are hunting down treasures/artifacts or looking to disrupt plans by the Nazis or the occult. Very Indiana Jones! In fact the narrator seems to be budget Harrison Ford, the locals are Africa or the Middle East, lots of sand and dunes. The only thing missing is the man with the whip himself.

The game is divided into 5 different scenarios, and each scenario has to be completed before the next one is unlocked. At the start of each scenario you are given maybe one paragraph description about what you are hoping to accomplish, but the stories are very light in this game. In the first scenario you are basically looking to save the “Marcus” equivalent from Indiana Jones, at least that is how I saw it. He was captured by the Nazis, and is going to be killed unless you can intervene in time. You are then whisked away to the setup screen which is one of the spots I think this game shines. Not necessarily just the screen, but what it implies.

There are 16 characters total, and while you won’t start off with all 16 (have to unlock about 8 of them), each character has a range of different traits to measure before deciding to pick them for your squad. Not only does each character have different stats (boring) which dictate how much health they have, how far they can move on their turn, how accurate they are, etc., but they can also equip different weapons and abilities that are important to weigh when picking a team of 3. So, perhaps you want to take someone who uses assault rifles as their main weapon, you want someone who can heal mid battle, and you want someone who won’t use up any ammo on the expedition, great, but that is really only half the strategy. Each character has character traits that also will impact some of the random events that come up during a scenario. I will speak to those random events later, but these character traits are something else you want to throw into the mix to make sure you have a good mix of characters. You might not want to take two characters who have the same character trait of “Sixth Sense,” on an expedition because its redundant and a waste of a trait. This is also compounded by the fact that gear and levels that you may earn on previous expeditions carry over. Do you want to try and level up that new character you unlocked, or take the Sniper you used last time, who already has gained a level and is rocking a better rifle?

If that isn’t a lot to think about, once the scenario officially starts you have 3 extra things to worry about running out during your trip. You are given a set amount of ammo, gas, and supplies at the start of the scenario. These items do tick down with each use, and while they are also common finds while travelling, it is possible to run out and find yourself in quite a predicament if you aren’t careful. Ammo doesn’t need any explanation, but every bullet you fire can have a little more weight to it depending on how much ammo you are sitting on. While I never ran out of ammo, I did fall into the low 30s at one point during a scenario and had to take a little bit better care as to whether or not I should be engaging enemies at all, and if I was in an engagement if I could get close enough to use knives instead of a bullet. Supplies are a catch all for anything “extra.” Using a med-kit consumes 1 supply, fixing up your armor uses 1 supply, throwing a grenade uses 1 supply. Supplies are probably the items you will run out of the most often, because not only are they so universal, but you usually only start with 5-6 a scenario. If you have a rough fight, its not hard to see you using 3 supplies just to heal each character once, and if you mix that with using grenades in the fight or wanting to repair armor, and 5 supplies could be used very quickly. Finally we come to gas. Gas again does not require much discussion, but each location you visit will burn one gas, and should you run out of gas during a scenario your characters will take damage travelling from one location to another. In the earlier scenarios, you should have enough gas to get from the start to the finish without ever needing to find or buy gas midway, but some scenarios are multiple screens long, and if you aren’t careful you can run out and then die very quickly trying to march to the next trader.

Phew, we finally finished talking about all the prep work to just get a scenario going. It sounds like a lot to start, but it actually works together pretty well, and outside your first expedition you aren’t spending hours mulling over the setup screen. Now we can talk about what this game actually is. In each scenario you are essentially shown a game board that has spots along a road from the start to the finish. Each of these circles is a spot that your car will stop as you move forward and if no icon is above that circle, a random event will play. These can vary quite a bit, but usually fall into the following categories; Nothing happens, trader, potential event, combat. For the events where nothing happens, you are given some flavor text, but then you can just move on to the next spot. At trading posts, you are given the option of selling any equipment or items you might not want, and then buying either gear (weapons, armors, etc) or buying “necessities” (Gas, ammo, supplies). Some traders have a mix of goods, and some will only be selling one thing, like gas or ammo. Event spots and battles are the locations that you were agonizing about who to bring on the adventure. Each of these have flavor text, but will sometimes have options that you can participate in based on if any of your characters has a set trait. Perhaps you came across a man who doesn’t speak your language, well if you brought the person with the “ancient language” perk, they can talk to that man and either be gifted free equipment, or they might be told about an ambush up ahead, but if no one possess that perk, then you just leave and get no benefit. Other events might be bigger in nature, where having a perk might make a battle easier by removing a handful of soldiers before the battle begins, or allowing you to skip the battle completely but still the rewards. There is no way to prepare for these events, and you are going to come across more that you can’t do in a given scenario then ones you can actually do, but on the few occasions where you have a character who can use a perk it is almost 99% of the time beneficial to actually use it. The only reason I don’t say 100% is because I haven’t done every event, but out of all the events I have stumbled across that I could use a perk on, it was always a more favorable outcome then opting to use the other option.

Of course, what you will be doing the most of during any scenario is fighting. When you do get into battle you will be whisked away to an overhead view of a combat map where you need to place your characters in starting points and then start taking turns. Who goes first, is dependent on the flavor text prior to the battle (do you surprise the enemy, or do they surprise you), but then the game switches to your turn-based strategy game that I love so much. Each character is given two actions per turn and it is your standard stuff. You can move, attack, reload, use an ability/item, etc. Some abilities you might be used to, not everyone has access to. For instance snipers can do overwatch, and some people can hunker down, but it isn’t something universal for every character. There are different levels of cover, not quite half and full cover, but pretty close and like every other game of this ilk, it is in your best interest to make sure your characters don’t get stranded out of cover. What I think this game does pretty well, is that while looking to move around the map, you can push a button at any time to see whether or not you character would be able to attack an enemy from that new location, and what the percentage would be to hit an enemy as well. This allows you to plan accordingly so you aren’t trading one cover for another, just to shoot at the same percent if you don’t move. Yes, this game does suffer from the x-com percentage game, where you will feel like you miss more shots then you hit, but if anything it will make you understand how important your movement on the screen is. Trying to get someone into flanking position can result in a guaranteed hit, using knives and close range weapon always hit as long as you are close enough, and your gear will have accuracy ratings or boosts to dexterity that directly translate into better chances of hitting enemies.

At the end of every combat encounter, you do get XP which obviously can go to improving your characters, but you will also get supplies or new gear that can be equipped or used right after combat. An aspect that I think is interesting is that it is possible that you get gear for characters that are not in your party. Since equipment can carry over (assuming you don’t sell it or run out of space), you might get a shiny new sniper rifle, without having a sniper in your current party. You might get a new med-kit or better armor for people who can’t use those items and it does add a little weight into the selection of your crew next scenario, whether you want to bring someone to utilize that new equipment or stick with the same team because they might be leveled up. At one point I was finishing up a scenario with 3 different assault rifles in my backpack despite not having someone who could use them. I kept them all because I didn’t want to sell items that I couldn’t actively compare to what someone not in my party had equipped, but early on in the game your inventory can fill up quickly and you might have to make tough choices about losing or selling certain items.

I do want to hammer out some problems I had with the game despite enjoying the game quite a bit. For the record I love this genre and have played my fair share of these types of games. Now I don’t know if it is because of that, but I found this game actually a little on the easy side. I played each scenario twice for a total of 10 scenarios, and I really only felt like I could actually lose the whole scenario one time, and that was when I ran out of gas. I unlocked 15 out of 16 characters, and the only one I didn’t unlock is a character that requires you to resuscitate allies 15 times. The reason I didn’t unlock that one, was because I only had 3 allies fall across 10 scenarios, and while I was able to save them all (heal them before they bleed out), that still left me 12 short to get the final character. If I played more, would I eventually get this, certainly, but either I have to actively be going for it which would mean I am letting people die on purpose, or I just have to play 5 times more then I currently have. My final testament to the difficulty, is that when selecting my team, I prioritized bringing my lowest level people on scenarios so I could level them up. I played as all 15 characters, and not a single one of them is maxed out, because I never felt that I needed to keep bringing the same crew. When you beat a scenario, upon re-playing it you can tweak difficulty in multiple different directions, from either the difficulty of the enemies, to how big the battles will be (# of enemies) to even how little or much starting supplies you have. I did toy with these difficulty options, and while obviously you can feel it in the lack of supplies or how many soldiers you are fighting, it’s a little more nebulous regarding difficulty of the actual soldiers. There is an “iron-man” mode that is an option when starting a new game, that I was tempted to try, but you have to make that decision before you start your very first scenario and that seemed like a tall order having never played the game before.

While I did enjoy my time with the game, I do wish there was more of a story either within the scenarios or over-arching between all the scenarios, and you really aren’t given that. I understand why this is done, because it’s a rouge game meant to be played over and over again, but I think it could have improved upon the game. Having all of the random events pop up, help populate a story in your head, but 20 minutes into any scenario I couldn’t tell you why or what we were going to do, I just knew I had to drive to the ‘X’ to win. Also once you have played each scenario once, they all blend together in your head. Since there is no real story, you are relying on the events to differentiate the scenarios, but since the events are random its not a good touchpoint. Did I run out of gas in scenario 2 or 3? Which one of these did I find the magic tomb? I would have loved something more, because while the minute to minute is fun, it could have been better. Now, I'm not asking for lore and story akin to deep RPGs, but dot the map with some story beats that you have to hit, let me know why I should care about this artifact or person I am going after.

This may be controversial, but this game should be ripe for DLC and I was sad that it didn’t have any. I’m no game designer, I don’t even want to pretend to be one, but I feel like there should be a DLC that includes a couple new scenarios and more random events to occur to flesh this game out just a little bit more. 5 scenarios are a good starting spot, but it just scratches the surface. Sure the hour count might still be 5-10 hours for an indie game, which is fine, I just think about how you probably wouldn’t try out every character, or even unlock half of them, if you only played it once through. The hypothetical DLC could even add a few more random events to occur, which would help make sure that you aren’t going to see the same ones over the course of two campaigns. While I can say that I have never seen the same event twice in the same scenario, I can tell you that in 10 campaigns I have seen some random events 3-4 times. I don’t think new equipment or even new characters need to be added, but a DLC pack with 1-2 more scenarios and 10-15 more random events would really help diversify this game.

Overall, I really did like Pathway, I am glad that I got a physical version of the game for the switch and it might be something that I re-visit later in my life, because there are still some things that I would like to do; including unlocking the last character or even maxing out just one character, but I got bored with playing through the same scenarios and events multiple times. I know what the outcome is at nearly every random event, and that really takes a lot of wind out of the games sails, when it can’t surprise you anymore. I might not know when they are coming, but if I know the result once I see it, the thrill is gone of bringing the right character along to benefit. I think Pathway rises above a lot of clutter with similar games, because it has a lot of systems working at once, and lots of playable characters, but this will only placate you for so many runs before you feel like you have seen it all and once that feeling hits, you can't go back to being amazed at it.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: In the pantheon of similar games, I do think Pathway is fairly decent, and I think you can get a lot of legs out of wanting to level up characters and seeing what is going to come up next. However, you will certainly hit a point with the game where it just stops working for you (not literally). In trying to balance the two, I have this ranked as the 44th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between Jade Empire (43rd) and Super Dodgeball (45th) out of 123 games.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

@isabellagradal: thanks for the read and comment.. yeah there is a limited inventory that you can expand before each scenario up to two times. I will say that once I expanded it, even just the first upgrade, I never ran into inventory restrictions again.