Pathway by Robotality

Here’s the thread (that is interesting) for Pathway.

I’ve only played it a bit so far, but it is very promising. It feels like Renowned Explorers by way of Jagged Alliance. I have not played enough to see how much persistence there is, and it doesn’t look like it has the overworld elements of Renowned Explorers - at least not so far.

Very promising; the battles have been fairly easy so far, but it is easy to trip up. You use up your equipment, so be careful not to spend all your grenades and medkits too soon.

One thing I like is that there are symbols on some of the nodes, so you can know if a place will have a battle or be a place you can rest.

Beware: There’s no confirmation before you end your turn, and you do not get a warning if you’ve forgotten to take actions with one of your expedition members.

Also: Mandatory “WHY IS THIS NOT ON THE SWITCH!?!! IT’D BE PERFECT!!!”

Thanks for this, watching this play out a bit it’s going to be a pretty awesome game for me, for sure.

This has a thread now , yay!

@KristiGaines come be excited with us! Pixels!

I’d be much more excited if the game itself were named Robotality. MUCH MORE EXCITED. 🤖🤖🤖

Also up for sale on GOG.

https://www.gog.com/game/pathway

I just bought and played some Pathway over lunch. It was fun! It definitely has JA2 vibes, plus The Curious Expedition and FTL. Fun little game! The performance in the temple maps is bizarrely poor… Then again, I was playing on a 4 year old Macbook Pro. I’ll dig into it some more later. The narrative elements were pretty cool so far.

Jeep deep into desert looking for a buddy.
Rest and water just over the horizon.
Bump into Nazis instead.
Science Chick quicker on draw than Muscle Dude!
Didn’t realize this and shot wall thinking I was aiming with Muscle Dude.
Dog kills Science Chick.
Muscle Dude shot multiple times by Nazis.
First adventure ends in death by stupidity.
Will Adventure again.

p.s. I would play a lot of this on the Switch. 👀

Some questions if anyone happens to know…

How puzzley does it feel? (I dont like puzzle tactical games like Into The Breach but am fine with looser ones like XCOM original)

Also does it have time limits? (EG: Number of turns or you have to restart. Or even actual time countdown to take a turn?)

Finally does it have escort missions?

I hope for “no” as the answers to all these questions :) Cheers!

Combat feels a lot more like Jagged Alliance 2. Nothing has felt puzzley to me.

Not that I have seen yet.

You have to escort yourself around while managing fuel for your vehicle. The strategic layer is sort of like FTL or Out There. Combat is fun. The narrative elements that I have encountered were pretty cool. Imagine taking The Curious Expedition narrative and adding Jagged Alliance 2 combat with the Out There strategic layer… that’s pretty close to how it feels to me.

Clay answered this but to clarify - it does have a finite resource used to advance from one map pip to the next, Fuel. It looks like you start with 10/20 fuel and can buy/find fuel along the way, very much like FTL. After the fuel runs out, the guy I watched mentioned you had to walk so the run may not even immediately end there, just get a little tougher until you can find more wheels?

Thanks @Clay & @Scotch_Lufkin ! Sounds like my cup of tea. Buying :)

Yep, I ran out of fuel, walked (you lose health), surprised some Nazis in a temple, defeated them, recovered some fuel, and then was able to drive to the next pip. Some of the map pips have Place of Interest signs (camp, battle, etc.) so I headed towards one where I imagined there might be more fuel to buy. I had to stop playing at that point.

Excellent, and good to know! Thanks!

Very intrigued by this. Because I’m a weirdo, when I look at this I think of Indiana Jones and his Desktop Adventures (see also, Yoda Stories), a budget game from the 90s which did some fascinating things with procedural generation of environments and story. Its combat was real-time (maybe Zelda is the comparison) and not turn-based, but whatever. Gimme that randomized pulp action please!

image

Some strong negative reviews on the steam page, so I’m waiting for more feedback on this one. Definitely hits the right notes in terms of 1930s (check), beautiful pixel art (check), and turn-based combat (check).

Seems overwhelmingly positive to me as I read through Steam, but personally I want to hear what more people on this board have to say they have played for a while.

I just took a look at those… seems like the players had different expectations from what they bought. The previous descriptions of FTL meets Xcom (or whatever) are pretty much what you get. I never noticed a problem with load times. If you would enjoy FTL with tactical turn-based combat, I think you’d like it. However, there’s never harm in waiting for more reviews to trickle in and/or a patch or two.

Thanks LK I think I will grab it there. And yes this does look VERY good.

Yeah, that was a weird comment. I expected the review skew to be terrible, but it looks very positive from my chair.