Saturday, 21 May 2016 00:00

The Way Review

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I don’t always have a gleeful smile when I play games but for The Way, I do.

The Way is a fantastic little game from Puzzling Dream that has some of the best art design I’ve seen in some time. Something about the H.R. Giger inspired backdrops to the close attention to detail throughout the entire game just hit me in all the right spots. It’s hard to really get a grasp of what this game has to offer without first checking out screenshots or watching at least some video on it. Go on and look. I’ll wait.

See what I mean? It’s got a certain charm about the visuals that not all games are able to achieve these days - especially games with a higher fidelity of graphics. Something about its design choices are just so coherent and concise that the whole game feels larger than it is, and it’s wonderful.

Now, I can keep going about how much I love the visuals in The Way, but I feel the gushing nature of that kind of review would get tedious. Instead, I’ll move things along. I do want to stress though that games tend to put their best attributes into the trailers and screenshots; it’s what draws you into the game. The Way surprised me with its visuals in the trailer but it didn’t end there. Each new location was thoughtfully plotted and maintained in a perfectly pixelated way. The opening sequence has you in a Blade Runner style setting and later on you’re on a planet filled with flora and fantastical creatures. The visuals just always seem to surprise me.

Onto another aspect of design would be the audio which has a great, 80’s-inspired soundtrack that you would expect to find in any classic science-fiction movie from that decade. The sound of your weapons and gadgets also have that classic sci-fi feel that makes any nerd feel welcomed and at home despite being light years away from earth.

That being said, a large part of what makes this game work so well is how it plays on that nostalgia factor but still allows you to be surprised.

It drops sometimes not-so-subtle referential hints that always made me happy to see. There’s a note for a person named “Scotty”, your ship is a Dwarf class, the aforementioned H.R. Giger-inspired backgrounds harken back to Alien. To top it off, you go by Major Tom. The store page of The Way points out that it has inspiration with a few classic game titles such as Another World and Flashback, but I think it’s much more akin to the amazing sci-fi titles of past.

he story of The Way is simple, but surprisingly powerful. The very beginning has you digging up your wife’s grave, which certainly sets the tone. Your main objective is to find a “fountain of life” of sorts in order to revive your wife but, naturally, you’re going to have to travel to another planet. The story is, at its core, a love story - and the writers do a good job of making it feel like an authentic relationship. Throughout The Way you’ll find these ghost-like holograms of your wife that you can interact with to view a memory of the past. These memories are very sentimental in nature and work in a way that’s smart and subtle. Though these vignettes have no dialogue, they do a wonderful job in showing that Tom was probably not the most attentive husband to his wife. In learning these factors, it’s clear why this man has such a need to bring her back. As I said, it all works surprisingly well and really helps glue everything together perfectly - without it feeling like it’s shoehorned in.

There’s also a ton of contextual backstory that you can choose to read into or not. When you walk by certain statues or reliefs in the background, you’ll see little text lines pop up around them giving you some information about the object without having to actually interact with each and everything that you come across - smartly avoiding a pixel hunt.

Onto the gameplay: The Way is a platformer at heart. It should be said that I played a majority of it with keyboard and mouse. I tried playing with a controller, but I prefered the fidelity that came with using a mouse for the more precision based shooting that is required (although there’s not a whole lot of that.) The controls are tight with a bit of a slippery nature that can make certain jumps a little tricky but never makes it feel like it’s the game’s fault and the only person to blame is yourself.

The big complaint I have with the game is the checkpoint system.

I understand that adding more checkpoints to games make them a bit easier, so I’m sure this lack of them was a design choice to make it tougher, but some of the placement for checkpoints seem too far apart so there will be a lot of retracing steps. Considering it’s a one-hit-and-you're-dead kind of title, the retracing can be frustrating and take a lot longer than I’d like. Even still, I never felt like it was The Way’s fault that I died and I mostly blamed myself. It would just be nice to have a few extra checkpoints in a few extra spots.

Checkpoints aside, backtracking itself is an integral part of the story as a whole. I hesitate to say that this title is a “Metroidvania” because it’s really not. That genre gives you a big area and you need to trek back and forth in order to get to spots you wouldn’t be able to reach without a certain object, etc. The Way has a bit of this but each section is contained. For instance, the first big set piece is in the hangar where your spaceship is being held. In order to get to one place you need to activate a switch on one end and then so forth and so on. We’re all familiar with those titles but something about this one makes those needs for backtracking necessary. There is a need for launch codes in the top floor of a flight control tower on the far right side of the map with a note on what you need to do on the first floor of the same tower. The launch codes themselves are stored in an archive which happens to be on the other side of the map. Some “puzzles” like that never felt like they were done to just make you spend more time walking back and forth but instead made sense. Puzzles like those were reminiscent of 2012’s Fez - a game where I would write things down on paper in order to remember what to do later on.

The difficulty of the puzzles can certainly differ from person to person. Some puzzles had me stumped before I realized I was over-thinking and realized that they rely much more on common sense than I thought. When you complete each puzzle, The Way makes a ding sound that truly feels gratifying.

At first the puzzles involve a variety of interactable consoles that allow you to get what you want accomplished.

Later on, you get access to a tool that gives you four unique abilities, changing the gameplay with each unlock. One tool allows you to gain access to consoles, one allows you to use a shield to block projectiles, one allows you to teleport and one allows you to move certain objects. Each one feels exciting and new - even if we’ve had mechanics similar to these in other games in the past.

One weird mechanic is having to recharge your tool. At the start, when you’re given a pistol, your ammunition depletes and you just wait it out as it automatically refills. Since you're using a laser pistol, this makes sense. However, when you get the ability to use the other tools listed above, the recharge mechanic seems to be redundant and unnecessary. Having to recharge a shield makes sense since that can be used to defend yourself against enemies, but the telekinesis doesn’t quite need it since you’re not using it for defense. So that just means when you’re sitting there doing a puzzle that requires you to figure out a puzzle by moving a lot of blocks, you have to occasionally let that meter charge back up before you can do anything else.

OH! I also forgot to mention that you have a giant alien creature pet named Tincan that follows you around and scares bad guys and also leans up against walls and is also super cute and cool and badass and eats people and is rad. Sorry. Just had to make sure I told you about Tincan.

As a whole, The Way is just a remarkable piece of gaming that I enjoyed on many more levels than I was expecting. Those little frustrations I had with this title pale in comparison to what The Way is. Nothing has come close to “my style” of sci-fi and was still fun to play. I cannot stress how smitten I was with the entire game. Did I mention how GORGEOUS this it is? Pretty sure I did, but it’s always good to stress the fact a second time. Cause it is. It’s gorgeous.

Do yourself a solid and check out The Way and make sure to tell your friends.

10

The Verdict

The Way handles sci-fi much more elegantly than a majority of games before it. With engaging puzzles and an impressive art style this wonderful and detailed, you’d be doing yourself a great disservice by not playing it.

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James McKeever

When not playing video games, James is usually found playing video games. When he simply does not have time for video games, he goes to a thing called "Job" where he makes money to feed himself and his wife and to buy more video games. Since he was too scared to use the controller himself at the young age of 3, James started his gaming career as a "navigator" of sorts instructing his father when to jump in Super Mario Brothers. Since then, the fear of controllers has subsided and James can now jump freely, circumventing the middleman.

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