PATHWAYS INTO DARKNESS REVIEW
I got a comment recently (thank you pancakehero) recommending that I play Pathways Into Darkness, since it’s a part of the greater Bungie rabbit hole. Many people including myself have a… troubled relationship with Bungie, considering all of the lost media Destiny content and the damn Marathon extraction shooter. But the only reason I have such a troubled relationship with Bungie is because of how good their older stuff used to be.The pain, the agony… arg arg arg
I love Marathon & Halo, ask anybody. Even if Marathon was considered a DOOM clone at the time (which, any boomer shooter was called a DOOM clone, kind of a meaningless observation) it still provided a lot of foundational stuff like mouselook and weapon types we hadn’t seen before (it & System Shock also had that “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” AM inspiration with their AI characters. I’ve already talked about the Durandal thing at length in my Marathon reviews, so you can hear my thoughts on it there). And that’s not even getting into how important Halo was for the FPS genre— that game absolutely OWNED.
So I was shocked when I realized I hadn’t actually played Pathways Into Darkness yet. I’d seen videos dissecting the plot of the game (which is very good and ties into Marathon directly) but I haven’t actually PLAYED the game myself, which is a travesty and needs to be rectified. So I grabbed it off of Aleph One (a must for any self respecting Marathon player) and the file owner was…
… W’rkncacnter.
AAAAAAAAAAAAA.
Now, if you’re already not a fan of boomer shooters like DOOM, Blood, or Quake, you’re NOT gonna like Pathways. The game is very obtuse and janky as hell if you’re not already familiar with how games like this will work. All the levels look practically the same, there’s no music, and depending on your settings it’s likely you might be playing it in the corner of your window. (You don’t have to live like that.) The Aleph One port makes GREAT use of Lua, so it’s the best port you can get.
Unlike Marathon, you make use of an advanced inventory and magic system, with more RPG elements and NPCs you can directly talk to (rather than reading the terminals like in Marathon). It’s really interesting to maneuver around inside of the pyramid and learn information about what exactly happened.
And yes, I said pyramid!! This game features the messed up fictional country of America like so many stories do. Aliens contact the president of the US and let him know that there’s some sort of eldritch behemoth below a pyramid on Earth, and it’s going to destroy the planet in a week if it wakes up. The aliens are on their way to try to stop it, but they won’t get there in time, so the government decides to nuke the thing to stop it from destroying everything. The player character is an American soldier who’s sent with a team to delve into the pyramid and set up the bomb… except your whole team dies, and you’re humanity’s last hope as you delve into the ruins.
There’s a lot of freaky monsters you’ll encounter, including stuff that are 100% mutated forms of aliens we’ve seen before (like, those goo monsters are ABSOLUTELY mutated versions of the F’lickta. Really weird implications) and they’ll become more and more common as you progress.
PID is a lot more slow-paced than Marathon— ironically, it’s more of a marathon than Marathon is. You have to be patient and pace yourself in combat, otherwise you’ll lose valuable resources or even die. You can’t take too long, though— when you start up the game, it starts an actual timer, where you have only a week to get to the bottom of the pyramid and set up the nuke. Take too long, and you get the bad ending, where the W’rknca— sorry, the mysterious unnamed thing that we don’t know what it is (lolz) wakes up and destroys everything.
PID is not an entry level game. It requires a lot of patience and perseverance, so I recommend it if you’re already a fan of games like this, but not if you’re only just starting to get into them. Play Quake or Prodeus if you want to get into games like this. I really enjoyed the game, though, and there was a lot of stuff I never saw in stuff like Mandalore’s old video from the 20s!! I give the game a 7.8/10!!