When shot with your bow (a simple hold-and-release of the right trigger, no aiming required), they burst, filling your energy bar and gusting you onwards at a bracing lick. The terrain is strewn with drifting diamonds-a surreal, video game touch that somehow manages not to intrude on the fiction. These sights are, more often than not, brushed with the haze of speed, as you pelt through the surrounds with your head pitched forward, like the prow of a ship. These are of black towers and beacons flaring in the half-light swards of sweeping green and shattered temples, racked with rain. In other words, this is one of those games in thrall to symbolism, in which the story (written by Steve Lerner and Kelsey Beachum) is thin, the better to thread together the images. What is that quest? “The last Hunter makes the journey to reclaim the light that has been stolen from the world,” read the subtitles. Nava uses it, here as in Journey, to douse the flickering figure at the heart of the screen with doubt, and daunt their quest with scale. This same trick was used, long ago, in God of War, the suggestion being that our labours are furled within legend-the kind of tale that’s held aloft and passed down-in which the deeds of heroes belong to the land. The camera, during play, is pulled back, filling the frame with sky, trees, and rock. She wears a veil the hue of blood-as though she were trying to shock us, or herself, with a reminder of life. She has dark-blue hair, as if dipped in ink, and her skin is spectre-pale.

In The Pathless, you control a lone woman-credited as “Hunter”-who boats through the gathering gloom to an “isle on the edge of the world,” where, we are told, “the realm of man and the realm of spirits intersect.” This seems the perfect place for her, given that she appears to belong somewhere in between. They grant us powers of movement and magic. What stops them from staling into sermons is that, rather than bore, they soar. Nava’s games (he was the art director for the first two, and creative director for the others) are united, as are we all, by the threat of ecological disaster.

That’s less time than it takes to complete Marvel’s Avengers. If you add up all the games that Matt Nava has worked on, Flower, Journey, Abzû, and now The Pathless, what do you have? By my count, over 13 hours of fire, water, wind, earth, birth, death, and God.

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