The Pathless Beginner's Guide: How To Collect Crystals & Find Your Way

The Pathless tells you that there’s no one true path to salvation, and it’s pretty accurate—literally and figuratively. The game doesn’t give you any maps or navigational tools to find your way, so you’re immediately thrust into this wide, wide world with absolutely nothing. To save you some time gliding all over the place aimlessly, we’ve figured out how to make paths in The Pathless easier for you.

How To Find A Path In The Pathless

In The Pathless, your Spirit Mask is your friend. Activating it tints your vision with a bluish monotone, allowing you to see clearly the different points of interest in the distance, which will have a glowing red aura. To maximize your Spirit vision at the start of every area, immediately run to an Obelisk, which is a towering, well, tower with an Eye of Sauron-esque red orb at the top. Ride the rope up to the very top and use your Spirit Mask from there. Being the tallest structure in every area, an Obelisk provides the best vantage point for you to see where you need to go.

Here, you’ll immediately spot the gigantic red storm that moves slowly across the field, which I’ll explain in more detail later. For now, what you need to look for are glowing red auras in smaller structures, on the ground, among the trees, or on mountains. These will contain Lightstones that you need to collect to cleanse an Obelisk from its corruption. 

From afar, all these glowing red auras will look the same, but as you get closer to them, you will find that there are two kinds. One glowing red aura has a Lightstone that glows bright yellow trapped inside a red force field. Another type simply has a glowing yellow crystal, often embedded in statues or inside treasure chests.

These yellow crystals are optional collectibles that fill up a meter, and each full meter grants you an extra Flap ability for your eagle. Once, I was able to revive a dead animal and it gave me yellow crystals too, so keep exploring and you’ll likely encounter more ways to fill up that gauge. To be honest, though, you can choose not to fill this up since defeating an area guardian grants you an extra Flap anyway.

As for the Lightstones, these are the ones you need to collect to progress through the game. You will need to solve puzzles to unlock a Lightstone; thankfully, you only need a limited number of them to clear the Obelisks (one each for the first area, and two each for the succeeding ones). Each area has more than enough, so you can take your pick.

The puzzles will mostly have you aligning hoops you can shoot your arrow through with the help of your eagle, or calling your eagle to carry weights you need to drop onto raised platforms on the ground. Some of them will have you trying to angle the camera just right so that you can shoot lighted fire pillars and have your arrow ricochet to hit another unlighted pillar in the distance. The first time I encountered this kind of puzzle, it had me running around not knowing what to do for hours. But once you figure it out, the puzzles of this variety actually become pretty repetitive.

Avoiding The Red Storm in The Pathless

Stay away from that huge ominous red orb of doom at all costs, as getting caught in the thick of it will rip your eagle companion away from you. You’ll have to sneak past the area guardian’s line of sight to get to your eagle, and getting caught in its cone of vision will make you lose any yellow crystals you’ve collected much like Sonic loses his rings whenever he gets hit. You’ll also have to pet your eagle to wipe away any grime afterward—it won’t function normally until you do.

Of course, this punishment for getting caught in the storm actually isn’t that bad, so if you need to enter the storm to get to a puzzle along the way, you can totally do so if you don’t mind losing yellow crystals (or if you’re not collecting them anyway). If you do get caught in the guardian’s cone of vision, just stay completely still and it won’t see you. One trick I accidentally discovered is that you can actually hide inside a structure if you can’t outrun the red storm. It will then pass over you and you’ll be safe until it blows over.

If you want to aim for 100% completion and collect extra stuff, it’s actually best to do your exploring after you’ve cleared the area and cleansed the guardian. This will also clear away the red storm, so you’ll be free to roam around as you please.

How To Get Around Faster In The Pathless

Controls are pretty simple in The Pathless. The auto-aim mechanic means that shooting floating talismans to boost your running speed is done effortlessly. What you do need to practice is to speed through the fields while avoiding obstacles like tree trunks and huge boulders. Running into these will obviously stop you in your tracks instantly, as will stepping on small creeks or any body of water. As early as you can, try to spend some time mastering how to navigate the terrain to avoid these obstacles without breaking your speed.

I say this because all of the area bosses will involve you chasing them through the fields in the first phase of the battle, which can get pretty annoying if you can’t get close enough to hit the marked targets on both sides of their bodies. On one boss, I spent more time trying to chase down the thing than the actual fight itself because I kept landing smackdab in front of a tree. The boss will also eventually hurl fireballs backwards at you to slow you down, so you really have to know how to change directions at a moment’s notice to avoid losing your momentum.

One thing I found effective was to air boost while gliding to avoid the fireballs. While you’re gliding with your eagle, hit one of the floating talismans and you’ll do an air dash, keeping you suspended in the air until you hit the next talisman.

So, practice your movements while you can do so peacefully before cleansing all those Obelisks—besides, you can experience the beauty of the game even more by exploring and moving through the landscape, anyway.

We hope this beginner’s guide will help make finding your path in The Pathless all the more satisfying!