The Eightfold Path Reviews

This game is beautiful. The art style is beautiful. The world is beautiful. The sound design and music is beautiful. The implementation of the meditation as a mechanic is beautiful. The things it tries to teach are beautiful. This game is also incredibly frustrating and suffers from game design issues. Pathways are long, meandering, and maze like, difficult to navigate and lacking any sort of map or signage to help you keep track of where you've been - so I hope you remember every aspect of this complex map across every play session. Also you walk extremely slowly. The puzzles range from cryptic (the rabbit puzzle) to unforgiving of even slight error (trying to move boulders in a cave). If you "die" you get sent back to a random checkpoint, sometimes it's a million miles from where you just were and there's no way of choosing or knowing how to get back to where you were, so making progress can be very tedious. Sometimes an enemy can fly off the edge of the map and even if you know what you need to do to stop it (no spoilers), there's no time do execute on it. The same is true if you stop the game and pick it back up. Are you where you left off? Not likely. So now time to fumble around fro 15 minutes to find another puzzle to attempt to solve. Overall, I need to reiterate, I find the game beautiful and enjoyable aesthetically, the mechanics reflect the things they're trying to teach, but it could use an update to polish out some of the issues if it wants to be accessible to a wider audience than the most hardcore and dedicated exploration puzzle solvers (and I suspect with the philosophy they teach, that is something the creators would like).