The Way Remastered tells the story about a space explorer who lost his wife. Not coping with the loss of his wife he digs up her body and goes on a quest to obtain eternal life on an alien planet they once researched. While searching for The Way, he discovers the planet hides many secrets and dangers he must face.
A homage to Another World
Once The Way Remastered starts, I immediately got a sense of recognition. The alien planet looked familiar. As if I once visited the place before. Then It dawned on me that this game is just a huge homage to Another World and Heart of Darkness, both by French computer designer Eric Chaci. People who played those games shouldn’t need any more convincing to just buy this game. Great gameplay mixed with stunning and very detailed pixel-art backgrounds.
Mind-bending puzzles
The Way remastered offers a great mix of platforming action and mind-bending puzzles. Each puzzle offers a unique experience and a real sense of accomplishment when you finally solve them. Certain puzzles can only be solved after finding certain items which grant you new abilities like telekinesis and teleportation. This is a great tool to keep adding different elements to the puzzles.
Trial and error
These types of games used to be very unforgiving. The Way Remastered surely isn’t different. Everything can and will kill you instantly. Dropping from too high, touching spikes, getting stung by alien insects, … it all results in your untimely death. Luckily the game lets you respawn instantly, so you can try that tricky passage again (and again and again…) until you time your jumps just right.
The journey
The story spans almost a whole lifetime on the alien planet. Along the way you’ll encounter alien monsters, a bounty hunter with robot army and even some digital pirates. You’ll become a cult god-like figure for one of the alien races and learn to speak their language, adopt a giant orange beast since you butchered its parent and give it your all to be granted the secret of eternal life. Memories can be picked up along the way, giving you some narrative. Cutscenes add to the journey and tell you what happened while the years on the alien planet go by eventually leading to your goal.
A sense of isolation
While exploring the different scenes The Way Remastered offers you a real sense of isolation. You feel as if you’re the only human presence on a big unexplored planet. Every new scene gives fills you with a feeling of wonder and excitement. The changes in scenery get accented by a really great adapting soundtrack making it a great experience along the 10 hours it took me to reach the end. Adding subtle references to older games – for example, calling the pirate LeChuck referencing the Monkey Island games – makes the world even more fun to walk around.
Remastered and redesigned
The Way has its roots in a Kickstarter campaign from 2014. The game was originally designed for PC, Linux and Mac. Redesigning it to work on the switch meant the development team needed to rework many things. So much that they decided to make it an updated version instead of a direct port. The Way Remastered adds voiceover, graphic improvements, rumble features and even redesign of certain puzzles based on players’ feedback.
Conclusion
The Way Remastered is a throwback to the great adventure puzzler of the 16-bit era with improved visuals. The platforming is challenging but fair and solving the puzzles gives you a great sense of accomplishment. The story is well written, and the narrative is cryptic enough to make you want to explore more to find out more. Certain animations could work smoother and the occasional bug does happen although the developers already have a patch ready to fix a few of those. But all in all, I had a lot of fun playing The Way Remastered.
