What would you do for love? Imagine for a moment that you had someone so integral to your life, someone you couldn’t live without. Maybe you already have that person in your life, maybe it’s a relative or a significant other. Now, imagine that person was taken from you, taken from you way earlier than they should have been. If you had the ability to bring them back in any way, would you go through whatever it takes to accomplish this?

The Way Remastered is a deep story about a man who lost the love of his life too soon and is on a mission to bring her back to life. He must travel to alien planets and uncover their dark secrets to find a way to be with his love again. It’s a touching story of loss and discovery.

Exploring these alien worlds comes with a sense of discovery of figuring out how the technology works. Unfortunately, the puzzles presented aren’t terribly difficult, but there will be a couple that will have you take a moment and think. The hardest parts are actually found within the platforming segments. Not because they’re intricate or well designed, but because the controls and platforming can be wonky at times.

During platforming sections you have the ability to auto clamber on ledges which will help a lot, but unfortunately it doesn’t always work well or in your favor. There were times where he would hit a ledge and just glance off or you’d want to fall to the next level, but he would climb onto a nearby ledge instead. In these cases, having to duck and crawl off ledges is required, otherwise he’ll just keep grabbing the nearby ledge.

Death will happen quite frequently in The Way, whether it’s from falling ten feet, a prowling monster, or a spike spit, it all ends with a one hit kill. Luckily for the most part, the auto save is very generous, but there are times sections will be repeated often until the correct actions are learned.

As you proceed through you’ll unlock four different types of upgrades and even a couple of weapons that will come and go depending on the story section. While this seems like a good way to keep puzzles fresh, the new ability you unlock is always at the beginning of a section that is obviously designed for it and thus makes most puzzles transparent in nature. That’s not to say some won’t prove a challenge for a couple seconds, but if one is familiar with puzzle games it shouldn’t prove to be difficult. In fact, the hardest sections were because of the funky platforming sections mentioned before.

I actually really enjoyed the visuals. The pixelated art direction isn’t done in any new way that we haven’t already seen plenty of times, but it’s well done. The backgrounds and smaller details all standout very well despite the limits of designing with pixels. There is one effect that was added that I didn’t really think was necessary and it was the addition of extra pixels behind moving characters to try and show speed. This sort just came off as a strange color smudge instead of a swooshing motion which I believe was intended.

The sound track and sound design are phenomenal. I am so happy they included the option to go through the tracks separately within the options because there are definitely a few tunes I wanted to listen to again. The various sound effects are well done too and for the most part the voice acting is decent. There are a few lines that aren’t delivered well or that are repeated often, but overall the sound design is fantastic.

The Way Remastered is a a decent game with a fantastic story and sound design, but it kills me to not be able to recommend this version. There are sometimes where glitches or crashes happen because games are left on and resuming them later can cause problems, but I had more than just the one random crash. There was a section of the game that had me crash to the Switch desktop three times, within the same puzzle area. Included also a game freeze upon death where I couldn’t press “A” to resume or even pause to reload, forcing me to close the game and re-open. There was also another section that had a glitches where I couldn’t proceed or even reload an older section to try and fix the glitch. I quit and closed the game multiple times before trying another slightly different path that seemed to activate the section to proceed.

The Way Remastered  has a story that I would like everyone to experience and considering the overall game is well done it should be an easy recommendation. But, until these problems are fixed I can’t in good conscience recommend it. Which is odd considering this is titled the “remaster”.

I’d do anything for love but I won’t do that.

Graphics: 8.5 Very detailed pixelated art style that works well the majority of the time.	Gameplay: 6.0 The gameplay is fairly simple and the puzzles aren’t very tough. The hardest part is the platforming and not for the right reasons.
Sound: 9.5 The music and various sound effects are very well done. Some of the spoken dialogue is hit or miss and at times repetitive.	Fun Factor: 2.0 With some wonky platforming and considering I had three dashboard crashes, one game freeze, and a glitch that stopped progression until I found a work around, the good story is the only reason this section didn’t get a 0.
Final Verdict: 5.5

The Way Remastered is available now on Nintendo Switch
A copy of The Way Remastered was provided by the publisher.