Plot
Pathways casts players as members of a US Army Special Forces team sent on a mission to the Yucatán Peninsula. Days before, a diplomat from the alien Jjaro appeared to the President of the United States and informed him that in days, an ancient godlike being would awaken and destroy the Earth. The only way to prevent this catastrophe is to prevent the god from awakening. The eight-man Special Forces team carries a nuclear weapon, with the goal of entering an ancient pyramid, descending to the bottom level where the god sleeps, and activating the bomb to stun the god and bury it under tons of rock. Before the game begins, the player's parachute fails to open. Awakening hours later, players find almost all their equipment inoperable. Reaching the pyramid on foot hours after the rest of the team entered the structure, the player must complete the team's mission before the god awakens in five days. In the pyramid, the player finds bodies of their squad-mates, the remains of Spanish-speaking treasure hunters, as well as fallen members of a Nazi expedition from the 1930s who were looking for a secret weapon, but never returned.
The game's ending changes depending on whether the player has a radio beacon to call for extraction, and when the nuclear device is set to explode. Forgetting to set the bomb, or setting it to explode at any time past the awakening of the dreaming god, results in Earth's destruction. The device's detonation before the player reaches a minimum safe distance results in a pyrrhic victory. The most favorable endings are achieved by leaving the pyramid with a beacon at least twenty game minutes before the device is set to go off; if the game ends with enough time for the player to escape on foot, the player survives without a beacon.
Read more about this topic: Pathways Into Darkness
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
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—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)