Have you ever felt like you’re stuck in an endless loop of working, doing chores and worrying about the future? That’s the story we are witnessing in the short demo of a cozy walking simulator Path to Serenity. This game from an indie developer Ludus Pax Studios invites you to find inner peace through casual exploration and everyday objectives.
Path to Serenity takes us on a journey with Jim, a man who struggles to find the right direction in life. While he is focused on advancing his career, it comes at the cost of what truly matters. However, when he finally follows his heart, he discovers a new path that will change his life forever. Although, not everything starts as intended.
Emotional story and the possibility of interaction with the environment
The idea of providing a calming and relaxing experience by focusing on simple exploration without any challenges or puzzles is a fitting choice for a cozy game. While we still need to complete tasks in order to progress, they’re treated more as a mean to serve us a story, which we can also discover on our own – finding some additional items gives us more details about Jim’s life, his family and their current situation.
The game aims to tell an emotional story, which we can delve into by guiding our protagonist, but also interacting with the environment. In the demo we visit two locations: Jim’s home and his workplace (although we see him in the forest at the end, sadly we don’t have a chance to look around as the game gets cut abruptly.) I appreciated how the colours, music, sound effects and even weather conveyd the feelings of our character, which made his journey more immersive.
Now moving on to some issues I noticed during playing. Since it’s a demo version, I completely understand that it might be rough around the edges, things like overlapping text boxes or unnatural shading won’t ruin the whole experience, as they can always be improved over time. However, when those technical problems start messing with your gameplay, it’s not that hard to get frustrated.
A very short demo full of bugs
Glitching sounds, blocking tasks and finally falling off the map forced me to restart the demo, although second time I managed to finish it, I was constantly worried if those bugs will happen again. I also have to add that the controls were clunky since the very beginning: the way we interact with objects is not quite intuitive as you’d expect from a walking simulator. Especially when sometimes you receive a sound cue for completing an objective, but sometimes you’re just left with no such indicator.
There’s not really that much to say about this demo, as you can finish it within 10 minutes if you focus strictly on the objectives. That’s also the reason why I feel like we didn’t get enough of the story to know what should we expect, it did introduce us to the character and his environment, but there’s no specific thing that could act as the anchor point for the plot. That being said, the concept itself is interesting, so if the game will adress mentioned issues, it has potential to turn into pleasant and tranquil journey.
You can play free demo of Path to Serenity up untill 4th March on Steam.
English (UK) 
Hrvatski