Pathways Into Darkness

Pathways into Darkness is a first-person shooter and adventure game. The game interface consists of four windows. The primary "World View" shows the player character's first-person perspective. Players move, dodge, fire, and use weapons and items using the computer keyboard.

The "Inventory" window displays items players have acquired, the "Message" window relates events and the in-game time, and the "Player" window displays health and energy information. The game clock runs constantly during gameplay, except when in conversation; the player loses the game if the sleeping god wakes after a set period of time.

Pathways casts the player as a member of a US Army Special Forces team sent on a mission to the Yucatán Peninsula. On May 5, 1994, a diplomat from the alien race known as the Jjaro appeared to the President of the United States and informed him that on May 13, an ancient godlike being sleeping beneath a pyramid 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 the 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.

The player character's parachute fails to open, and they fall unconscious in the landing. Awakening hours later, the player finds almost all their equipment inoperable. Reaching the pyramid on foot hours after the rest of their team, the player must complete the mission before the god awakens in five days. In the pyramid, the player finds bodies of squad-mates, the remains of Spanish-speaking treasure hunters, and fallen members of a Nazi expedition from the 1930s who were looking for a secret weapon. Additional plot elements can be revealed by speaking to these dead, enabled by the yellow crystal.

Pathways was Bungie's fourth game and third commercial title after their previous game, Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete, sold around 2,500 copies. In the summer of 1992, Jones was living in dorms at the University of Chicago when he saw Wolfenstein 3D, a shooter game with three-dimensional (3D) graphics. Inspired, Jones created a rough 3D-graphics engine for the Mac that simulated walls with trapezoids and rectangles. Originally, Bungie intended Pathways to be a straightforward 3D version of Minotaur, but they quickly found that the top-down perspective of their previous game did not mesh with the new 3D presentation.

An additional consideration was that the developers wanted to create a game that did not rely on then-rare networks and modems, an issue in marketing Minotaur. The rest of 1992 was spent tweaking the graphics engine.

Pathways was positively received. Inside Mac Games reviewer Jon Blum wrote that Pathways was "one of the best Macintosh games I've ever played". Computer Gaming World described Pathways as "a dungeon crawl, pure and simple". The magazine praised the "simple, elegant and easy to use" user interface and "excellent" graphics and sound.

Computer Gaming World concluded that while "somewhat weak on actual game play", Pathways was "a job worthy of a strong recommendation". Macworld's Steven Levy commented that the gameplay and graphics were extremely smooth. He singled out the creatures for specific praise, likening them to "something that might have come from a brain-merge of Tim Burton, Anne Rice and Hieronymus Bosch" instead of simple line drawings. Criticisms of the game included the difficulty level; Blum found some segments too difficult and that it was possible to spend hours playing before realizing that the player had made an irreversible mistake.