'Trackless' Goes on a Strange Pilgrimage Through an Unsettling World

Sub-15 is our regular look into smaller games (that go for $15 or less) with great ideas. Think of it as Free Play, on a little bit of a budget.

Trackless begins on a train. This might be the future. It might be a simulation. It might be some other world; a giant black orb hangs dead in the sky in the place of the sun. You learn you are a "seeker" among fellow pilgrims on your the way to see something called the Object. Other travelers tell you that they're nervous or excited. They are making their way toward the same station that you are, and their emotions could mirror yours or be completely different. This interpretability is what defines Trackless, a first-person puzzle and exploration game from the developers at 12 East Games.

Trackless has a more populated world than other games in the genre like Gone Home. While they share some DNA, it is clear that the developers of Trackless are steeped in the genre of first-person games and understand how to make sure that Trackless feels like its own thing. The world of Trackless boils over with other people who share their singular mindsets with the player, and it is through those characters that the player comes to evaluate whether being a seeker is all that worthwhile in the end.

All of this is apparent in the first five minutes of Trackless, which serve both as a tutorial and as a way of confounding any expectations about what this world is. Players navigate with the help of a small data pad that's reminiscent of a smart phone. There are traditional screens, too, but they look more like older CRT televisions than anything we might stumble into on a train today. There are also VHS players on which you can watch promotional films about the trip you're taking to see the Object, and there's a retrofuturistic game console that, strangely, allows you to look at a game that looks awfully similar to Trackless itself.

If you watch the video or listen to other seekers, you realize that there are Trials for seekers to complete on the way there. It's a religious pilgrimage, or it's a way of discovering yourself. There's no clarity here, and there is a wide range of interpretations that the player, much like any given seeker, must come to in their own time. This is already heavy in your mind as you step off the train, register yourself, put your cat in long-term pet storage, find a traveling partner, and set off.

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As lots of first-person exploration games demonstrate, a first-person game can feel like an emptier experience when the player is robbed of "shoot gun" or "fling spells" as meaningful interactions with the world. Firewatch or Everybody's Gone the Rapture have very specific ways that they try to fill that space up, but Trackless pulls the excellent maneuver of integrating the prompt-based interactions of classic adventure games. Instead of merely hitting a button, you interact with an object and type what you want to do. You select things to interact with and use a traditional adventure game parser to decide exactly how you want to make it work.

Interacting, Trackless is telling us, is a mode of interpretation itself. The prompts are a mode of narrative delivery all on their own; you find meaning where you go looking for it. When we look out into the world, we are really looking into ourselves. The Trials, which are strange rituals that take place in crypts and cathedrals, are highly symbolic and have a religious feel to them. Much like any given religious moment, what you take away from them is wholly internal. You react to the prompt, you type your verb, and you carry it with you forever.

On the whole, there is a feeling of ambivalence to meaning that Trackless commits to through its hour or so of playtime (the finale, which I will not spoil, really sells it). The result is that the player is mostly left to their own conclusions about what seeking, and Object itself, means in the world of the game. I've recently come off playing the first two games in the Dark Souls series back-to-back, and it strikes me that those games and Trackless both share a purposeful ambiguity that encourages the player to take the game with them when they finally turn it off.

Trackless is a confident game that pulls from very real feelings of mysticism, religious pilgrimage, and self discovery to create a quest in which all of the benefits are wholly determined by the player. It offers a science fictional, fantasy-like world that does not demand to be dominated or fought through, but merely witnessed and associated with a positive journey of enlightenment. Whether the player finds that at the end is wholly up to them, but then again, that's the way all journeys are.