The Mysterious Cities of Gold: Secrets Paths

There is something quietly lovely about the moment Secret Paths loads up and that iconic theme drifts in. Neko Entertainment built this game as a companion to the 2013 revival of the classic French-Japanese animated series, setting the three young heroes, Esteban, Zia and Tao, on a new quest across Imperial China and Tibet in search of the next city of gold. The top-down perspective gives every courtyard and temple a clean, storybook quality, and the animation moves with the same loose, warm energy as the cartoon it draws from. If you have any memory of the show, those first few minutes will do something quiet and real to you. The core loop has you switching between the trio, each carrying a distinct ability. Esteban activates sun pillars and mystical glyphs with his medallion, Zia slips through narrow cracks in walls, and Tao deciphers Mu inscriptions and sends his parrot Pichu off to retrieve keys from hard-to-reach spots. Levels are structured around using these abilities in sequence: position a character on a pressure plate, send another through a gap, have the third activate a mechanism, and the door opens. It is a rhythm that feels purposeful in the early stages, and the bird's-eye camera makes reading a level genuinely pleasant. Between stages, short clips lifted from the animated series stitch the plot together, and in those moments the game has a real pulse. Here is the honest part, though, and I say it with affection for what the game is clearly trying to do: the puzzle variety does not grow fast enough to match the level count. The six regions of China bring new visual dressing, pressure plates give way to artifact pedestals and lever sequences, but the underlying shape of each room stays familiar for longer than it should. The light stealth element, where guards patrol with dotted sight lines that solidify if you linger, adds a small layer of tension, but the consequences for capture are so gentle that it rarely registers as a real challenge. Collectible parchments and hidden treasure chests offer a reason to replay stages for a better rating, which is a thoughtful touch, yet the incentive to do so depends entirely on how much you already care about the universe. If you are outside that nostalgia radius, the game will read as a polished but lightweight children's puzzler that arrived from mobile (it shares the same design bones) and does not quite justify its running time for a grown adult playing cold. The soundtrack, though, is genuinely worth noting: a shifting blend of Eastern melodies and old-school cartoon fanfare that carries the mood even when the mechanics coast. The cutscenes drop characters in mid-conversation and assume series knowledge, so newcomers will feel a little adrift on the story side. The craft is there in the art and the soundscape; the puzzle design just needed one more pass to match it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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