Dancing Pandas: Ranger’s Path is a wholesome and heartfelt experience

Game:	Dancing Pandas: Ranger’s Path
Developer:	Dancing Pandas, Nopia
Publisher:	Bonus Stage Publishing
Platform:	PC
Genre:	Cosy, adventure
Price:	£10.99 / €12.99 / $12.99

I love a game that makes me laugh but also encourages reflection, and Dancing Pandas: Ranger’s Path managed to do both while wrapping the experience in a colourful and humorous package that delivers an adventure that’s charming and surprisingly meaningful.

Dancing Pandas’ new cosy adventure game Dancing Pandas: Ranger’s Path follows Mico, a young and timid panda who’s invited to a tropical island by his ranger grandmother, but upon arriving, discovers she is nowhere to be found. What follows is a heartfelt adventure as Mico embarks on a journey of self-discovery to develop enough courage to reunite with his grandmother.

Pawsitively wholesome gameplay

The best way to describe Dancing Pandas: Ranger’s Path is a combination of a cute life-sim with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If that sounds strange, well, it is, but it works. To complete the game, you need to gain enough Courage Hearts to reunite with your grandmother, and these Courage Hearts are gained a quarter at a time by completing quests found across the game’s tropical island, similar to Zelda’s stamina and heart mechanics.

While most quests followed fetch-and-collect mechanics, the game kept them engaging through witty dialogue and charming interactions. Delivering suncream to a sunburnt panda, collecting scallops for a restaurant owner, finding a panda’s missing mail, and rescuing a trapped villager may sound simple, but the humour and personality of each quest made them memorable, which is a testament to developers Dancing Pandas and Nopia.

Many of the quests also required me to collect resources to repair items across the world, from small picnic tables to broken staircases and bridges that stretched over valleys and unlocked new areas. I used axes to chop wooden logs into smaller pieces and delivered them to buckets beside the items that needed repairing.

The game was forgiving enough to place logs close to these items, but I found I sometimes had to venture further out when I was in an area with a lot of repairable items. Similarly, for other quests like those involving collectables, I found there were always more than I needed, so you or a younger player shouldn’t run into difficulty while playing.

While there is no fishing or farming in Dancing Pandas: Ranger’s Path, the game does come with a lite mining mechanic, where you use a pickaxe to break apart large rocks or use a shovel to dig into the ground. Doing so rewards you with collectable purple gems that act as the game’s currency and are used as part of a select few quests or to purchase maps of the world and unlock fast travel points.

A tropical paradise made for pandas and gamers

The island in Dancing Pandas: Ranger’s Path is set on a gorgeous, tropical paradise for pandas of all shapes and sizes. It’s also larger than I first thought and packed with several unique environments to explore; from coastal beaches filled with sunbathing pandas and bustling villages with cosy homes to gorgeous autumnal woodlands and teetering mountaintops.

Exploring the world of Dancing Pandas: Ranger’s Path was one of my favourite aspects of the game. I climbed a hill to a lighthouse, swam through the ocean to explore smaller islands, and collected mushrooms in woodlands. It was a pleasure climbing to higher points of the map and spotting chests I hadn’t found or places I hadn’t yet visited, and, in Zelda fashion, drifting down to them with the help of Mico’s companion bird, Sofi.

What let exploration down in Dancing Pandas: Ranger’s Path were the camera controls that were frequently caught in plantation and obscured my view, sometimes leading me to fall off hills and cliffs. Other times, I found that Mico collided with terrain, pushing him off structures or hills.

I frequently had to jump whenever there was a change in terrain while climbing hills or staircases to avoid falling, and while this was annoying, I persisted and the reward was either a brand-new area to explore, a new quest, or a chest with purple gems to spend on maps or quests.

A panda’s heartfelt journey

Watching Mico grow from a timid panda to someone confident in his abilities to be a ranger on the island is great development, and I think it’s something that many of us, including myself, can relate to: spending time to find ourselves.

But it’s not just Mico we see grow in the game, and witnessing other pandas develop and grow was touching and it’s a nice way Dancing Pandas separates itself from other adventure games. There’s a depth to the game’s cast of characters, which really added to the experience for me.

For example, one quest I completed pushed me to play with a lonely panda child on the beach and then speak with his absent parents to persuade the family to spend time together, and another simply involved checking on the panda I rescued from a cave to make sure she was okay before having an in-depth conversation about mental health.

It’s touching and sweet, something that I think will resonate with both adults and younger players alike. There were just enough of these little moments that they never bogged the game down or took away from its humour, but instead offered bite-sized pieces of inspiration and encouragement, which I loved.

The final verdict

I went into Dancing Pandas: Ranger’s Path not knowing much about the game or what to expect. But I came out having had a wonderful time despite the game’s frustrating camera issues and my inability to connect a controller. The colourful world of Dancing Pandas is fun to explore and gorgeous to look at, the quests were engaging, the calm music was fantastic and reinforced the game’s wholesome feel, and the characters were memorable.

The humour landed perfectly and the quirky dialogue had me laughing multiple times throughout my four-hour playthrough. Most importantly though, I enjoyed seeing Mico grow as a character while helping those around him, too. It’s a wholesome, cosy, and entertaining experience that I think adults who are seeking something uplifting or straightforward in a world that’s so bogged down in negativity will enjoy. It’s also something you can easily enjoy with younger players and can serve as a wonderful introduction to gaming.

A review copy was provided by Bonus Stage Publishing for PC.
Dancing Pandas: Ranger’s Path is available now for PC via Steam for £10.99 / €12.99 / $12.99.