The Path, PC/Mac – Review
The Path, PC – £6.29
Review by Bobby Foster
I’ve become a willing participant in the rape and murder of seven young women. I say “young women”, but five of them you’d definitely call girls. What worries me is that I’m not sure I even regret it.
It needn’t have worked out like this. I’d happily have taken each of them safely to Grandma’s house and let them live there happily ever after. To begin with that’s what I did, and young sweet Robin looked so peaceful cuddled up next to Grandma. But the game wasn’t about that. It told me I hadn’t found any of the secret rooms, picked up any of the collectibles, nor met “the wolf”. I had failed. It was clear that next time, I would have to walk off the path.
Things then started to get strange. I headed off into those woods determined to keep sight of where I’d come from, but along the way I must have let myself get turned around. Pretty quickly I’d lost all my bearings and couldn’t find my way back even though I’d wanted to. Knowing I’d gone off course and uncertain of how to proceed, I had no choice but to wander aimlessly for a while. Then in the distance I caught a glimpse of another young girl, dressed in white, running between the trees. Was she a ghost? I didn’t know. But by now I had no idea where I was and felt the only thing I could do was run after her.
She led me to an abandoned theatre. We got up on the stage and danced and played together, and then she lent in to give me a hug. Before I had any chance of finding out who she might be, she ran off.
Lost and alone again, I kept walking. I came across an abandoned wheel chair, and sat on it.
“Wolves are just dogs. But werewolves are like people.”
What did that mean? I couldn’t be sure. But it certainly seemed I was getting closer to encountering the wolf. I knew now that it was only the wolf that could lead me to “Success”.
…
This is the Path. Incredibly bold in its choice of subject matter and for its narrative ambiguity, but sufficiently flawed that I have to break out of telling you the story of my game to explain some of the stuff that’s likely to test your patience.
For starters, the pacing. Everything is designed to make you take your time. If you run for too long, your view pans down, and collectable items and interactive objects fade out of view. There are some moments when you can only move in a straight line, crawling forward at a painfully slow pace with no interaction required aside from holding down the forward key. At others, you’ll be forced to move along a fixed path regardless of what key you press, taking in the scenes like you’re riding a demented Tunnel-o-Love. You often end up with the sense that you’re bumbling (slowly) through what the game wants to show you, rather than being in control of what’s happening.
It gets repetitive too. Despite sublime sound design, the woods themselves are flat and often uninteresting. Aside from the collection of slightly-interactive objects through which the abstract narrative unfolds, you spend most of your time collecting the 144 flowers there are in the game. What’s the point of collecting these flowers? I don’t know. I finished with 142 of them, and it was never made clear to me what benefit they were giving me or what I might gain from painstakingly trying to find the last couple.
And while the game isn’t very long, it would surely benefit from being even shorter. I love the subversive way the player is given an instruction that they need to wilfully disobey (“GO TO GRANDMA’S HOUSE AND STAY ON THE PATH”), but after the fifth or sixth time it loses all of its power. Similarly, during the first hour or two of playing it makes sense that you’re encouraged to play slowly, as you need a bit of time and space to think and work out what’s going on. But by the fifth or sixth hour you feel like you’ve seen enough, and the game’s slow and uncooperative controls become frustrating instead of perhaps, err, “making a provocative statement about about mankind’s desire to manipulate other people”.
Yet I want to give Tale of Tales the benefit of the doubt. It’s hugely refreshing to play something that isn’t just about goodies fighting baddies, where the imagery is full of symbolic ambiguities, and the story is implied rather than made explicit. It’s still pretty rare that game-makers trust players enough to fill in any narrative blanks for themselves, and the Path gives me hope that it will one day be possible for me to play a game and feel like an adult instead of an over-grown child.
So much of modern game design has become an exercise in bombarding the player with fun, and providing an unrelenting stream of stuff intended to stop the player getting bored or from making them want to take a break. The Path becomes boring, as well as genuinely horrific at times. I played it in forty minute chunks across the space of a week, and would be amazed if anyone could stand much longer sittings with it. Yet every day I found myself wanting to go back to it, because so much of my time not playing it I’d spent thinking about it.
The Path is atmospheric. It’s thought-provoking. And I took away as much from playing it as I have from any art gallery I’ve been to. Does that make it a good game? I hope so.
Well on my play through I encountered at most one rape. Seems to me like if you saw any more than that then you got that from your own head rather than the game. It’s true every girl does end up dying but death in the game is just an allegory for growing up. The death of innocence. They all lose some childish aspect of themselves through their encounters with their own private wolves and so the innocent child they were before the encounter dies. That’s just the nature of growing up. Just like growing up it looks a lot scarier than it is. The message of the game is that growing up in important and necessary, that the children need to die and avoiding this gets you no where. It’s a direct reply to the original Little Red Riding Hood’s moralistic message that chastity must be preserved at all cost.
That’s a nice interpretation, although I don’t think you can suggest that there’s a definitive “message of the game”. My point, and in fact the thing I like most, is that you can take away what you want from it.
Well yeah but you know, you can’t let justified doubt interfere with pretentious art critism. 😛
Good reveiw by the way. I forgot to say that in my first comment, how rude.
If you think rape that says more about you. As Planescape Torment says: What does it take to change a man? In the case of The Path it’s the ability to look beyond the obvious, dig deeper than the superficial and try to keep at bay the media you have grown up with that has little in the way of sophistication when it comes to story telling!