The Path review

The review isn’t anything special in terms of TEH SPOILARZ, or even explaining what’s going on, but it does distill how the game plays for folks who might not be sure if it’s for them. However, I feel The Path works best if you just start it up and figure it out. In a way, the couple of people who are feeling a bit lost and frustsrated in this thread are doing it exactly right. :)

 -Tom

Well, I opened this up again when I got home. It was different this time, with Carmen. I still couldn’t get the girl in white to lead me back to the path, but I encountered a different “area” in the woods this time, and also met my wolf. Weird thing was that when I re-loaded, it started me from the path again, and didn’t give me credit for finding a bunch of items with Carmen last time.

There are a lot of things about this “game” that make me raise my eyebrows, and so far most of them don’t have anything to do with the content.

The girl will come if you just wait. Soon enough she’ll grab your hand and lead you back to the path, but it takes a few moments to happen.

There’s also an autosave that should save every 15 minutes, too bad about the game not remembering what you did earlier… that sucks.

jack thompson will latch onto this as a game for pedos.

I played as the little girl (Ruby?). I found the white dressed girl and she did lead me by the hand back to the path. Maybe only the little girls will follow her?
As for emotional effect, the game depressed me even though I didn’t understand much. But then any game with a 5 years old girl will do that to me.

I guess we can consider this a sort of spoilery thread – as far as I’m concerned, any discussion of this game is fairly spoiler, since it’s 99% about discovering instead of playing – so here’s a tip: the flowers you collect have an effect on the game. So you might consider grabbing a few if you have nothing else to do. They’ll eventually help you find your way.

-Tom

Those flowers led me on a wild goose chase, literally.

Disclaimer: I’ve only gotten to Grandmother’s house with Scarlet and Carmen thus far.

I think I’ve come to the conclusion that this isn’t for me. As horror, it fails to convey any real fear to me; it’s simultaneously too abstract and too direct, and the images are too repetitive for me to feel scared at all. I want to like it, I really do, but it’s an item collection mechanic with an extremely light narrative laid on top.

I understand that it’s supposed to be interpretive, but I don’t think there’s much of anything to interpret. Each of the wolf encounters I had ended the same way. (This left very little up to interpretation/imagination, imo) The sequences once you get to the house border on non-sensical.

As for the “poetry of experience” or whatever that phrase was, I don’t feel very attached to the girls, mostly because of the game mechanics. I admit, the first time I went into Grandmother’s house and had to take each individual step, I was impressed. The second time, though, I was just annoyed. I had just spent almost an hour wandering around the woods seeing the exact same crap over and over again, and even though I saved before I quit, I didn’t get credit for all the stuff I found. That really drew me out of whatever they were trying to expose me to. An incredibly slow turning speed and the mechanic of NOT doing anything in order to interact with something just don’t jive well with my sense of immersion.

I hope other people are having a better time with this. I intend to see it through to the end and get all six girls to Grandmother’s, but I might just run them all straight there to see what happens. The journey through the woods is too much like work for me.

The thing that puzzles me is that the girls got ‘ravaged’ (whatever that means) by the big bad wolf and the game counts that as a … wait for it… SUCCESS!?

Something to keep in mind is that the game is deliberately challenging some of your assumptions about how games work. Which may or may not click with everyone (it doesn’t seem to with frank austin, for instance). I think that’s part of a larger metaphor, but I’ve only finished a few of the girls at this point.

Also: I have never before played a game that approached the mechanic of giving the player multiple lives so, uhm, literally.

Just as an addendum to what Ben said, I went into The Path not expecting anything game-like at all. Certain things about it’s design that I pointed out already (low-level interactivity, nonsense imagery) don’t work for me at all, but that doesn’t mean it won’t for someone else.

For people who have enjoyed this, for people who think of it as interpretive, can I ask a kind of silly question? This is spoiler-y, so, read at your own peril:

What the fuck does a dining set around a tree stump encased in glass and presumably underwater have anything to do with girls getting raped? Maybe I’m just not artsy enough to understand the imagery, but it’s so WTF that it threw me right out of whatever they were trying to accomplish.

I haven’t seen that one, so I don’t know. The game is not about girls getting raped, though.

I intend to see it through to the end and get all six girls to Grandmother’s, but I might just run them all straight there to see what happens.

Do this.

Yeah, I’ve gotten two more there, and I realized that it was merely coincidence that the first two I picked are obviously about rape.

Sadly, I got stuck on a piece of geometry and had to quit out.

My review/mini rant is up now on my blog : http://chronicgamedesigner.blogspot.com/2009/03/path-sorry-no-witty-comment-this-time.html

I technically finished the game earlier at just about 4 hours and I’m completely confused by the game. I still have several items and about 30 flowers to find though, anyway I’m looking forward to reading some analysis of the story.

spoiler warning:

If anyone would like to fill me in on what the hell is going on in the grandmother house that would be great. Also what little understanding of the plot I have, I don’t think that the nightmare version of the house meant that the girls died for the most part. Several of the girls fade to black didn’t really show them in any danger I think.

I’m still mulling it over, but I do have a few thoughts to offer. So, SPOILERS, obviously.

Be wary of being too literal in how you interpret the game. For one, I’m not sure that there are “girls,” per se. I think there may just be one girl (the girl in white), and Ruby, Rose, Scarlet and the rest are just personifications of various aspects of that girl. Perhaps all the possible deaths that she might encounter.

They all die. The game is about death, in a nutshell, and the path that you take to get there. That’s why there is such a pervasive theme of inevitability throughout, whether it’s the way that every girl eventually has to meet her wolf, or the unwavering trek through the house afterwards. The final destination is unavoidable. You can wander around as much as you want, accumulating a bunch of pointless possessions that can’t save you from your ultimate fate, but everybody ends up at grandmother’s house in the end.

Grandmother’s house is a metaphor for the end of life. If you walk straight there along the path, you get to see the grandmother… and it’s you. Whichever character you are playing, that’s who is lying in the bed at the end of the road (check out the portrait over the bed), as an old lady at the end of her life.

Just put in an hour or so, here is my current theory, without finishing the game. (Ah I remember you, Silent Hill 2!)

Since this game is obviously based on the little riding hood, the objective is to somehow take out the wolf. The wolf is always in grandma’s room when you eventually arrived in the house unharmed, so you have to stray off the path to get the solution. There is always an obvious ending for a girl which ends up with the her being ravaged by the wolf (ravage here is just descriptive: after the ‘bad’ encounter they all look, well, ravaged). The objective then is to find some way to have a ‘good’ wolf encounter.

Various objects collected by different girls (some objects can only be collected by certain girl) can eventually lead to that ‘good’ encounter. I will be playing the game on this basis, using all the girls to collect as much stuff as I can. Another conjecture is that once you collected enough items, you can use any one of them to get the ‘good’ encounter.

I thank Roberta Williams school of adventure gaming for this theory.

While I haven’t found all of the items, I’d bet cash money that no matter how many you find, they will still be irrelevant when it comes to meeting the wolf. Some of them are clearly meant to lead you on, and make you believe that they can help you in some way (one of the items is a silver bullet, for instance).

But you can’t beat death. None of the items do anything–in the context of facing death, material possessions are pointless. All the items that you collect along the way just end up collecting dust in the old lady’s house at the end of the road. Quite literally; if you walk straight to the house at any given time, everything you have found so far is there. Another clue that the grandmother = you.

You sick bastard. :p

That was something, all right. Flawed, but haunting. Spoilers ahoy.

I think it was overscored, in a musical sense. Creepy piano chords, vaguely offtune humming, singsong words here and there–but constantly. I think it would have been better served by making a lot more use of silence, ambient forest sounds and the like. Daylight bird song on the first bits of the path itself, the flutter and caw of the crows flitting about, and when you stray off the path and everything goes washed out monochrome, that transition would have rather more impact by simply going dead quiet rather than Looping Piano Tune #2 With Chorus. Plus, then forest sounds at night. Bugs, the crackle of unseen creatures scurrying about underbrush, etc. A forest at night has great sound built in; they should have used it.

But other than that minor bit of armchair design, I really enjoyed it overall. Nicely open to interpretations–that all the “girls” are really just aspects of the girl in white is certainly a strong one. The selection room steadily emptying out as you play through leading to the epilogue of only the girl in white to be selected is another bit of evidence there, but there’s definitely room for other interpretations, just like every other aspect, wolf encounters included. (Also really liked the post-epilogue restart, of all the girls filing back in, and girl in bloodstained white leaving.)

Things I’m vaguely curious about but haven’t tried, mainly due to not being patient enough to: for the girls that you can still control after they find their wolf (Robin and one other just walked directly to the house after they got up with no input from me), if (you’re even allowed to?) you walk off the path again, does the girl in white fetch you? Also, at the very beginning, if you turn around and hit the payphone at the end of the pavement, you return to the selection screen. Is it possible, post-wolf, to turn away from grandmother’s house and trudge all the way back there? Like I say, curious, but nowhere near enough patience to find out.

No. Post wolf, you can only walk in one direction–towards the house. And every time a girl finds the wolf, she wakes up a little closer to the house. The first one wakes up on the path, the next one is a little closer, and then eventually they are on the bridge, and the last girl wakes up directly in front of the gate and walks right in.