Finally finished this. My earlier theory doesn’t hold water after all the girls met their personal wolves. I just don’t have the patience to play through it again to see if the items can affect the outcome.
However I don’t think the white girl is the ‘original’ girl, but the hunter in the fable. She helps you out, and from the bloodstain and the end, it seems like she carved open the wolf’s chest and free all those girls.
Also all the different red girls represent some archetype: Robin is the innocent one, Ruby is the one with existential anxiety, Carman is the ‘attention whore’, Rose is the kind and gentle one, Ginger is the tomboy full of vitality (my favourite!), Scarlet is the level-headed one, but yearning to be ‘free’. If they are all the same then the white dress girl must be… every woman (Whitney Houston singing ‘I’m every woman, it’s all in me’…) The picture above grandma’s bed I don’t think has any real significance, the image depends on which girl is supposed to be visiting her.
As for the items, collect enough of the 144 flowers and the game gives you on screen direction to various locations. The secret items open doors in the house (and parade more vista to you). The normal items add and combine with other items in the world, to add decorations in grandma’s house.
All in all it wasn’t much of a horror game, more of a puzzle or adventure game in Roberta Williams’ mould. Although it did remind me of Silent Hill 2. The art direction is whimsical, it is the one thing that really stands out.
Have you guys been reading the discussions over at the developer’s forums? Some pretty interesting thoughts on all the imagery, which makes me feel even more stupid for not getting any of them.
I tried to avoid spoilers before finishing the game, which I now have, but I did read some people talking about rape in the game. To which I now say “what rape?”
Try as I might I couldn’t read any of the Wolf encounters as anything of the sort. In fact, if it weren’t for the unsettling nature of the imagery and music surrounding each encounter, I’d have assumed the Wolf encounters were entirely positive. Ginger runs and plays with another girl. Robin rides a wolf around, piggyback. Rose dances in the air with some sort of cloud spirit. Ruby shares a cigarette with a handsome stranger, and Carmen has a beer in front of a roaring fire with a lumberjack. And Scarlet receives piano instruction from…I dunno who or what that was, really.
I guess if you’re really primed you -might- be able to interpret Ruby and Carmen’s encounters as ending in rape (especially Ruby - the carpet that guy was dragging out into the woods -was- a bit creepy), but I couldn’t.
I don’t think you have to be “really primed” to interpret images of a creepy dude in a creepy atmosphere hanging out with underage girls (giving them alcohol, looming over them) and BAM - next thing you know, they’re waking up on a deserted road in the rain looking broken… as rape. It may not be the “right” interpretation, but I don’t think you have to be looking for it specifically to see it.
Well, when every other encounter ends exactly the same way, regardless of how “creepy” the person is, and given that Carmen plays around with the lumberjack (takes his hat, etc) like she’s completely comfortable with the situation…
Hmm, I was playing[1] this yesterday, and went through all six paths. It’s fascinating, not just in the work itself, but also in people’s reaction to it. Carmen’s story, for example - it can be read as rape, but on my take, it’s fairly heavily sign-posted (taking the cap off the forester, etc.) that Carmen was the wolf in the scenario - reading rape into it seems to be interestingly missing the point. After all, Ginger’s is perhaps the saddest tale[2], and her encounter with the wolf is on the surface the most pleasant of the lot. But then again, one of the creators has explicitly said that there’s no right interpretation, and I’m sure people could view all the tales in completely different ways to mine - this diversity of interpretation is perhaps its biggest success.
(Also, having been awarded the beret of pretension by Tom Chick for a comment on Fidgit, I’ll go balls out and say that the whole piece reminded me most of Bartok’s Count Bluebeard’s Castle - in that a well-known fairy tale is used as a starting point for a work that is not so much about the action, but to bring out, through symbolism, the nature of the characters’ psyche.)
Well I’m afraid it really isn’t gelling with me, it strikes me as a “game” that people who liked The Passage and such will enjoy, and I simply don’t. I saw no reason I needed to control the “game” at all. What was the point of me being there? To represent the futility of decision?
I just ended up wandering, bored, in the woods, moving slowly, while way too much sound came through my speakers. The “game” counts my items at the end, but there’s no way at that speed with no map I’m going to try and find them all and thus I will never know if I missed the point, making the entire experience even more frustrating.
According to the manual if you go straight to grandmother’s house enough times you’ll unlock that basic map that appears after every 100m by pressing the M key. (I haven’t played in a few days and can’t confirm if this is true.)
It’s not hard to tell if you’ve found all the items you can at any given moment - they give a different background in the basket to items that you can obtain in a particular run. The default lack of map is frustrating, though.
(note that the end of chapter count is a count of whether that character in that particular play session found those things, not whether you’ve found them, full stop.)
Because the extent of your interaction is moving. You have a choice in where you go and what order you see everything, but that’s it, it’s an interactive movie otherwise. I’m not saying it’s a good thing or bad, but it’s not very deep as a game. As a narrative it shows you interesting things and withholds enough to let you fill in the gaps, playing on your perception and assumptions.
Wait where you are until a girl in white appears, she’ll lead out back to the path. There’s also a visual clue as to her whereabouts in a kind of directional arrow at the edge of the screen in the form of a curled thorn or something, but I don’t know what you need to do to activate that - I only noticed after finishing one of the girls’ story.
A quick question after finishing w/ one girl. At the end it gives you a screen that tells you what you missed and whatnot. Is that referring just to that girl, or the whole game?
Those aren’t to the girl in white, per se (although she does tend to hang around points of interest). They point the way to interactive sites, within some distance of you. I don’t think they know or care if you’ve already found it, though. And they’re pretty much always on.
Similarly, the black noise/scratches point to the local Wolf. And black lace is Grandmother’s House.
