The Path is a small independent game by a little shop called Tale of Tales that is described as a horror adventure. The fact that it is an ‘indie’ game sets up several expectations – low budget, lousy graphics, limited scope and appeal, and somewhat derivative of existing works. It probably also suggests to you that it is a ‘casual’ game. If you start playing with those expectations, you will soon feel like you’ve been smacked upside the head with a baseball bat. The Path might be small and short, but it is certainly not a casual game … and it is unlike any other game you’ve ever played. Intrigued? Read on!
The Path is an innovative retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story. As the description says “Six sisters live in an apartment in the city. One by one their mother sends them on an errand to their grandmother, who is sick and bedridden. The teenagers are instructed to go to grandmother’s house deep in the forest and, by all means, to stay on the path! Wolves are hiding in the woods, just waiting for little girls to stray.”
So … Little Red Riding Hood, eh? Yes, you know, the one where you are on an errand taking a basket to grandmother’s house? This is the same core story, but retold six times from a modern perspective. The girls vary in age from 9 to 19, and the game changes depending upon which one you are controlling. There are almost no environmental sound effects, but instead you are treated to a continuous soundtrack that shifts as the game progresses and matches up wonderfully with everything that happens on screen.
The tale of The Path really needs to be looked at two ways, so here goes. Note: the second analysis could potentially spoil the experience for you, so proceed with caution!
The Path as a Game
You control each little girl identically, from a third person over-the-shoulder perspective with a fairly simple set of controls. You use the WASD keys to move and the mouse to alter the camera angle. There is a button to run, and you interact with things by… releasing all buttons. All of this is introduced when you start the game with the first sister and serves as your only tutorial… and really the only thing approaching direction you will get during the entire game.
Visually the game is actually quite impressive: it is dark and moody and very disturbing. You start standing right where the road ends and the path begins. Behind you is the city and in front of you the path leads on as far as you see. On either side of you are the woods.
Once you get used to the play style, the game becomes more straightforward. There is not much more I can say without revealing stuff that would ruin the fun for you.
The one issue that many folks will have with the game is the pacing – glacial is the only word that comes to mind. There is a run button, but as is true with most adventure games, running means missing pretty much everything. This means you need to walk around and constantly observe your surroundings. As you progress you will realize there were things you missed – again pretty typical – and this means backtracking to get every detail. At the pace you’re moving this is rather tedious.
But you will do it if you are a fan of horror or adventure games, because the rewards are simply worth it. This is a very good adventure game that is also much more than that. There is replayability built-in after you complete all six sisters’ stories and the epilogue and are launched back into the room, but even without it The Path is definitely well worth much more than the budget price.
The Path as Existential Contemplation
There have been a load of ‘games as art’ discussions that have sprung up around The Path, and for good reason. There have been many games held up as artistic for one reason or another: Planescape: Torment and The Witcher for their writing, GTA IV and Indigo Prophecy for putting you into the midst of a highly cinematic movie-like experience, and many others for a variety of reasons.
Yet The Path is different – it contemplates a philosophy and forces us to confront that metaphorically through playing the game. You are playing six different incarnations of Red Riding Hood at different stages of childhood, presented with a seemingly simple task – stay on the straight and narrow path towards the goal in front of you and never stray into the luring dangers that you know can consume you. Yet if you do so, if all you do is walk straight to grandmother’s house… you die, and are met with a game over screen.
So you MUST go into the woods, even though the only rule you received was NOT to go into the woods. This is where things get interesting.
You cannot go into the woods because of the wolves, or so you are told. But what if the wolves you meet are not furry creatures with sharp teeth, but rather metaphoric wolves constructed from your past experiences, fears, and future desires that you need to understand and confront in order to be ready to cross the threshold into grandmother’s house?
That is the question posed by The Path, and one that makes it an amazing experience that was something completely unexpected for me. You roam the woods with each of the sisters, and depending on the age of the girl you will uncover different experiences.
There is no explicit sex or violence in the game, but there are implied cues throughout. Some of them are rather disturbing – these are all young women, some of the most vulnerable individuals in our society, so seeing them imperiled immediately tugs at our senses. But it is not a simple gimmick like it is in Prey or Bioshock – this is a truly mature experience that makes us think rather than showing us contrived scenes to play on rote surface reactions. It is truly worthwhile immersing yourself in this experience, even if it is relatively short lived.
Final Thoughts on The Path
Suffice to say that I felt that The Path succeeded wonderfully as both a thought provoking experience and as an adventure game. The price is stunning – you can grab the game for the price commanded by many games on the iTunes App store, yet this experience offers so much more. My advice – if you are at all a fan of horror and adventure games grab this, but if you know that nothing will get you past the slow pacing you might want to give it a pass. If you can handle the slow speed, you will definitely be rewarded for your patience!
Pros:
+ Stunningly original
+ Never the same experience twice
+ Tremendously satisfying experience
+ Budget price
Cons:
– Glacial pacing
Game Info:
Platform: PC, Mac; digital download only
Publisher: Tale of Tales
Developer: Tale of Tales
Release Date: 3/18/09 on PC, 5/7/09 on Mac
Genre: Adventure/Horror
ESRB Rating: Mature
Players: 1
I have loved technology for as long as I can remember - and have been a computer gamer since the PDP-10! Mobile Technology has played a major role in my life - I have used an electronic companion since the HP95LX more than 20 years ago, and have been a 'Laptop First' person since my Compaq LTE Lite 3/20 and Powerbook 170 back in 1991! As an avid gamer and gadget-junkie I was constantly asked for my opinions on new technology, which led to writing small blurbs ... and eventually becoming a reviewer many years ago. My family is my biggest priority in life, and they alternate between loving and tolerating my gaming and gadget hobbies ... but ultimately benefits from the addition of technology to our lives! 
Excellent review, Mike. The game sounds absolutely brilliant, definitely the type of “different” game I’m sure I’d love.
And I didn’t even realize it had been out on PC already. I thought it was only a Mac game for some reason. Will definitely be picking this up on Steam when I have time to squeeze another game into my rotation.
One thing – I am serious abuot the ‘glacial pacing’ thing. When I first tried to play, I was going to squeeze in a quick fifteen minutes and see what I could do … the answer was nothing. nd the rushing effort was just frustrating. The game is meant to play slow and anything but slow play will be less than satisfying.
Hehe, not a problem for me. I tend to plod along in every game I play to begin with, so The Path should be right up my alley 😉
Seriously, I would pity anyone who tried to sit down and watch me play a game considering how much of a completionist and perfectionist as I am with games. Take BioShock as an example- I’d stop and comb through each area for at least 10 minutes making sure I found all the audio diaries and hidden item drops. I even began to bore myself sometimes lol
This review is… shocking. It’s riddled with errors and misconceptions, not just misleading about the game in question, but on games in general.
“The fact that it is an ‘indie’ game sets up several expectations…”
It does: But they are nothing like the laundry list of insults that came after this phrase. Indie games are the most experimental games out there — not all of them, but the bigger ones for sure, like Gish or Dyson. Poor graphics and limited appeal — this may apply to freeware, but most developers, indie or otherwise know that a certain level of polish is required to demand any kind of price tag.
“…the pacing – glacial…”
This is ridiculous exaggeration. Yes; The Path is a slow game. It’s deliberate; the pacing sets in a mood that is fairly vital to the game. It isn’t however hopelessly plodding, as it doesn’t take long to start finding things if you aren’t rushing. Falling in love with the ‘Run’ button probably had you miss all of the Flower Coins, which vanish if you’re running. Collecting these will give you indicators to things in your environment so that you don’t get lost and bored. You also failed to mention that the camera shifts to a bird’s eye view while running, which limits your visibility. The Path is a game that recommends you WALK.
“There have been a load of ‘games as art’”
It’s a little terrifying that the most artistic games you can name off are Planescape, The Witcher, GTA IV and Indigo Prophecy. Nothing for Portal, or Shadow of the Colossus? Nothing on the broad streak of experimental indie games? No Seiklus, or 6 Days a Stranger? Surely you must know SOME game that’s tried to be more meaningful than the ones you’ve listed, why you didn’t draw that comparison, I don’t know.
“all you do is walk straight to grandmother’s house… you die, and are met with a game over screen.”
This is just complete fabrication. If you walk straight to the Grandmother’s house, you FAIL. The implication given by the overall game is that NOT dying is failure, or rather, to not encounter the wolf is failure.
The fact that you don’t mention any thing like collecting memories, or that many of the locations in the woods only appear for certain girls, that there is no mention the Girl in White, or the deformation of the Grandmother’s house, and no sign of the philosophical writing in the game or that the girls eventually go missing… it all makes me wonder; did you even play the game? Because if you did, I can only encourage you to take a second look — you seem to have missed a lot that should have made it in to a review this long.
The Path is an excellent game — I feel this review does it a disservice. While not so vile as to recommend that it needs explosions or weapon selection, this review still glosses over many of the games strengths and makes a number of startling statements that are generally misleading or broadly unrepresentative of the game as a whole.
Wow Greg, that is a fairly hostile post. And considering that I really loved the game and recommend it highly, which you also seem to do
All that stuff you mentioned at the end is stuff that I alluded to as things that really needed to be experienced – that NOT going straight to grandmother’s house is what the game is all about. I didn’t want to detail out the entire experience of what is in essence a fairly short game (OK, I’m sure you’ll take issue with that as well!).
On different game forums I see folks deride anything turn-based or adventure games in general as being boring. I don’t consider The Path as boring at all, but it is paced in a way that most gamers will have difficulty adapting to immediately. I think it is extremely worthwhile to do so …
And when it comes to games as art, you would hold up the writing of Portal and Shadows of the Colossus to the two I mentioned, sorry I can’t help you out. Portal is a masterful 2-hour playing out of singular gameplay mechanic, sort of like Braid in that regard. Shadow of the Colossus is a short action game with an awful camera system. GTA IV I am highly critical of, but it is clear that the developers were going for a ‘you are the movie’ sort of thing. And Indigo Prophesy, again in a flawed way, even had ‘new movie’ as the term for starting a new game.
Wow, Mike, maybe I need to reread your review. I was under the impression you loved the game. Oh wait… you did!
Haven’t played the game myself yet though, so not going to insert myself into the debate over specifics about gameplay content. I’m just blown away because the review I read was very positive about the game.
One thing though, Mike… please don’t brush Shadows of the Colossus off as a “short action game”, that is about the most inaccurate description of the game I’ve ever heard lol. Both it and ICO have been two of the leading focal points in the “games as art” debate. Just sayin’ 😉
I know Matt – but Portal is also a brilliant game, but I chose a couple of examples specifically based on non-gameplay areas where the ‘game as art’ stuff is brought up, writing and cinematic feel.
He is right about the inaccurate way I described the ‘fail’ as ‘death and game over’, but to me that was just a way of saying – look, you are told to stay on the path and go straight to grandmother’s house, but by doing so you fail totally.
But I was also surprised to get jumped on for a game that I feel I frothed about in terms of my strong positive recommendation.
Ok; first thing — Michael, I owe you something of an apology. I read this post first thing in the morning while diagnosing a fatal error in my laptop; following that with your line of ‘indie expectations’, I was not in a good mood for writing. Something like road rage, really — and inexcusable.
However; I really do feel that you missed out on the appealing aspects of the game — the review sounds like YOU were bored with it. The open writing and the symbolic visuals… not to mention the self-correcting game mechanics, like the map, or being able to follow around the Girl in White if you’re lost. And while the game is slow, the phrase ‘glacial’ invokes something with virtually no perceivable pace. I mean, really — glaciers are REALLY DAMN SLOW.
The reason I’ll take Portal and Shadow of the Colossus over GTA and Planescape is because they’re games that really tried to experiment with their presentation, to really give the player a really different sensation while playing the game. GTA IV does a lot of things different, but realistically, it’s just polish and refinement on every version of the game preceeding it. Invoking GTA as an art game is sorta like trying to compare a great mob-action movie with modern film art, and they just don’t match up at all. Very apples and oranges. The Path doesn’t bother with a lot of reward mechanisms we expect without justification in most games, and does something really different, which it does need to be recognized for.
Oh I completely understood the examples you provided. You can’t list ’em all for crying out loud. Was just jabbin’ at you for fun. Can’t have anyone speak ill of SotC 🙂
Thanks for following up Greg!
I am always open to learn how my interpretation of one element of a game can really hang like a cloud over the rest, even if I love the game! I got loads of crap on one Mac forum because I was so negative about Aspyr’s GameAgent digital download service.
Obviously my intent was not to come across as bored – it was more to say that in these days where games are consumed like chugging beers, The Path is a game that really deserves and needs to be savored like a fine Ste. Emilion …
As for ‘games as art’, GTA 4 isn’t a game I would choose – it is one that has been touted by many others. In fact, in other reviews Matt and I have both said we’re not big fans.
Planescape represents (along with The Witcher, NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer, Betrayal at Krondor, Ultima IV and VII, and a few others) the pinnacle of writing in a game as far as I’m concerned. The reason I bring that into the picture is more to contrast with what The Path is doing. No game writing matches the great novels, no game soundtrack matches the great music of the ages, and no cinematic game sequences matches the great movies. So what The Path is doing is unique because it incorporates a very unique way of approaching a game experience.
Heh. I’d feel pretty terrible if I’d left it at that snobby, angry rant. I’m a fan of indie games, I like to promote them all I can, so I guess when I got it in my head that you were tearing at The Path for not being more like big-studio stuff, I got more than a little miffed. It’s good to see that not all disagreements (passionate or otherwise, justified or not) can be resolved more peacefully on the web — we don’t see enough of that.
I think I’m level with your POV here now, though.
As Planescape: Torment goes — it did have good writing, but I can’t help but be convinced it could have been delivered better. While some of the gameplay did help to advance the story and explain the characters, most of the quality in it’s story telling came in a format as text heavy as ZORK.
Not always a bad thing, I suppose, and given it’s historical context it’s entirely forgivable, but compared to The Path’s bite sized, free-floating, context-free text chunks, Planescape is something… novelesque. Now, that’s not a bad thing either, but I believe it shows hope that we’re getting closer to procedural and modular storytelling, which is when the writing in games will truly become amazing.
Food for thought?
Greg – I totally get what you are saying … I guess I come from being a big advocate of Spiderweb Software, and love their stuff and the recent Eschalon Book 1 indie RPG, as well as the Stephen Peeler’s Depth of Peril and Kivi’s Underworld … all of those games take crap for not having AAA-style graphics, but personally I’ve never had a problem with it.