The Path describes itself as a horror take on Little Red Riding Hood, but in the end, it stands far apart from even the best of the horror genre's traditional stewards. Sure, as noted, there are more than enough design issues here to go around, and if I was going to break it down, I'd find several issues with the presentation as well. While I found myself annoyed by the mechanical obstacles in my way, the slow walking speed, the abhorrent object interaction, the motivation tightrope remained steady enough for me to hold my balance all the way to the end. Thus, I will set that aside, at least for tonight.
There are going to be spoilers aplenty in this entry, so consider yourself warned. This is not a review in the gaming sense. I'm going to discuss the game, how it affected me, and my take on it, and the content of the story figures integrally into any discussion we're going to have here.
Experimental game studio Tale of Tales is expert in atmosphere, and when we're told to guide the six Little Red sisters curiously off the Path, we're met with a foreboding and endless forest that sets a truly ominous tone. Our exploring is rewarded with the tastefully alluded brutal rape of all six sisters on their way to grandmother's house, and their equally brutal and tasteful murder once they arrive. The wolf doing the damage shows up in many sorts of sheep's clothing, each time taking advantage of the innocent Reds from a different angle, be it as a hard-working woodsman offering beers or a playful girl in a field of flowers.
While it's easy to fixate on the sensationalism of a game featuring the implicit rape and murder of girls as young as nine, the reason The Path is worth respect (unlike another recent center of the games + rape discussion) is that it uses the utter viciousness of its story to a worthwhile end. Both its ultimate end and the imagery vessel it uses to get there are extremely impactful.
Naturally, the rape itself is completely implied with imposing music and a simple fade to black. I will not pretend to claim that I know what it's like to be the victim of such an attack, but the slow, broken walk of the battered girl through her grandmother's house got through to me on a level that few games ever have. Seeing horrible reminders of the attack in the walls, the doors, everywhere you turn and in everything you see, communicates the depth of the scar such a horrible experience can leave on one's psyche.
Being put out of your misery once you reach Grandmother's bedroom feels like exactly that; the wolf granting a welcome release from the gauntlet of painful memories. This imagery affected me and disturbed me unquestionably, but that's only half the story. On the surface, the Path is an expertly executed exercise in communicating emotion through imagery. Where the Path plays beyond is in its use of this brutal interpretation of a timeless tale as a fascinating allegory.
In my eyes, there are only two characters in this story, the grandmother, and the granddaughter, the girl in the white dress, retracing her grandmother's steps. Each of the Riding Hoods play the role of one stage of the old woman's young life, from the bright eyed Robin to the learned Scarlet. The wolf, in his many forms, represents the betrayal and cruelty waiting out in the world when you stray from what you know, what is safe, and what is easy. Each betrayer plays on an element of trust and vulnerability, as the teacher whose guiding and nurturing hand , or the pet who leaves this world and teaches death to a child before she is ready. In each experience, we feel Red's pain quite intimately, before, with a sickening thud, she is no more, replaced by the sadder but wiser.
This is a game about pain, suffering, recovering, and finally moving on. The scarred journey through grandmother's house becomes much more easily empathized if we were to map it to the pain of a first lost love. When we finally move on and put the shattering pain behind us, we do often feel born anew. It's a vicious ordeal, but the message of this game is that that our innocence being raped and murdered by the pain of the cruel world is also the cost of advancing, growing up, and ultimately, of living.
I'm not going to get mired in whether this sort of storytelling is the next frontier or what it means to the so-called "art game" movement. While it's obscured behind awkward and simple mechanics, I don't think the intimate and mature braiding of the Path's powerful imagery with its moving narrative would be quite the same if it were not something that we played. For The Path that I took tonight, that's all that really matters.
UPDATE: As L.B. Jeffries and I were discussing the differences in our experiences in the comments section, it came to light that the presentation of each of the girls' third act seems to vary wildly depending on how the game is played and can lead to starkly different interpretations of the meaning of the events of the game. It seemed appropriate to note in the main post that my impressions may differ dramatically from yours depending on which side of the game you were shown. This entry is a fair reflection of what I encountered.
