The Path
INFO: If you've tried out The Endless Forest or The Graveyard, you know Tale of Tales crafts some peculiar products. Their latest game, The Path, is described on the developer's site as 'A Short Horror Game.' From that tag maybe you'd get the impression it's something basic and clear cut. A few monsters here and there, some shock scares, and a disturbing revelation at the end of the storyline, that sort of thing. Yet The Path veers far away from what would be considered a traditional gaming experience. Depending on your personality and what you aim to get out of the products you play, it can serve as a genuinely affecting experience.
The setup is pretty simple, built using the Little Red Riding Hood premise of bringing a basket to grandma's house. Six sisters of ages ranging from nine to 19 wait in a room, their body language and styles of clothing all differing, reflecting bits of their personality. Over the course of the game you'll play as them all, but the order is up to you. After making a selection, the girl is set on a path. 'Go to Grandmother's House,' the game tells you, 'And Stay on the Path.'
As it turns out, those directions are somewhat misleading, as going directly to grandmother's house result does not move the game forward, instead returning the girl to the character select screen. To make progress, you have to explore the woods surrounding the path and encounter a wolf. The wolves differ for each girl and seem to serve as metaphors for the internal struggles of each as they relate to sexual curiosity, artistic expression, escapism, and experimentation.
Since the game forces you to initiate the encounters with the wolves, thereby forcing the girls to engage their core beliefs and insecurities, the game can be seen as a sort of severely fragmented interactive representation of the process of willing yourself to come to terms with the vastness of the human experience. The Path's style of horror isn't the overt kind where a zombie suddenly crashes through a window. It's a feeling that lurks at the back of your brain, bubbling up during periods of intense personal change. It's the terror of encountering the unknown; the fear of the revelations a new experience might produce as well as how it might afterward manifest itself in your thoughts and world.
The game doesn't really try to supply any answers or spell out anything with any kind of exactitude. The point of the experience is to elicit emotion and encourage interpretation, and the manifold possibilities of such a range are reinforced by the game's graphics and sound. Across the screen skitter bursts of images and scribbles. The color saturation of the game world is in constant flux. The sharpness fades in and out. Deep in the woods you may find the color suddenly drained from the scene, with the schizophrenic soundtrack shifting from icy piano melodies to heartbeats, the creaks of playground equipment, and furious flurries of stringed instruments. While it's never outright frightening, there's an unsettling quality to the presentation that succeeds in making you uneasy even as there's no pressing threat.
Once you meet the wolf, things get even stranger. The screen blacks out following a cut scene between the girl and the wolf so you're never shown what transpires, though the implications can be disturbing. Waking up directly outside grandmother's house, the girl is disheveled and the screen is full of grey, suggesting whatever lesson was learned sapped her of something, whether it's youth, innocence, or something more twisted isn't made clear. Then you must guide the girl into the house, where, depending on what you've done in the forest, you'll encounter a nightmarish assault of light and perspective as you inch forward along a set path, leading to a final barrage of splintered imagery. A mission rating screen pops up afterward, a gaming convention rendered bizarre considering the context, and you're graded. If you're successful, the girl is removed from the selectable pool and you pick another.
It's easy to see a lot of gamers being put off by something like The Path. It doesn't have much in the way of traditional gameplay. In the woods you control the girls from a third-person perspective. Even though there's no threat in the world that you have to actively avoid, wandering is never relaxing. You'll find points of interest like ruined sections of fences and walls, a television set, and a well, among other things. At some of these only specific girls can interact, sometimes adding items or memories to your inventory, which is styled after Little Red Riding Hood's picnic basket. Really the point of running around, examining, and picking things up, which is all you do in the game, is to familiarize yourself with the mindset of each character and how they compare to each other, along with providing a kind of context for the wolf encounter. If that's not something that sounds appealing to you, then you're probably going to hate this game. If you're not a fan of filmmaker David Lynch's work, you're definitely going to hate this game.
If you want you can poke around picking up ghostly flowers, triggering memories and wondering about the girl in the white dress who keeps running across the periphery of your vision. Is she your subconscious mind leading you toward personal growth and wisdom? Is she trying to shield you from the pitfalls of reality by leading you back the path and the status quo? Or is she the embodiment of all the game's themes, with the six sisters serving as slivers of her own personality? Like the rest of The Path, it's never explained, but the allure of trying to formulate a satisfying theory is what's meant to keep you wandering through, like an adventure game with metaphors in the place of usable inventory items.
Technical data:
Dimension: 249 MB
Language: Inglese
Genre: Horror
Developer: Tale of Tales
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