Tale of Tales’ The Path comes out a week today. It’s a unique game, almost stretching the use of the word “game” to describe it as such, in which you take one of six Little Red Riding Hoods through the woods, on her journey to Grandmother’s house. However, simply completing this task is the shortest route the the game’s ending – indeed, if anything, finishing the game is really the last thing you want to do.
The path is surrounded by woods. Walk straight down it and you’ll find the house in around a minute. Leave the path and things will take a lot longer. In the woods are various locations to discover, which the girls will respond to and maybe gently interact with. I have one of the worst senses of direction known to mankind, so I’m never quite sure if the game is masterful at spinning me around such that I can never retrace my steps, or if it is reordering the position of places behind my back. Whichever, this is a game of getting lost, of the terror of thinking you’ve been moving in a straight line and finding yourself back where you started.
This is difficult to write about. It describes itself as a “short horror game”, but it’s not horror as you might think, or even as it might present itself. The atmosphere is immediately picking up on gothic vibes, especially in the presentation of the six girls. Varying ages, varying styles of dress, each is distinctly morbid. Who you choose defines how you’ll experience the world, from the reaction to objects found to the speed and style of movement. Ranging in age from 9 to 19, each represents a stage of growing up, of the transition from wide-eyed excitement, through cynical disgust, to a craving for adult responsibility. Rose gambols amiably, positive and optimistic. Robin, 9 years old, is slow and aimless. In fact, she’ll fight against you as you try to control her, walking off in her own direction as soon as you take your hands from the keys. Ruby, with her left leg in a brace, walks with a limp but runs fast. She’s 15, broken, and unpleasantly vulnerable. My experience playing her was by far the most uncomfortable. I kind of don’t like the game.
This is not a criticism. If anything, it’s the highest compliment I could pay it. While there’s spooky woods, abandoned playgrounds, creepy dolls, and many other familiar themes of horror, these offer no scares. For me, the horror comes from what appears to be the most abhorrently pessimistic presentation of adolescence. This is a game about doom, about unhappy endings – even a peaceful finish feels wrapped in threats of morbidity and misery.
The atmosphere is probably the most important thing to discuss. It’s almost a character within the game. As you move, scrawlings, doodles, weird motifs scratch themselves into the surface of your screen, while the entire quality of the image constantly shifts from over-saturated colourful worn photographs, to blurred, grainy archaic film footage. Colour washes in and out of the world, while the soundtrack twists and wails. Thoughts from the girls slowly write themselves over the top of it all, often obscured and impossible to read. It makes Monolith’s attempts with FEAR 2 look grossly uninspired.
There’s a strong theme of helplessness throughout. I think perhaps it’s this, more than anything, that takes The Path into what I assume is its intended uncomfortable place. Movement is often achingly slow, slower than in any other game I’ve played. When a girl runs briskly, it’s a remarkable feeling of sudden freedom, then taken from you once again when you reach a certain place, or see a certain sight. Reach Grandmother’s house, and the controls completely betray all your instincts. While you never feel completely in control at any time, here no matter which buttons you press, you move forward. It’s a fascinating decision, and says a great deal about the role of our interaction. Depending upon your actions, and the girl you’re playing, the house can be very different. But most of all, moving forward is often the last thing you want to do. Taking away that choice, but yet still forcing you to press something, anything, in order to keep moving, is sinister.
The speed is a problem. If Tale of Tales push their luck anywhere, it’s here. To move quite so slowly suggests a great deal of confidence in the player’s interest in persisting, and perhaps this isn’t always deserved. I stress “always”. Often it is, but there were certainly times when I was just bored, rather than anticipating.
I’m left feeling incredibly unsure about how to express my negative feelings, having attempted this paragraph half a dozen times. I don’t want to give anything away that happens in the game, but I do want to discuss my experience of playing as Ruby, and why it genuinely upset me. I think this is The Path’s greatest achievement – to be capable of being genuinely upsetting. Although I’m not sure that’s something I want. Well, hell, that’s not true. I do want to be challenged this way, to be left feeling repulsed. I think that’s important. But I think the honest reaction to it is say that I don’t like the thing that caused it.
I think The Path can be criticised for occasionally misjudging its pace, for oddly poor details in the character designs (while others are fantastic), and for the awkwardness of placing collectable flowers around the woods, and a strange score table at the end that’s completely incongruous to everything else. But it cannot be criticised for making me feel really fucked up by it.
It’s remarkable. I strongly suggest that when it’s out a week today, you take a look. I’m so ideologically opposed to its attitude, so bothered by its perspective on adolescence, that part of me wants to rail against it. But more of me is fascinated that something has created such a response. It’s certainly unlike anything else. Whether that’s a good thing is going to be an oddly personal reaction.
Related Stories:
“John, perhaps it helps when you think about the different girls in The Path as aspects of a single person.”
It’s this that I find most pessimistic of all!
It’s interesting that you say The Path is about the player. I instinctively disagree, but of course that might just be self-defence. I couldn’t find the option to interject my optimism for people, a way to turn them around and let them move forward and out of their oppression. My issue (and I stress again, my issue, not a problem with the game) is the hopelessness – their ordeals end in death, or doom. An opportunity for something beautiful – say playing the piano – ends in brokenness and misery. I’m fascinated that Lewis saw it as optimistic. I’d love to have his perspective!
I think the optimism was achieved through not interpreting the deaths as deaths.
Interestingly, though the marketing blurb has repeatedly told us that “at the end of the game, you die,” nothing in the game tells us this. Not explicitly, anyway. Imagining some of the characters actually killing the girls doesn’t seem to work. A lot of the ‘death sequences’ seem to allude to something else entirely – and the fact that you continue on your journey to grandmother’s house afterwards, albeit in a weird, dreamy manner, means it’s open to a variety of different theories.
So I didn’t see it as a game about death. I took it as metaphor for having to take risks; having to let the past go in order to grasp the future. When Carmen sits down with the elderly lady (is it a lady?) at the theatre and plays the piano, is she killed? I didn’t take it like that. I took it as her relinquishing her enforced responsibility for her younger siblings and taking hold of what she wanted out of life.
Maybe I forced myself to think like that because of how crushingly depressing it would have been otherwise, since it probably isn’t the obvious interpretation to take.
Most of my joy came from the beautiful clarity of the younger characters, though. Some of Robin’s comments, from her naive, nine-year-old mind, made me really question some of the adult notions that are engrained in us as we grow older.
I’ll be honest – all this game as art crap normally makes me want to hurt someone. Which I then do in a game I enjoy, whether it’s art or not. But this sound unbarably interesting, not to mention a massive challenge to review.
From reading John’s review and thinking about what I heard about the game, I’d assumed that it was meant to be the tale of one girl who keeps going back – but I suppose not if they all have different names. If/when I play it, I’d want to see how the … “story” holds up under both points of view.
Plus as a typical teenager, it’ll probably make me as exceedingly angry as everyone else telling me I’m doomed!
Nice work John, you too Michael.
John – in your case then, the hope lies in your direct opposition to the pessimism of the game. You perhaps see something of a photographic negative of your own ideologies which may be disturbing, but ultimately appears to strengthen your own positive outlook.
In relation to the definition of “horror” or not to identify this game: obviously I’m only specualting until I actually play the thing, but a more fitting description might be “uncanny”, famously described by Freud in his essay of the same title(unheimliche, or “unhomely” as a literal translation). Such encounters are unsettling, natural but unnatural – attractions and repulsions just as the avatar within the game is controlled and not controlled by the player. In fact, one example he gave within this essay was the uncanny feeling of being lost, trying to find your way again and ending back in the same place from which you started. Bound within this, as you might guess with Freud, are ideas of childhood and parenting.
I really can’t wait to play this. Too few games make good texts.
This just in, ChaosSmurf: You’re doomed :)
Okami: ah, but it’s all you older folks’ fault.
Giganto spoiler territory, folks:
@Lewis “When Carmen sits down with the elderly lady (is it a lady?) at the theatre and plays the piano, is she killed?”
I didn’t see it as death, no. She then woke up on the path, rain falling on her, barely able to shuffle forwards, clutching herself, her head hanging, looking ruined and destroyed. So I’m thinking it wasn’t something good that happened. (Which is why Ruby’s encounter in the park was quite so awful.) I laboriously had her inch her way to the house, which became a broken-down theatre, twisted and terrible, ultimately seeming to destroy her. That bit felt a lot like death. (And again, was nothing compared to the monstrous situation that Ruby encountered, which undeniably brutally killed her.)
Mind the spoilerishness there, Lewis. Some of us want to play this game knowing as little as possible about what might happen…
Mind the spoilerishness there, Lewis. Some of us want to play this game knowing as little as possible about what might happen…
OH! You’re my new favorite blogger fyi
Sorry for the potential spoiler. The weird thing about The Path is that it isn’t really about what you see happening, on the surface, so it’s difficult to know what’s a spoiler and what isn’t. You don’t come out of the game knowing any more than you did when you started, really, as there’s a very deliberate jump in time that skips out the main bulk of “what happens”.
Incidentally, I meant Scarlet before, not Carmen. Carmen and Ruby are the two that are the most clearly distressting, for rather obvious reasons – ie. they’re the two that are most overtly led astray, rather than just down a different path in life, so to speak.
(As a brief aside, when I first saw that the game was going to be called The Path, I cringed it its seemingly unnecessary simplicity. Having played the game, the title makes a lot more sense.)
My memory might be playing tricks – I’ll have to go back and play it again – but doesn’t Ruby consider, um, engaging with the thing that happens to her, elsewhere in the forest before she succumbs to it? So perhaps you’re right about the sense of inevitibility that goes hand in hand with the ultimate “demise” of certain characters.
The only one I haven’t fathomed an interpretation of is Ginger. Because her situation seems completely positive, no matter how I approach it.
I’m not o.. Ok, I’m ancient and close to death by your standards. Never mind..
Anyway, to turn this stupid piece of flame bait into a decent comment (I always feel bad for writing stupid stuff when everybody else – even the teenage whelp – is writing all kinds of clever stuff):
I must admit to only having skimmed the article, as well as many of the posts, since I don’t want to spoil myself the experience of playing the game. Or experiencing the work of art. Whatever.
But between Smurf complaining about people telling him that he’s doomed (which he is) and John and Lewis’ very different reactions to the deaths of the protagonists, I’ve come up with an interpretation of the subject matter myself.
Though of course I’ll have to play the game to make sure, if that’s really the way I’ll react to it. I feel a bit like somebody analyzing a painting he’s only been told about.
But I digress, here we go:
Children and teenagers are indeed doomed. Let me rephrase that: The child and the teenager that I used to be were doomed. And now they’re dead, since I’m a very different person now than I used to be.
I still remember the queasy feeling in my stomach I had as a kid, when I thought about grown ups, they were very alien beeings and I couldn’t imagine ever beeing one of them myself. Even as a teenager I had troubles imagining myself as somebody who works for a living and has completely different responsibilities.
So in a way, parts of me have died during my way to adulthood. I’ve lost quite a few things that once defined my as a person and I guess that this happens to most of us. And depending on out lives and the kind of person we are, we experience this loss and rebirth (because, let’s not forget, we also grow as persons and usually gain more than we loose in the process of growing up) in very different ways. So we’re also bound to react to stories of the death of childhood very differently.
That’s pretty much bang on how I saw it. But John’s right – the sequence that plays out afterwards is dark and upsetting, regardless of what may have gone on before.
Man, I really want to read this comments thread, but I really want to experience this game for myself, too. Will knowing what happens ruin the experience, or is it more about how you get there?
You’re over 70? Christ. :P
See, the idea of the teenage frame of mind being doomed is something I have a huge problem with. I believe that the large majority of adults chose not to … how to put it … continue to enjoy the things they do as a kid. The “proof” for this, imo, is every person who works in the games industry as a developer, tester, journalist or people who read/write comic books/cartoons or any one of a number of other professions in typically teenage dominated customer markets. If the teenage frame of mind is doomed to die, surely these people wouldn’t be able to do what they do?
I plan to write in the way I do now for the rest of my life, if possible. I intend to react to situations and, to be more specific, play video games in the same way and with the same level of commitment and enjoyment I do now for the rest of my life. The idea that some strange event or sudden realisation not under my control will make me stop just seems … well stupid. It’s who I am, that’s not going to change unless I want it to.
There are probably holes in this argument (read: there are holes in this argument), but it’s not really about facts or figures when it comes to “growing up” is it? Anyway. Yeah, rambling is awesome.
Smurf, I’d argue that, while you’ll certainly continue to play games and enjoy them just as much, you’ll start to enjoy different things about them, for different reasons.
I don’t know how old you are, but if you’d have given me The Path at age 15, I don’t know what I’d have done with it.
I wish I’d played it before reading this thread now, just so I could estimate how I would have reacted 2-3 years ago (I’m 18 in May) and give you an honest answer for what I like/dislike about the game, so I’ll dodge the second part of your reply for now.
To the first part however: I can’t imagine ever not enjoying stabbing a guy in the back in TF2, the amazing dialogue of VTMB, the story of Deus Ex, the strategy of StarCraft or the comedy of a good Lucas Arts adventure. Maybe I’ll enjoy MORE of them (or react differently to the bits that I don’t like, instead of raging), but I wouldn’t call that a death, it would be an addition (something to be happy about).
Would changing from, say, my current dislike of all these indie games that keep turning up that aren’t actually as much fun to play as blockbuster titles but get lots of publicity because they’re cute ickle development houses to being more tolerant of them count as a death of a hate, or an addition of like? Perhaps, it’s all about perception, The Path sees the change of growing up as deaths of previous perceptions, I see it (and I think perhaps John Walker does too?) as additions to different areas of perception?
(if any of that doesn’t make sense, sorry lolrambling)
ChaosSmurf: Wow, how dull. o.O
I think that part of the glory of life is the constant change, in your environment and in yourself. That change makes life interesting and worth living. I wouldn’t want to stay in my current frame of mind (I’m 16, so a “teenage” frame of mind) for the rest of my life…but then I know I won’t, because I’m in a constant state of change. The mindset I have today will be subtly different tomorrow; EVERY frame of mind I have is doomed to die. But that isn’t a bad thing, because it means I can remember what watching Bambi at four felt like, and know how it feels now, and speculate as to what it will feel like at thirty.
In addition, I don’t really feel that is such a thing as a “teenage” frame of mind; there’s just a frame of mind that is you. And that frame of mind will constantly change; maybe it will change the way you write, maybe it will change how or why you play games or even make you not play games at all – but if I were you I wouldn’t see that as a bad thing. Every iteration of you will still be YOU. There’s no reason why you should want current-you to be future-you as well.
Wildbluesun – but there’s a difference between death and change. I don’t like people saying that the way teenagers are will naturally “die”. That implies it’s a total end that won’t affect the future. “Change” is fine. “Die” is something else entirely.
To be honest, ChaosSmurf, my previous point doesn’t really stand now that it emerges you already think about games more insightfully than most adults I know.
(Lets hope the Daily Mail never read this thread, they might get the idea that not all gamers want to shoot things in the face. Also in games.)
Personally, as an old person (well, 28), I’ve never really enjoyed any of the ‘adult’ things that have come into my life. Working? well cash is nice but sitting in an office is bloody soul destroying (which is why I’m commenting here rather than working). Having your own place? great, now I have to cook and clean up after myself. I guess for me growing up turned out to be a choice, or at least not something that has to be a full time lifestyle.
I’m looking forward to The Path, but I wonder if ‘game’ is really the right word. I’m expecting something sort of similar to the aforementioned Dear Esther (really worth a look if you’re looking for something to tide you over until the 18th), but I didn’t see Esther as a game, well, not by the time I reached the end, it was a more emotional response than that, more akin to a poem or something…
*edit: I think the death of the child/teenager that’s being talked about is from the feeling that you can never go back. What you choose to do as a teenager (or at any other point in your life) and what happens to you make what you are later on, but you can never go back and change any of those things, only change who you are now. It’s that sense of loss and not being able to change stuff that I thinks makes us oldsters think of it like a death. Personally I don’t have many regrets about my childhood, even the bits I should have done better.
Dear Esther is probably the closest relative of The Path, but it still feels more like a cousin than a sibling, if you’ll excuse the awfulness of that metaphor. I was genuinely surprised by how game-like The Path is in places, whereas Esther shocked me with its audacity in being anything but.
I think that, while The Path is more objectively a better application of the “ambiguous narrative” ideas into a videogame world, Dear Esther resonated with me slightly more. John’s negative emotional reaction to The Path is akin to how Esther made me feel – not repulsed, as such, but certainly deeply upset. It’s the closest a “game” has come to making me cry. The Path seemed to play more on thoughts than emotions for me, though the two are intrinsically linked.
There comes a point in reading these comments where I made myself make that binary decision to stop reading. There’s a fine line between spoilers and teasing (thank you for the explicit warning Mr. Walker) and I look forward to discussing this game after we’ve all had a chance to enjoy it. Thank you all for your thoughts and insights and, as always, doubleplusgood that we have insights from the developer as well. I anticipate re-reading (or, in some cases, reading them for the first time) these comments with some perspective in a week or two.
The ‘Requiem for a Dream’ of games?
This should be interesting, as I have nieces covering those age ranges quite closely. I can see the wide-eyed wonder at everything in one (also, almost sharing the name: ‘Robyn’) and the eternal ennui of the oldest. I’ll have a play through, but also see about letting them play to for their reactions. Unless it will disturb the youngest too much, obv.
“too” &ahem&
@Phuzz, I swear, those daily mail articles make me so angry I might just go out and shoot someone in the face.
The statement about disappointments once you reach later life is something I’ve had to deal with. I’m still exceedingly optimisitic that the rest of my life is going to be better than what has gone before (nothing really bad has happened, but it hasn’t been the best life ever), but a lot of my older friends keep telling me how “it’s the best years of your life” and all that. Perhaps some of the game is about the death of optimism.
This is all getting a bit grim eh.
@John
i haven’t played the game but couldn’t it be argued that coming out of it is like the bizarre euphoria at the end of an hours vomiting, the contrast between the games fantasy world and the real world should make apparent the things about this world which are brilliant, if someone is quite down generally the best way to make them see the good is to contrast it with something truly horrific
ohh and @Wildbluesun, Lewis & ChaosSmurf
i had more time for indie games and stuff when i was younger, the older i get the more i seem to want the instant gratification, i think because i’ve got less time and am so much more stressed.
ChaosSmurf – well if you’ve changed and can’t retrieve who you used to be, then wouldn’t that bit of you be dead? Just because it’s dead doesn’t mean it’s not affecting the future.
Ehh, I wouldn’t. Any sort of ensemble cast with diverging archetypes can be held to that– I’ve heard people argue that Ferris Bueller and Cameron Frye represented two halves of the same individual.
Now, I haven’t played the game but I’m still inclined to say “Leave that sort of thing to Of Mice and Men”.
Wildbluesun – I’m made of what I was when I was younger in addition to what I’ve learned. No bit of it has died or been lost, its just been added to. I guess bits of that have changed… But I wouldn’t define them as dead, reborn would be a better phrase
ChaosSmurf – Touché. Perhaps it’s different for me because I’ve changed a lot during the past year or so, and feel that some parts of me really HAVE died (though that’s not always a bad thing).
I’ve been reading this site for ages, and easily the best thing about it is the way you guys so intelligently cover indie developed games (such as pathologic) as well as the big name releases. (such as left 4 dead) Seriously, every time I read a article where you lavish praise on a indie game, and read the comments about other indie games, check out the link on those games, etc, it gets me so excited to see that there are so many people out there creating amazingly thoughtful things such as this.
It also makes me want to get of my lazy butt and do my own game too. So thanks for articles like this, I really enjoy them.
I would refer to our continual progression in state of mind and perception of the world, not as deaths, but more like assimilation.
My worldview and perception of life and the events in it, both present and past, are continually evolving as my own experience base and consciousness does. I see the events of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood very differently now than I did before. Each step in your aging lets you step back and reevaluate all the events that came before it. You see it from new angles and with deeper insights, and learn something new from it.
A perfect example would be one of my favorite books. I read Watership Down for the first time at 8 years of age. To me, it was a story about rabbits, and good versus evil. Reading it again as an early teenager, it was a story of rabbits as people, and the desire to be free and choose their own destiny rather than what others wanted. As a teenager going into college, it was a story about rabbits as examples of socio-economic policy, political science, and a case study of collectivism. As a young adult, it was a story about rabbits as representatives of society, and how each different rabbit with its unique views worked together to be something bigger than just another warren.
The book, like ourselves in the past, didn’t change. The words, like past events, were exactly the same. It was I who changed.
Umm, RPS? You’re awesome. I really, really love you guys.
And it’s not just because I’m drunk.
OK, I think you’d have to be right, WaywardBuddha. Assimilation it is.
(Also, you win bonus points, because before I typed “Bambi” I was considering typing “Watership Down”. What an awesome book, as in, inspiring awe.)
The youthful discussion about pseudo-death is very interesting and in part the kind of thing that inspired the design of the characters (I myself am 40, by the way, which I guess makes me something of a dinosaur around here). So it’s amusing. But for me the most important thing of the game is what happens before the end. The game is not called “Grandmother’s House”… Death in the game is merely an end point and it only really exist as a way to stress the importance of what you do before that point. After that point, there’s not much left to do.
It’s complex stuff, though, also for me. I think we made The Path as a tool to help us think about certain aspects of life. It’s definitely not a straight up expression of an opinion.
It looks really interesting. I’m happy I hadn’t heard of this game (“game”?) before so I’ll have only a few days to wait in anticipation.
Just bought it. Hope it’s as good as it seems :)
Wow. I’ve been playing through Rose this morning. I don’t think my wife liked the music too much. “Creepy and Uncomfortable”. I love it so far. On screen hints for items I didn’t know exist, interactivity by not interacting, losing sight of objectives when running that become clear when walking, color saturation changes the way the trail pops up after I’ve walked a bit and Oh my. It just changed while I was typing away on this other box. Brighter, prettier, and my friend is with me. All because I stopped trying to achieve my “objective” and I just AM. Unfortunately, it seems to have brought me back to the one place I don’t want to be right now – The Path.
Such a delightful prospect. This may be one of the wake up calls for Adventure that my beloved genre needs. It’s almost the exact polar opposite of Pathologic (in so many ways, the way time is handled most of all) but it’s the most refreshing Adventure I think I’ve played since playing it. I can’t wait to pour more time into this gem. Thank You.
Played it very briefly today and I find it absolutely fascinating. I don’t know if I like it or not, but it’s certainly intriguing. My workmates, however, sat in the background sniggering like children, commenting on how awful it was and how it was “like The Ship again – great idea, awful execution.”
I think a fundamental problem things like The Path are going to encounter is the presumption that any non-utilitarian and/or non-creative software on a computer [i]has[/i] to be a game. Especially when the software involves 3D graphics, avatars and movement control.
As long as people always expect ‘a game’, there’s going to be inherent limitations in the industry. I’m not going down the “but it’s art!” route, because that’s just annoyingly pretentious. My main point, I suppose is that “game” and “gaming” are woefully inadequate terms for this whole interactive computer doodad.
I gibbered about the issue, and the particular problem it gives games journalism, in some more detail on my blog awhile back – http://potentialgamer.com/2008/12/31/the-name-of-the-game/
Hey what on earth is wrong with slow pacing? In most games what i seek first is the walk key. I’m not in a rush so i wanna enjoy the environment in all its corners.
Running spoils atmosphere and realism.
So I was able to play through it last night, as robin and Carmen. Honestly, I don’t think that Carmen’s “end” was a bad end. She seemed familiar with where she was, who she was with, unsure what actually happened though, there’s one place I didn’t check before encountering the “Wolf”. Will have to try it again.
I hope it was a good ending, where she knew where she was, or else it’s a REALLY depressing ending.
The graphics and artwork for this game are amazing, worth the $10 alone.
In other news, did a storyline and a title page for my toy WPF game, feel free to check it out. This article made me want to start my own game.
In case anyone got the so called “First person view” error, the game is in 3rd person view. All you need to do is create a shortcut from “PathViewer.exe”, edit the shortcut target to “[Your folder]\PathViewer.exe” Q3DStart.q3d.
For example mine is “C:\Program Files\The Path\PathViewer.exe” Q3DStart.q3d
Enjoy :)