The girl in white at the end? Hope. It was the only time in the game after the first wolf that I didn’t the oppressing gloom the game creates. Like a burden is lifted. I don’t think I’m negative enough for that to symbolize death for me.

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(Warning: spoilers ahead. You have been warned)

I would also like to add a small qualifier to my comments: I’m not a psychologist, childhood or otherwise. I have experience dealing with children who have been exposed to trauma through volunteer work I do, though I don’t know enough about most of them to tell you what trauma they’ve been exposed to. (It’s emotionally safer. Learned that lesson the hard way.)

I also have a friend who was sexually abused by her father when she was young. She’d be the same age as the oldest of the girls in the game now.

I’d say the game (it sounds a little hollow calling it a game) only implies rape once. No, not the wood-cutter. Not even the cigarette-smoking biker fellow.

The wolf. A predator, in a place of death. Even the cutscene there is shot shaky-cam style, frantic, disorienting, confusing. I was left with the sort of “what is happening” here feel. I’d imagine that’s the sort of feeling a sexually abused child would feel.

Everything else? Consequence. I can be a little more solid with my discussion with this, as I’ve seen it in my friend. She’s hooked up with older, “dangerous” guys before, ala that charming young gent and his ominous carpet. She’s gotten lost in her own worlds before to the point where it dragged her to dangerous places (light being), got drunk before the legal age and “messed around” with a guy (wood cutter), sought the approval of that absent father figure through trying to excel at a task (The piano teacher)

(I still haven’t figured out the Wolf in the field, though)

And always at night, the nightmares.

It’s not a definite thing, and like everyone, my reading of the game is tempered by my experiences, and in this case my experiences with a friend who was exposed to something no-one should ever have to go through. In many ways, we were spared. My friend exhibited many more behaviors which would have scared the bejeebers out of me in a game.

Again, restating my qualifications: none. Bar experience.

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For the record, the first time I played Ruby, I ran straight to Grandma’s house and experienced a childishly innocent and heartwarming ending. Anyone professing to be “disgusted” at this game is probably more disgusted at themselves – at the impulse that made them persist with whatever action would lead to the “rape”, even though they could probably guess what would happen. For a game (if it is that, I’m still undecided) made my non-gamers, it certainly sticks a very incisive critical knife at the “motivations” that drive us to do the things we do when we’re gaming (or which designers use to prod us into doing stuff, whichever side of the coin you want to see). Rather than screaming with outrage at what YOU did in the game, think about what MADE you do it: excited curiosity to see what happens next, or a slightly sadistic desire to see your avatar get in trouble? Whichever it was, what was it that made it disturbing in THIS game, but not in others? I know that, in saying that it’s the player’s own dark impulses that lead to the girls’ traumatic experiences, I’m, ironically, sounding dangerously close to the “She knew perfectly well what she was doing” defence that men accused of date rape typically employ, but who hasn’t chuckled at the amusing death messages in the old Leisure Suit Larry games, or sent Lara hurtling off a cliff in frustration (I’m reminded of Spaced here)? What makes it OK to send, for the sake of argument, Max Payne hurtling after his darkest nightmares in the dream sequences, forcing him to commit mass murder with no regard for the consequences it’ll have on his scarred psyche, or to put him in situations where he’ll sustain grievous injuries and then pump him full of painkillers so that he can just long enough for you to lead him to his next traumatic experience? The examples might sound flippant (might as well argue that Pacman advocates popping hallucinogenic pills), but although the treatment of death or trauma (either physical or psychological) is radically different in my examples than it is in The Path, the IMPULSES that drive the players to subject their avatars through the game aren’t! Note, emphatically, YOU, because in The Path you still get an ending if you DON’T put them through that (and arguably a “win” condition, even if the score screen says otherwise!) – it’s always your conscious choice to do it, so, if Larry Laffer’s death is treated humorously and Carmen’s rape (if it is that) is treated heart-rendingly seriously, it’s the player who failed to make the distinction and run straight for grandma’s house, not the game!

To be honest though, I dispute that the subject-matter of the narrative is about literal rape at all. Rather, it’s a reinterpretation of the LRRH story as a loss-of-innocence tale. This was arguably a major theme in the original, and any folklorist or anthropologist will tell you that coming-of-age tales form a HUGE proportion of fairy tales – indeed it’s almost a commonplace to interpret them as such, which is why the Aarne-Thompson system classifies tale types according to what happens in them, not by how they can be interpreted! :)

In the game, you can interpret the encounters with the wolves as rape, although I think that’s inaccurate. Even Carmen’s (which is the most explicitly-sexual one) is more likely to be consensual sex which she later regrets – just because she did it willingly doesn’t mean she wasn’t traumatised by it: she might have felt compelled to do it to ensure the man’s sexual loyalty, to enhance her self-image as a desirable woman, to secure herself financially through marriage with a financially-independent male, or any other number of reasons that don’t mean she actually liked the guy, and which, with hindsight, turn out to have led her to the wrong decision and to have caused her psychological trauma and self-loathing. There doesn’t NEED to be any rape for this to be traumatising, and, in fact, the story can be more painful in some ways if she did it willingly.

Literal rape is also, of course, a valid interpretation for some of the stories in the game. The point is that the rape itself ISN’T THE POINT: the rape is a metaphor for the broader issue of passage into adulthood and loss of innocence, just like in the original children’s story.

As an aside, I also thought the movement was horrifically slow. This affected the gameplay to the point where I thought this was a “bad game”, but I’d say it’s a fantastic “interactive story” (which is, I suppose, one genre of computer games). It’s just better at the story than at the physical interactivity. :)

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Obviously, it’s packed full of spoilers, so I wouldn’t recommend reading it unless you’ve finished the game.

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Anyway, I have a question concerning The Path and its source material Little Red Riding Hood. For those who think this is almost entirely a “rape game” and that, as a result, this necessarily makes it a horrible game (ignoring any technical issues, as I’m only interested in thematic ones here), does this mean that you also think that the Little Red Riding Hood story itself is a horrible story?

From the Wikipedia article on LRRH, concerning pre-Perrault versions of the story: The wolf usually leaves the grandmother’s blood and meat for the girl to eat, who then unwittingly cannibalises her own grandmother. Furthermore, the wolf was also known to ask her to remove her clothing and toss it into the fire. In some versions, the wolf eats the girl after she gets into bed with him, and the story ends there. In others, she sees through his disguise and tries to escape, complaining to her “grandmother” that she needs to defecate and would not wish to do so in the bed. The wolf reluctantly lets her go, tied to a piece of string so she does not get away. However, the girl slips the string over something else and runs off.

The above description of the content of versions of the actual LRRH story is much more explicit and graphic than anything shown in The Path (or even implied, really). Sure, The Path implies the Concept Of Rape indirectly, but that’s it. As has been stated, nothing is explicitly shown. Think about it for just a moment. What if The Path had tried to more explicitly portray content such as the above? o_O

So, again to restate, is the LRRH story itself as horrible as some of you are making this game out to be, because Rape?

Also, since this thread has already long since moved into spoiler territory, here is my semi-literal take on the fates of the Red Girls (I have other interpretations that are less literal which I won’t get into here, because I want to keep it nominally simple):
– Robin is mauled by an actual wolf, or large dog of some sort.
– Rose drowns in the lake.
– Ginger is killed in an accident while playing with a friend, presumably involving barbed wire.
– Ruby is killed in a motorcycle/car accident, after doing a bit of joy-riding with her new “friend”.
– Carmen… well… Carmen is raped and murdered by the woodcutter, after flirting heavily with him, e.g. stealing his hat off of his head and wearing it, drinking his beer either with or without his prompting, hanging around on the boxes near the fire waiting (forever) for him to finish his work, etc. I kind of think that she simultaneously both did and did not fully understand what she was getting into there. I think of it as somewhat similar to one of the more disturbing hitchhiker scenes in the interactive fiction game I-0, in which you end up raped and dead if you actively try to do anything with the creep aside from try to escape (or if you do nothing at all and just let the scene play out).
– As for Scarlet, I have no idea, honestly. The woman in gray seemed the most sinister of the “wolves” for me, and I can’t really say I understand what happened with Scarlet’s wolf encounter and ending, except in the vaguest, most metaphorical sense. I don’t have a literal interpretation of this one.

I perceived the Walk Of Shame up to grandma’s house and the subsequent Silent Hill-ish imagery inside to merely be a dying hallucination of each Red Girl based on their situation, at least based on my more literal interpretations anyway.

Only in Carmen’s ending did I really get the impression that rape (or at least questionably consensual sex) was (rather heavily) implied. I mean, the sound effects alone during the walk through grandma’s house tend to imply pretty strongly that sex was involved somehow. Ruby’s encounter maybe could imply it as well, if you stretch, but I think her walk through grandma’s house leans more toward the “dies in motorcycle crash” theory.

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