Me Reviews: The Path

I had heard about the game many years ago when it was still in production and back then I was very intrigued in the premise.

The idea of the game revolves around the Red Riding Hood story, when you first start the game you are greeted by five girls, you as the mother send each one off to visit grandma with some wine and bread. The game starts out with said girl on "the path" with the words of her mother echoing in her mind "don't stray off the path" however the aim of the game is to stray off the path and enter a wood filled with psychologically imagery, if you just follow the path you receive the failure ending.

Each girl's travels through the forest is different, each will come across different items in the forest and depending on the girl can interact with them. These items including a rusty car, a television that plays nothing but static, a well, a treasure chest, a wheelchair and others, they invoke the girl to muse in her own way about the item therefore you learn more about her the more items you find.

As you travel through the forest you will encounter each girl's "wolf", in only one of the girls travels is the wolf an actual wolf, in others they are men or a mist creature or a young girl dressed in red. The wolf represents something traumatic that happened to the girl and after a cut scene with the wolf, the girls are returned to the path, lying there broken in the rain, each girl gets up and enters grandma's house where they are faced with a horrific journey through Grandma's house which reflects the traumatic experience.

I give this game a B+ because it is one of the best i've played but it also falls flat in several places.

First of all, I was a little put off by the fact that the girls were so broken by their experiences, and some of the girls for arbitrary reasons. Although each travel is vague and can be interpreted in different ways, the general consensus for one of the travels of Ginger was that it was about the trauma of menstruation and growing up, umm... I don't know why people have this idea that menstruation is "traumatic" it didn't bother me much, I just was a bit pissed that I would have to do this every month. I watched a cartoon on a site once about a girl going through menstruation who wakes up and starts rocking backwards and forwards in her bed because she's menstruated with the words "you're a woman now" eerily sung over it, I was just like... whaaat? it's not that bad... really!!

The travel I most liked was Carmen, which deals with a traumatic first time, as yes I can imagine how that would be traumatic and her rooms in grandmother's house reflect her confusion and trauma, however the others were a lot more vague in a sense that I couldn't really understand them at all. In Rose's her ending is that she gets in a boat and meets a torso dressed in a cloud, that's it... I felt as through the creators had run out of ideas and just threw this together. Also Scarlet's (which is my favourite but only because her wolf is the most handsome XD) which is where she plays the piano and the curtain closes on her. What's that about? I could only understand it as her becoming a failed musician.

I believed that though this was an amazing game with beautiful enviroments and eerie imagery, it failed on a human level. The gameplay is amazing especially the grandmother houses, which you walk through clicking to move with the shadows of the girls superimposing, but that it didn't really talk about proper traumatic issues.

The idea of the game is, that if you leave the path (i.e. conformity) and do the wrong things, like having sex with an older man, being involved in a drunk-driving crash, and failing as a muscian, then you have lived and experienced (which is mirrored by the forest girl at the end, whose white dress is smeared with the blood of experience) unlike just following all the rules.

However I wish that it had gone further, there are so many traumatic experiences that they could have done but didn't and the ones they did do, weren't really done well, such as Robin's (it was supposed to be about a young girl discovering her own mortality but I didn't get that at all), Scarlet's and Rose's. Carmen's and Ruby's were very good but they weren't the best. Themes they could have done: Death of a parent, unwanted pregnancy (which could also be about a miscarriage), being gay or lesbian or transgendered, loss of faith, sickness or illness, loneliness etc. etc.

All in all, I say play it, it's an experience which you won't regret but don't expect this to be any sort of real psychological look into the mind of a girl (just the fact that most of the wolves are male is one indicator, the girls didn't seem to have any problem with women which I find hard to believe).

Also it does get tedious after a while, since the forest is endless you can go for whole stretches without seeing anything, the girl's can also only run for a short time without getting out of breath. You can follow the white squiggles at the edge of the screen to find items but the squiggles don't dissapear once you've found the items, sometimes leading you back to the same damn bathtub every time!!