(Note that this post will have extreme spoilers for The Path. If you ever plan on playing it, please don’t read this before you do and experience the game for yourself fresh. It’s that kind of game. When I go into spoilar territory, I’ll mark it.)
So, while perusing the Steam game catalogue, I stumbled upon the two games by the company Tale of Tales. They looked intriguing and artistic. One in particular, The Path, looked especially pretty. I wondered what it was about. I talked to Brer about it, and he ended up getting it for me for my birthday. I just got around to playing through it last night.
This game is not perfect. The controls, honestly, are not wonderful. There are weird decisions made for supposedly artistic reasons that kind of waste your time. There are game elements (a scorecard at the end of every chapter, collectibles, etc) that seem out of place in an “art game.” However, the game was so compelling that, once I started, I could not put it down. I kept going back to it as I had to see what the hell was going on and how the whole thing got put together. As I played, the more “gamey” elements slowly started to reveal themselves. I figured out that the “artistic” flashes of vision and such were mostly just a really weird HUD I could use to find my way around. Tooltips would sometimes pop up and tell me about an element of the game that I had absolutely no idea existed before, and it would totally change how I played. It’s a game of exploration then in both the forest and in actual gameplay, and that’s odd, but kind of cool. It looks pretty, it uses audio extremely well… if you want to point at a game in a “games as art” discussion, this is a pretty good one to point at. I didn’t spend the $10 it cost, but if I had, I would have found this experience completely worth it.
However, most of the enjoyment of a game like this comes from interpretation, and that means spoilarz. I have to talk about my theories about the game, so we’re heading deep being spoilarily lines now.
—Beyond This Point Be Spoilarz—
There’s no doubt that the game itself is saying something about youth. You don’t just have these fairly young girls getting into these situations without having it saying something about the situation they’re in. Much like the Little Red Riding Hood story the game is drawing a lot of imagery from, I found the game to be a series of cautionary tales. Each girl’s story had a sort of “moral” and while I don’t particularly agree with all of these morals, I can totally see why someone would present them. It’s a play about the perils of youth and the things during your youth that can ruin you.
Ruby’s story is one of caution against getting into a relationship out of simple boredom. She’s goth, she’s pessimistic, and she finds a boy in the woods who offers her a cigarette. There were images of school, of a “pandora’s box” of sorts when I got to the house in hers. She’s opening up more than she can handle, and it destroys her. A beam falls on her head. Bam.
Robin’s story is one of caution against innocence. She runs around the forest, picking up drugs and saying “Yay, candy!” She plays in shopping carts. When she finds a werewolf in an old graveyard, she just wants to play. She hops on his back and rides him. She gets sent to a grave with flashing, gnashing teeth for it. For assuming everything is fun and will always be okay.
Ginger’s story is one of caution against getting tied down by friendship. This is one of the stories that most bothers me, actually. Ginger runs around the forest, talking about how nothing can stop her, and nothing can keep her down. When she finds a friend, however, with the happy music that comes with playing with her, the act of helping her when she falls DOES keep her down. It makes her small, as she walks through the house. It binds her up in barbed wire. This one really frustrates me simply because I don’t believe that helping your friends is a bad thing. You can take anything too far. Ginger didn’t. People don’t exist just to pull you down, but that seems to be what this one is saying. You’re better off alone, it says.
Rose’s story is one of caution against religious fanaticism or just religion in general. As she wanders about, she constantly thinks about the soul, about going to heaven, and about how she can get there. When she encounters a ghost in the lake, someone who knows about the soul and can help her float to heaven, she pursues him, with church-style organ music in the background. She floats up. In the house, this choice only seems to drown her. She’s gone in a whirlpool that sucks her down, not up. It seems to be saying to focus on this life, not the next.
Carmen’s story is one of caution against being a wolf yourself. Carmen thinks the forest is beneath her. Who would leave this butchered bird out there? She finds a campsite and goes about making it her own. She starts a fire. She grabs a beer. She takes the wolf hat from the Woodsman and puts it on herself. She takes all the initiative. Then she attempts to prey on the Woodsman, who hands her another beer and she flirts with him while sitting by the fire, trying to get what she wants. In the house, there’s sawing and moaning noises. She got it, for better or worse. But it doesn’t seem to make her happy. It creates a hall of burning fire. As she approaches the tree she tried to climb to ascend to predator instead of prey, it falls on her.
Finally, Scarlet’s story is a caution against too much devotion to art, which is kind of ironic. She talks about how nature isn’t beautiful, it’s art that’s beautiful, and how she couldn’t live without art. She finds an abandoned theater, and picks up a demon mask. Everyone hides behind masks, and that’s fine, she says. She plays the piano instead of speaking to the teacher in the audience, and only then does the long, white-haired teacher come and play with her and interact. The result is abandonment. The house is empty. Everything is covered in sheets, the furniture moved out. As the blue curtain rises, she falls. Nobody is waiting for her, and nobody is watching her. At least, not really. They care only about her art.
Finally, after you see all these stories, you get to play an epilogue as the girl in white who runs around the forest as you explore in earlier chapters. You can run all around the forest then, and you know where everything is, unlike with the other characters. However, she knows better than to fall for these traps. There are no wolves for her to find. She won’t let herself be caught. When you finally go to grandma’s house, you see her dodge the fates of every other character, in turn, and is then left finding Grandma, kneeling next to the bed and watching her.
It’s at this point that the game throws a bit of a twist in there, as you then see the girl in white again, standing in the character select room. The other girls come back, one by one. The girl in white has a huge red stain on her dress. She might have dodged all of the perils the other girls faced, but she isn’t perfect. She made mistakes of her own. You can’t be completely blameless, perfectly white. But before we can see what her mistakes are, she leaves, and the game is restarted.
What do you think? Does that work? Clearly the game is open to many different interpretations. I read one from a guy I was talking on twitter with about the game that was vastly different than what I thought. His commenters said different things as well. Depending on what you do in the forest, you see different images, too, so depending on how you play, you could get vastly different ideas.
However, I think that any game that can make me want to, I dunno, write an English paper about it explaining it completely on my own, without assignment provocation? That’s a good, artistic game, don’t you think? (Then again, maybe that says something about how good I am at writing literary analysis, if they all basically look like what I did up there. Heh.)
