Fairytales can make for dark narratives when told with a twist, and video games can make stories of all kinds more interactive and approachable to many people. They don't even have to be gamey in the traditional sense of having challenges to overcome and enemies to defeat. They can be works of art in their own right. Or walking simulators, if you prefer.
The Path, on the surface, is simple. Walk a girl through the woods to grandma's house. But it's more than that, right?
Frustrations
The Path opens into a red room with six characters - or maybe six parts or versions of one character, who knows for sure - and that's your menu. Options? No, thanks, this is art. This isn't a game, this is an experience. Wanna experience it?
If I have to, I suppose.
Signposts and purple skies don't distract me in the slightest, and in the distance appear to be the gates to a house, which I can only assume belongs to grandma.
I can't say I was expecting such a dark interior, and I can definitely say I wasn't expecting this section to be a first-person exploration of said dark interior, though that's not strictly true either. Your inputs on the keyboard only serve to shuffle you along a set path through the house towards grandma's room.
I guess we're along for the ride. Where does it go?
Hhhhhuh. It would appear that following the rules and walking down the path is not the objective of The Path. That way leads to failure, and there are secrets and wolves to find and encounter. Let's hope for more success with our next granddaughter, Scarlet.
Heading left, because it's luckier than heading right thanks to the power of alliteration, I start sprinting through the forest (now that The Path has told me there is indeed a sprint button), only to slow down when I see that the sprint camera is absolutely useless for seeing where you're going. I guess that's what makes it arty.
Spotting something in the distance, through the fog, I finally have something to walk towards that isn't grandma's house. But what is it?
If you're near to an interactive object, such an overlay will appear, letting you know that the thing that looks like this can be interacted with. What does this bench reveal when we interact with it?
Oh, yeah, there is someone here, but I despite awkwardly shuffling in front of them, there doesn't seem to be any way to interact with them, so I guess we'll ignore them and check out the stage.
After shoving a mask into our basket for... reasons... not sure... we sit down at the piano and start playing, at which point our mysterious observer decides to walk over and tutor us, I guess. I'm not really sure, there are no voiceovers to listen to nor subtitles to read. We've got to infer what's going on and, to be honest, that's quite difficult when none of this makes any sense in the first place.
As the curtain ominously descends and the screen turns black, we're briefly left to wonder what has just happened, until we're shown face down in the dirt outside grandma's house in the pouring rain.
Slowly getting up, we take an agonizingly long shamble down the rest of the path to grandma's house for some shelter - and I mean it. Sprinting isn't working here, and your default walking speed has been slashed in half, or worse. This is painful to sit through. I even stared out of the window, rather than watching The Path slowly play out before me.
When we got to grandma's house this time, though, the interior design was even more unexpected than our first time here, glowing green and white as though we're playing through night-vision goggles. The auto-walk around the house is still in place, but while the final door is the same, what we find behind it isn't grandma at all.
We've found a theater instead. Hooray?
According to our stats screen, we have got a lot more searching through the woods to go yet. Who is the next young lady to Wolf encountered: yes?
Final Word
Who indeed. I won't be finding out myself because I find The Path to be quite boring.
Arty games that aren't games can be tricky to get into. You almost need to know the point of the piece so that you know whether you want to devote time to it at all, but any time you put into The Path is spent trying to work out what the point of The Path is.
I need an analogy. Flower. How many people picked up Flower without knowing anything about it, played it, maybe even finished it, and at some point discovered the point of Flower, versus how many people played Flower because they were told Flower ought to be played because it's about unwinding and appreciating the simple things and being inspired by nature and whatever else?
I would never have come across The Path and thought "Hmm. That's one to dive into." In fact, I think I'm right in saying that I uninstalled The Path because I didn't know why I had it installed in the first place, completely forgetting I was doing this 1001 list, because it looked so unlike anything else I was playing or expecting to play.
Doesn't that say more about me than it does about The Path? Yes, I'm sure it does. I think games as simple and as arty as this have to have a hook that interests me, and The Path doesn't have one that I can see, and as such I'm not interested in searching every nook and cranny in the hopes of finding one hidden away.
Sorry to fans of The Path, or Little Red Riding Hood, or spooky games, or arty games. This one just isn't for me.
Fun Facts
Working title 144 would have been ever so slightly more interesting to me than The Path, but let's face it, a change in title wouldn't have changed my views.
The Path, developed by Tale of Tales, first released in 2009.
Version played: PC, 2009.