Negative Gamer Not Review: The Path

[Editor's Note: Not Reviews are for the situations where a full, proper review would not be fair to the game. Perhaps the reviewer ran out of time, or maybe there was some technical reason why it wouldn't be fair to review the title. As such, Not Reviews don't have a score or stick to the standard review format.]

First of, why a “Not Review”? Well, it’s easy to slam The Path as a pretentious piece of garbage, especially after what Micheal Samyn said about his gaming habits a while back. “What a fucking douche.” I thought. But still, I was interested in The Path and wanted to give it a fair chance in a review.

The thing is; while playing I realized that The Path isn’t a game. Ergo, I can’t review it as such. Stay with me on this. Rating it bad because it’s a terrible game (which it is) would be unfair to it as it never tries to be a game. That’s like saying Left 4 Dead has a terrible Single Player Mode. Well duh, it’s not meant to be played alone.

The guys from Tale of Tales tried to make a piece of art, not a game. Did they succeed? Except for some (arguably major) flaws, I think yes. You could almost display The Path in an art gallery.

The concept of wandering through a forest all by yourself and discovering stuff is very interesting to me (maybe because I live right next to one), and Tale of Tales managed to create a very thick atmosphere. Also thinking I know what is going to happen is enough to give me the creeps in some situations in The Path. But maybe I should explain to you what it’s all about. Well, basically it’s a version of the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale.

At the beginning you select one of 6 different girls who are then given the task to go to grandmothers house and to stay on the path. If you do so, you reach the house after about 3 minutes, meet your Grandmother after moving through the house on a predetermined path in first person view and after getting a ranking, you (and the girl) are sent back to the selection screen. Only if you ignore the command given to you and explore the forest it gets interesting.

About 30 objects are scattered in the forest, some of which can only be picked up with a specific girl. Every girl has different comments about the items, even if you can’t pick them up. Each item is put in your basket and is then either present in the sequence in the grandmother’s house or changes it in some way. Picking items up, and interaction in general, is a bit different then in other games. There is no interact button, you simply walk up to something until a superimposed picture of the object appears on screen and let go of the controls. Your girl will pick it up by herself.

So, you collect stuff and go to grandmothers house for all eternity? Not quite, as for every girl there is a unique wolf (as in sexual predator) in the forest. Finding him fades the screen to black, after which you wake up in front of grandmothers house. Entering the house after that changes the sequence dramatically. As before you can only move on a rail, while pushing any button moves you forward. The scenery can only be described as fucked up, with things like the furniture sticking to the ceiling and very weird colours. Instead of talking to your grandmother the girl is killed at the end of the path and no longer available from the selection screen.

Like I said, I like the concept of wandering through the forest, coupled with the fact that there is no real storytelling (except for the manual), as it all happens in your head. I said that you can almost display it as art, because it has, as mentioned, some flaws. Most of which can be traced back to Michael Samyn’s douchebaggery.

If he argues that most other games that are called art are too challenging, why does he then make a game with needlessly complex controls? You can run, but if you do so, you can’t see any of the relevant items. There is a map, but you can’t directly access it at first, it will only come up for a short amount of time if you walked a certain distance. Arriving safely at grandmothers house several times, makes it available with the push of a button, but you are only told that in the manual, as with most other important things. Like why do I pick up glowing flowers? Ah, the manual tells me that after I pick up 6, I get a hint on the location of a unique item.

An in game tutorial isn’t present. Interestingly, the manual states that you should work with the game and not against it to enjoy it. If you ask me, putting that in there is a testament of bad and lazy game design.

But like I said, you can’t really call it a game, other then fact that you are controlling your character like in a game. The Path doesn’t have a clear goal. There’s stuff to collect, but these only unlock more rooms in grandmothers house. Basically you’re unlocking more pretentious crap, after which you get a rating that does nothing (which raises the question, why but it in there in the first place?) You only “play” it to experience and to interpret it. And there’s no real way to fail at that.

It almost smacks you over the head with some of its symbolism. (Playing as girls as a symbol for being helpless? Had that a few times in horror games.) While at different times, it’s just plain wacky. (Why does the wolf encountered at the misty lake look like Inferno from Soul Calibur?)

Apart from it’s pretentiousness it has a real problem with communicating what it wants you to do. If you don’t read the manual or haven’t heard about it from someone else, I imagine that it would take a while to figure out that you need to ignore the one command given to you to get to the interesting stuff. That can be seen as a comment on the fact that we as gamers are used to do what we are told in games. But other games, like Bioshock did that before and where way more effective at it.

So should you play it? Depends. Do you like pretentious stuff, piecing together a story for yourself and don’t mind strange controls and developers who are full of themselves? If yes, you should at least try out The Path. And with only 10 bucks for it, it’s not that big of a loss. Everyone else should just ignore it.