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After
playing The Path for a while, I became hopelessly
lost. The thick forest had grown darker and
darker, the unnerving sounds becoming more and more
frequent. Giving up on looking for a landmark to
help me get my bearings, I hatched a plan. I would
run in one direction until I reached the edge of the
game world. Then I'd turn around, and come back in
at an angle across it, hoping to return to the place
where I'd started.
I underestimated The Path. I assumed it
had an edge.
The Path does this a lot. It mercilessly
toys with your expectations of what games are supposed
to do, and what you're supposed to do in them.
Going into it with no knowledge of the game from
pre-release murmurings, you might find yourself
'finishing' after just a few minutes, and leave
extremely confused. But totally rid yourself of
your preconceptions, your years of battling through
rigid conventions, and you'll find there's more to talk
about here than almost any other commercial game that
springs to mind.
That said, it's difficult to know what's safe to say
without ruining the magic. Half the joy of The
Path comes through discovery, so we're going to have
to stick rigidly to the 'no spoilers' rule here.
Even my anecdote above is straying into dangerous
territory. But it's difficult to convey just how
interesting this is to play without citing a hundred
examples. This will simply have to be an article
of broad statements, and you're simply going to have to
trust us that The Path is an experience we'd love
for you to share.
"...an
adventure game without puzzles..."
So.
We're talking about an adventure game without puzzles.
A game that takes place from third, first and even second
person perspective, depending on the situation.
A game in which you can practically see the end as soon
as you start. A game that grades you poorly for
surviving and highly for perishing. A game where
you're never quite sure what's going on, but always
conjuring up another fascinating theory. A game
without a story, but with an abundance of meaning.
A work of art. An interactive poem.
Followers of Tale of Tales, a.k.a. Michaël Samyn and
Auriea Harvey, will be familiar with this term, first used
to describe their 2008 interactive short The Graveyard. While over in just a few minutes,
it toyed with plenty
of concepts that aren't explored in this interactive
medium to any real extent. Though clearly a lot
more 'game-like', The Path feels like the natural
evolution of The Graveyard's ideas. Its
minimalist approach to player-defined interaction and
maximalist approach to audiovisual design is perhaps the
most striking similarity. Even though the Quest 3D
engine is relatively lightweight, Auriea Harvey's art
direction is nothing short of sublime, and the
dynamically altering, omnipresent soundtrack - composed
by experimental American songwriter Jarboe - is
astonishing. The attention to detail is
spellbinding throughout, from the subtle colour shifts
that transition with the scene's mood, right down to the
artistry of each individual leaf on the trees.
There's clearly a heavy silent movie influence on The
Path: there's no dialogue and no overt sound
effects; just shimmering music and the occasional
thoughts of characters displayed like intertitles
scrawled on top of the 3D world. With the emphasis
drawn away from the usual challenge factor of most
videogames, The Path leaves you free to soak up
its wondrous atmosphere, every second of the journey.
Secondly, like it
spiritual predecessor, it questions the
medium's notion of 'death', upturning it and placing it
at a more logical end-point of the narrative. In The
Path, when you die, that's the end of the chapter,
and the end of that particular character's active
involvement. It's not taken as far as in The
Graveyard, where your avatar's passing meant you
literally couldn't do anything else, even quit the game.
But it again raises a very valid point about how
trivially the issue is treated within videogames.
Here, dying is not merely a minor punishment for an
unimportant failure. It's the end of someone's
life - and it's treated as the most dramatic, emotive
and poignant aspect of the experience.
After exploring the forbidden forest for a given amount
of time, you'll eventually come across what will be the
location of your demise. Entering this location
initiates a short cut-scene, in which you are introduced
to a "wolf" - in inverted commas for a reason.
For whatever explanation, this wolf is going to lead to
your character's downfall, and once you initiate an
interaction with him, her or it, you're headed for the
end-game.
"...poetic
and tasteful..."
It's poetic and tasteful. You never see what
happens to your character; it's only eluded to,
symbolically, in the short, nightmarish,
semi-interactive sequence that concludes the game. Sometimes,
there's an obvious interpretation. Other times, it
seems wildly abstract, but all the more intriguing for
its ambiguity. Thematically, there are clear
leanings towards giving into temptation, gaining
independence, questioning authority and letting go of
former fantasies: in other words, it's about growing up.
But there are other themes running deeper through the
roots of The Path, and everyone is going to come
away with a different message. That's almost
certainly part of its design, and undoubtedly part of
its beauty.
Meeting the wolf is also the only time The
Path allows you to fully 'opt-in' to an interaction.
Elsewhere, the game is centred around its intriguing 'Drama
Princess' AI system. It's almost like the
micro-antithesis of Left 4 Dead's 'Director' -
that is to say, where that focused on the dynamically
shifting AI of an enormous group of NPCs,
this focuses on the adjusting behaviour of a single
character. Letting go of the controls causes the
computer to take over, with you sitting back and
observing how your avatar chooses to interact with the
world around her - be it lying down in a bed of flowers,
lighting a fire and sitting next to it, or playing
pat-a-cake with a ghostly little girl. This
behaviour alters based on the context of location, mood
and the inherent personality of your chosen young lady,
and is made all the more inspiring by the
always-wonderful animations. But the wolf
encounters are decidedly a matter of the player's
choice, a very deliberate ploy in ensuring the point
of The Path's narrative is driven home. At
the crux of this game is the idea of taking risks, and
only you can decide to enter into such a
situation.
If there's criticism leveled towards Drama Princess, it's
likely to be that the options run out fairly
quickly. By the end of my second play-through (or
fourteenth, depending on how you look at it), I'd pretty
much exhausted all there was to see of it. While a
little more variety may have been nice, however, it
doesn't really matter. The Path probably
isn't a game you'll return to time and time again, but
the wonder of experiencing it for the first time more
than makes up for any longevity-related shortcomings.
"...a
fabulous portrayal of the artists' vision..."
Surprisingly, what is
perhaps strangest of all about The Path is how
traditional its more game-like aspects actually are.
The juxtaposition of familiar elements against a
radically unusual backdrop provides for an inherently
different gaming experience. A 'hints' system is
incorporated, with 'flower gems' glowing, bouncing and
spinning above the ground, as if The Path were an
old-school shooter or platformer. At the end of
each chapter, a statistics screen is displayed,
informing you how many of the world's secrets you
managed to uncover, and how far you traveled in order to
find them. It even grades your performance upon
completion, and, though there are obviously some ironic
undertones to these mechanics, it certainly allows for a
diverse range of playing methods. It's a game
aimed at those who wish to savour the experience, but
there's enough here to keep pure completists happy as
well.
Apparently, Tale of Tales have even gone as far as incorporating
achievements into the Steam version of the game, which
seems a like a slightly odd decision. We can't
comment on their implementation - they aren't present in
the review code we received - but it does seem a little
at odds with the overall feel. The Path
works so hard to be a true work of art. Imagine
walking around an art gallery, only to have someone
interrupting your ponderings by congratulating you for
visiting a certain room, and attempting to entice you
into another one with the promise of reward. It's
clearly not an enormous issue, but for those wanting to
take this experience very seriously, exploring it
instinctively and carefully considering its themes, I
worry that the achievements system may serve to cheapen the experience
somewhat.
More overt flaws exist. In the version we played
(essentially the final build, we're told, aside from a
few minor stability tweaks), there are plenty of clipping issues, which can
occasionally take some shine away from the delectable
atmosphere. Whether this will be fixed before
release remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely given
how soon that is. It also seems to have been
optimised primarily for a gamepad or joystick, such are
the slightly awkward keyboard and mouse controls, which
seems an odd decision for what is currently a
PC-exclusive. On occasion, character movement is
agonisingly slow - clearly a specific design choice, but
some of the ludicrously sluggish walks will test the
patience of many players. And some will feel mislead by the
marketing blurb: though billed as a horror game, it's
never really frightening; it flits, instead, between
uplifting and unnerving. Still, there's no
doubting this is a game that will creep its way into
your head, something that most modern horror fails to
do.
Getting caught up in hype or technical inconsistencies
seems unfair, though. It takes a lot of courage,
patience and auterism to pull off a project like this,
and Tale of Tales have done so with aplomb. This
is such a fabulous portrayal of the artists' vision that
it feels awkward to put a score to it. It's a game
intended to be understood differently by different
people, and we would never suggest that this is the
definitive take on it. That in mind, don't feel
mislead if you find yourself perplexed or turned-off by The
Path. That's fine. It just wasn't for
you.
But there's a whole host of people who will absolutely
love this, for all its quirks. I'm one of them.
80%
A
thoroughly interesting place to explore.
About
our scores...
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