Analysis: The Path

The Path, from Tale of Tales

Sorry to say, this one isn’t a free title, but it’s very worth talking about and it’s not expensive! Take a look at the trailers and judge for yourself, but I quite enjoyed the experience I got with this game. The Path is a re-imagining of the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, in the shell of a short horror game. It’s a creepy, atmospheric game that anyone can play through successfully; it’s also intensely interpretive and refuses to spoon-feed you its story.

Everyone knows the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. It’s a very common story, told in a number of ways, some more sanitized than others. The Path doesn’t bother with a literal retelling, but rather interprets the story and makes a world of it.

The game starts with the Red Apartment, where six sisters live; each of which is named after a different color of red — Robin, Ruby, Rose, Ginger, Carmen, and Scarlet. You select one and she sets off to visit their ailing grandmother. The game deposits the selected sister at the end of the road from the city, on the path through the woods to Grandmother’s. It gives you two instructions; ‘Go to Grandmother’s house’, and ‘Stay on the path’. You’ll quickly learn that following these instructions will result in failure; you’ll arrive uneventfully at Grandmother’s house deep in the woods. But that’s not what the game wants from you; it wants you to risk the forest.

From here on out, I’m going to talk about the game in depth, so beware of spoilers!What you can quickly find out is that the game is risk free. Tale of Tales did a magnificent job is making the woods FEEL threatening, but there is nothing out there that can actually end the game without player consent.

First; I must stress that the flavor of this game is magnificent. The woods are beautifully realized and creepy. The writing and stylization is provoking. It all came together in a way that even upon finishing the game, I felt I needed to keep playing.

Now, I’ll come back to the flavor shortly, but the mechanics are also worth mentioning. A lot of reviews I’ve read of The Path so far have been hesitant or confused because it’s a strange animal to most gamers. The Path doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of traditional mechanics. You can walk and run, and interact with some of the things in the woods in preset ways. The game however has only three things for you to do; collect ‘Flower Coins’, find Memories, and encounter the ‘Wolf’. Any girl can find all of the the Flowers, there’s some slight cross over in Memories, and each girl has a unique ‘Wolf’. Additionally, finding the ‘Wolf’ is the only way to succeed with each sister; after which, the girl is removed from the Apartment and cannot be selected again (until a new game is started or the epilogue is completed).

The game is thus, a collect-a-thon. If the flavor were removed, the path would be an awful excuse of gaming; dull, featureless and without any kind of challenge. Normally, this would really bother me, but the Path cleverly includes the collecting elements only as a kind of string to keep the player wandering, so that they’ll seek out the story.

There’s a few other clever mechanics in play, including the Girl in White, a girl you’ll find easily running about the woods. She serves a number of purposes; she explores areas of interest and thus can lead you to them, and she can return you to the path through the woods — this is important as the path vanishes once you leave it for too long, leaving you lost in the woods. The game also uses very clever camera angles to hide a number or mechanical processes.
So let’s get back to the flavor. ‘Game’ is probably the wrong term for The Path as it’s more honestly delivering an experience than a traditional game. The game offers you a story without giving you enough context to legitimately understand it, and thus you are forced to interpret it.

So we have our three collectibles to deliver the story; the Flowers (which only serve to direct you to memories), the Memories (which alter Grandmother’s house and provide snippets of insight in to each girl) and the wolf (which provides a large amount of story but is the most ambiguous element).

Memories are found as you walk through the woods; there are a large number of them, marked by small objects that the girls take with them and by large objects which they interpret it some way (and the recollection of which is taken with them). Some of the memories include wild flowers, bullets, spray paint, a piano, a wrecked car, a TV and more. Not every girl can find each memory and even if they can find them, they don’t always react to them. (The game does helpfully inform you which sister reacts to that memory if the one you’re controlling doesn’t.)

When each girl collects a memory, she’ll say/think something about it. These little clips of text provide our clearest insight in to each of the girls, letting us learn about how they think and who they are. Robin, the youngest talks mostly about how she doesn’t understand adults. Scarlet, the oldest, has more concrete and practical thoughts. Ginger is a tomboy, Carmen is a fashionable party girl, Rose is something of a philosopher who pontificates on the soul, and Ruby has a darker, outsider mentality.

While creeping around in the woods, we learn more about them. Unlike the Wolf, the memories provide a fairly contextual amount of information about each girl. The Wolf, however, seems to represent something far more significant.

The Wolf appears for each girl in a different location within the woods. There’s the Cemetery, the Misty Lake, The Abandoned Theatre, the Abandoned Playground, the Campsite, and the Flower Field. Only Robin encounters an actual wolf, though, and in her case it’s something of an anthropomorphic werewolf than an actual wolf. In every case, however, the wolf is symbolic, of predators and of trauma. After encountering the wolf in each scenario, the girl is then found deposited outside the Grandmother’s house in the rain, collapsed on the ground. When she stands, she’ll only stumble forward slowly, often looking injured, worn out or distraught.

This is very interesting, because the wolf encounters are not uniform at all. Robin rides her wolf around the cemetery; playing with it like a large dog. Rose encounters a misty figure on the lake who takes her in to the air and dances across the water. Ginger finds a playmate, a Girl in Red who she plays with through the Flower Field. Ruby encounters a boy in black who seems to chat her up at the Playground. Carmen goes hangs out with an older man at the Campsite and they drink. Scarlet plays piano at the Theatre under the watchful eye of some kind of spectre.

None of these seem all that traumatic and ‘wolflife’ without guessing about what we’re not seeing. Scenes of violence that occur between when the screen goes black and when the girls wake up in front of Grandmother’s house.
I won’t claim to have great insight here, but this is how I interpreted the story. Robin’s encounter with the wolf is a loss of child like wonder. She spends her time trying to figure out adults, but only time can truly produce that understanding. In the Cemetery, she started piecing together the cycle of life and death, and the Wolf she encounters is both the last child-like fantasy she has, but is also a symbol of the darker understanding that comes with growing up; a symbol of the harshness of reality.

Rose’s encounter with the misty figure is a near death experience with drowning. In her memories, she talks about the soul and the idea of floating in water being the closest you can feel to be disembodied (being buoyant as being weightless). The misty figure, taken literally, was her ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, mixed with the already misty quality of the lake.

Ginger encounters a girl — this colorful scene seems to be nothing but pleasant. However, taken in the lense of the other ‘wolves’, it would seem that Ginger had a gay experience of some sort. Something that left her feeling uncomfortable or confused, or filled her with regret or shame — common reactions for people who’ve yet to uncover their own sexuality.

Ruby, like Ginger has a sexual experience, but with a boy. It’s important to note that we can learn through her memories that she’d been in a car crash, leading her to being in a leg brace; between the hospital stay and the injury (and the brace), she drifted away from her peers. Ultimately, the encounter with the boy seems to be a regretted early sex experience; she accepts the affects of a boy she doesn’t know because of the feeling that she isn’t accepted or isn’t valued.

Carmen has a similar experience to Ruby, drinking at the campsite with the older man. Unlike her younger sister though, she didn’t regret the experience because it was too soon, but because she drank her way too it. Uninhibited from alcohol, her company had their way with her, possibly in spite of earlier objections.

Finally Scarlet, playing piano overseen by a spectre of a woman, is trying her hardest to be an adult and be responsible to gain the approval of the matronly figure who will not give it to her. It’s also possible that she aspired to do music and was incapable of it atop of her other responsibilities.

Now; after each of the wolf encounters, there’s a twisted journey through Grandmother’s house, and when all the girl’s are gone, the Girl in White appears in the Red Apartment. When you use her to enter the woods, she can’t get lost. She can find each of the major locations easily, and can run through them unlike the other girls. She never loses track of the path, and can quickly go to Grandmother’s house. Because she encounters no wolf, she can arrive there quickly, and only ever experience a normal house — only instead of a normal house, she tours through a combination of all the strange experiences of each of the girls before her.

After she reaches Grandmother, you’re returned to the Red Apartment where her white dress becomes stained in blood, and then each of the other girls return before she leaves.

This is an interesting element to me, and I’m still undecided as to who the Girl in White really is. I’m caught between two possibilities; that she is either the Wolf (and that she killed the Grandmother) or that she is the Grandmother’s only actual grandchild, and witnesses her Grandmother’s death.

The latter part seems more substantial to me, if we view The Path as a story of dying. The Grandmother in this case is in fact all of the girls; each of the names (spinning off of red) were nicknames throughout her life, and each of the girl’s represent a part of her life wherein something significant happened to her that shaped her future. We can view each of the girl’s personalities as separate, but they also flow well if we take them by age and apply events on to them. Robin loses her child like innocence, but not her playfulness, growing in to tomboy. Rose nearly drowns, but survives. She becomes more interested in activity and becomes the tomboy, Ginger. Ginger has a strange sexual experience; combined with a car accident, she loses her ability to be active and becomes the darker Ruby. Ruby heals up, and though regrets her first experience with a boy, she returns to being social as Carmen. Carmen parties (too much) and eventually after a spin of bad times at the hands of alcohol, she grows up and takes responsibility as Scarlet.

Scarlet loses touch with her childhood and lives long, but uneventfully, eventually dying in her cottage home in the woods, a single granddaughter baring witness to her last breaths as she dreams a strange dream of her most significant memories. The Girl in White’s unusual tour through her Grandmother’s house is really a metaphorical illustration of all of the memories kept within it’s walls.

At least, that’s how I saw the game, and it really drew me in. Maybe we’ll get some other impressions of this excellent, artful game below.

Tags: analysis, art game, Flavor, little red riding hood, Tale of Tales, The Path, video game