The Path

The Path, at least the one I'm writing about, is a game by Tale of Tales released in 2008. Rather than rehash every detail about how the game works, I'll send you to Metacritic to read all the details about the game written by all the people who got paid to write about it.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it right now: I don't find calling this title a game difficult at all. There are items to collect, a world to explore, and objectives to meet. The world may be dark, repetitive, slow, but that's the point. The objectives may be vague and even misleading, but that's the point. The item collection is, well it's item collection, so depending on your opinion of it, that task is pretty much the same in every game.

What I find so important about this game is that it truly is the first title I've ever played that has a feminine voice. Come to think of it, very few games I've ever played have a voice at all.  And that's what has me so worked up about The Path.  A huge catch 22 in the game development world is that the players want change, they want new IPs, they want fewer sequels, and they want innovative gameplay.  The 22 part of the Catch is that most gamers don't buy those games that try new things, that go out on limbs.  They buy the same shooter that lets you run down random hallways shooting bad guys.  But I digress.  The Path is none of those things.  It tried some very unique things, like divulging backstories of every character when they happen upon certain objects or scenarios in the woods.  But they don't find audiologs or scraps of notebooks.  The stories are told only through images, more akin to the way our memories work.  There are flashes of objects and a couple sentences printed on the screen that act as the inner dialogue of the character your playing, which is usually some sort of reaction to the object she's examining.

And that's where the voice enters the picture.  I have never played a game that seemed to speak from a feminine viewpoint as strongly as The Path.  The best part about it is that there is still interactivity, there is still mystery, I still felt that I was playing the game and not simply being told a story, but uncovering it and letting the imagery speak for itself and that in that imagery, the feminine voice was revealed.  Insecurities, uncertainties, and frustrations that only females can truly understand were playing out before me.  As a male player, I could empathize but understood that I could never fully know.  Reading through Tale of Tales' postmortem of the game, they say that a number of players believed the game to be about rape.  I don't blame anyone who may have had that interpretation.  The first character I played went through a story arc that seemed very much to be about her reaction to and dealing with such a violent act.  But the more I played, as I worked through all the characters, it became clear that while that may have been one story, it wasn't all of them.  The wolf, to me, was acting more as a symbol of struggle, something the girls each had to face in their own ways based on the context of their ages and personalities.

While I did find the game very interesting on an intellectual level, however, I understand the backlash that was unleashed against this title by people who play a lot of games.  There really isn't much to do and it is very very V  E  R  Y    S     L    O    W.  Certain aspects like being forced to walk very slowly around certain areas of the world did indeed become a bit too cumbersome for my taste.  But overall, I thought The Path was an excellent step in the right direction, a definitive game that makes a compelling argument for games as art, and one that anyone who has any interest in games beyond the B-movie narratives that populate most titles should play.