In short: everyone should play this.
Monday, July 20, 2009
The Path
A longer post on this will come later (probably when I've finished my paper), but I just wanted to say: this game is amazing. It's thought-provoking and incredibly creative. It's creepy, but not without a sense of whimsy. The character development is pretty mind-blowing considering the game's relatively brief length. And while the graphics have none of the realism of Fight Night 4 (a game that's so unbelievably, sweat-glisteningly, Mike-Tyson's-actual-physiognomy-usingly lifelike it's kind of unnerving), the game's aesthetic is haunting and undeniably beautiful in a way that I think painfully well-rendered realism could never be.
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How many of the girls did you play though? I did Robin for two hours and got nowhere, couldn't find the wolf at all; later, Joie and I played the oldest girl (I forget her name) and that took us over an hour to get through. Considering the low amount of actual events in this game, the result was that the game felt extraordinarly slow and dull. What did you think about the pacing? Did it make it more or less scary?
ReplyDeleteI played Ruby, Scarlet, Carmen and Rose....I really got nowhere with Scarlet and was wandering around for ages, Carmen took about two seconds (I found her wolf literally as soon as I started playing her), and Ruby and Rose both took probably about 30 minutes each. My friend played Ginger and I'm going to play Robin sometime later tonight.
ReplyDeleteThe pacing was definitely slow, but I think that's because the designers really want you to experience the atmosphere of the game. The creepy, haunting, frequently discordant music; the fading of colors; the endless, dizzying feeling of being lost in the woods...I feel like that's what you're meant to take in, and a sense of urgency to complete designated tasks would somehow get in the way of that. I didn't really see it as being about events per se because it's overall more of a weird psychological experience with each sister than a fulfillment of designated objectives. I think that narrative plays a strong role here, despite the fact that there isn't actually a set narrative provided (though you do get metaphors and a set of bizarre, decaying items that lend insight into the character of each sister). The narrative emerges based on how you choose to fill in the missing details in your mind. In that sense, it's a powerfully subjective game.
It's interesting, because I'd say that the game has no clear objectives whatsoever - while one could argue that the whole point of the game is to confront each girl's wolf, the only explicit rule of the game is to stay on the path (and thus to avoid the wolves altogether). You can collect items, or you can not collect items. You can find the wolf, or you can go straight to grandma's house. There's a sense of aimlessness to the entire game which I find intriguing in and of itself, since it's really difficult to conceive of a game without a well-defined purpose.
I didn't even find the game scary until I went to bed last night - and then I found it chilling. Then I realized the extent to which the game dealt with fear in its rawest, most primal form, and I started getting truly freaked out.
I also found the aimlessness interesting. The aimlessness of the game really contrasts with the final screens of the game in an intersting way. If you enter the house without confronting the wolf, for example, you get a huge 'FAILURE!' message, and any completion at all, wolf or no, greets you with a strangely arcade-style round-up of the number of items you collected and flowers you found and so on. While the game itself seems very aimless, the final screens are totally goal-driven. I'm pretty sure that this has something to do with a message they're trying to express-- what, in life, counts as 'success' or 'failure'?-- and I think this would be interesting for someone (not me, I'm bad with vagueness) to write about at length
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