Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Walking The Path!

Spoiler alert. I’m going to talk about things that happen in The Path. It’s hard to spoil a game which advertises its intention to kill every main character on the front page of its website, but The Path is a game about exploration and experience and if you want to keep your experience as fresh and personal as possible I suggest you pony up your ten bucks and enjoy the ride. But if you’ve played it already or you’re on the fence, read on without fear.

Last week I bought The Path. On a related note, last week I started to relapse into childhood habits regarding monsters and closets. I started to believe that, at any moment, my reality could be torn asunder and reshaped by some faceless malevolent will hell bent on dragging me into some sort of horrible purgatory underneath my bed.

What I’m saying is that The Path is a subtle, horrifying game about family, about home, about suburban life and what happens when we remove ourselves from it. It’s a game about growing up and learning about yourself, about exploring and seeing the world and about lots of other things. It’s a game rich with subtext, perhaps largely because its light on text-text and big on character.

It’s a game about experiencing a world uncannily similar to your own which is simultaneously alien. It’s a game about being uncomfortable. And more people should play it.

I’m not really saying anything new in those paragraphs. Reviews across the board have said as much. The Path is a good game. It’s a thoughtful game. And it’s a game that makes us consider ourselves, to reflect on our own response to the experiences it opens up to us. All games allow for this sort of reflection, but it’s normally occluded by any number of factors, from the action and pacing of a the game to the experience of the game’s storyline.

For example, experiencing Fallout 3 involves removing yourself, physically and intellectually, from Fallout 3’s storyline. Because while you’re experiencing the story they’re trying to tell you aren’t making your own story. At least, not as effectively as you are when you’re exploring, interacting with places and processing your experiences as you stride across the wasteland. And what you’re doing and thinking in these interim moments is what really shapes your experience and shifts Fallout from a great game to a work of art. In these moments the game begs the question “what does your reaction to this mean?”

The Path doesn’t have this hurdle. The Path’s central storyline is an obtuse continuation of Little Red Riding Hood. Kind of. In this case, “central storyline” means “framing device,” since The Path doesn’t have a preset central story. It’s a lean, intelligent treatment of what it means to be a videogame. You’re given a pretext, and you’re then placed in a position to subvert it.

You guide six young women or girls, as the case may be, one by one, through a swath of woods. You don’t really have any map to speak of and navigating can be a torturous affair most of the time. In fact, I’m still not even sure that the game doesn’t remove certain places from the world each time you play. I’ve yet to find The Playground as Ginger, despite looking for almost an hour.

Through this “challenging” navigation, The Path discourages the normal obsessive compulsive habits gamers bring to new experiences. There’s no way to see where you are in relation to the other map objects at any given moment, so a walkthrough wouldn’t do you any good. Instead you’ve got no choice but to enjoy the journey itself, rather than pursue rewards along the way.

And in return The Path is beautiful in a strange and alien way. Alien in that you are inhabiting the psyche of a young woman, an odd experience for myself, a young man with no children. I found myself coming to sympathize with characters as I guided them. I found myself disarmed, not by the strength of writing or the quality of art (although both are excellent, which is all the more impressive considering the design team of two could quite literally fit inside of a phone booth) but by the game play itself.

I’ll give you an example. The second time I played through I chose Carmen. I wandered around the woods with her, stole a man’s hat, lit some fires, and thought Carmen was an irritating tomboy slut. Her every self-aggrandizing thought made me want to stab her in the neck. Unlike Ginger, who I’d immediately felt sympathy and compassion towards I really wanted something terrible to happen to Carmen.

But it never did. I wandered to grandmother’s house and was treated to a not-so-surreal trip through its halls (only by the game’s standards, mind you; the house consisted of corridors out of an Escher painting filled with trees), delivered her bottle of wine and laid down in bed next to her. The game “ranked” me as a failure, as I had not encountered my wolf. But it was late and I was tired, so I shut down my computer for the night and went to bed.

The next day I started the game up and put Carmen through her paces once more. I was treated to the same set pieces and experiences that I’d had the previous night, colored somewhat by Carmen’s trip through the house. I felt closer to her this time, like I knew her a little better, but I still didn’t like her particularly. It wasn’t until I’d met her wolf that she truly got under my skin.

After Carmen essentially seduces her father figure she’s treated to the same rain-soaked walk of shame as all of the other girls. Then she enters the house and what had been a bland, lifeless piece of suburbia is now a hideous sort of butcher’s shop. The mundane fixtures of the house were replaced by bladed spinning monstrosities. The still, too peaceful passages leading to her Room were now colored by the sounds of sawing and loud sex. And Carmen’s Wolf hadn’t done anything violent or horrible to her. He’d simply given her what she wanted: beer and warm company.

Seeing Grandmother’s House once more through Carmen’s eyes, now that her innocence had been stripped away, made me feel a profound pity for her. In both worlds, Carmen was distinctly unhappy. She did her best to straddle them, reached for a life of hedonism while staying true to her family, but she simply couldn’t pull it off and in the end she had to go home with someone at some point. And for her that means choosing an extreme. There are, after all, only two options for her. She becomes a woman or stays a girl. The middle ground is only in her walk, and that cannot last forever.

And in becoming a woman the preconceptions of her girlhood are destroyed. We can never have them back without erasing our own memories. What was a beautiful shared experience in her mind will always, to the player, now seem like a horrible, ghastly, violent ordeal. Something she must endure, rather than savor, something that isolates her further rather than bringing her into greater harmony with the world.

I could keep going about Carmen, about how she made me feel and how she made me reflect on my own life. I could pontificate for pages about the way that she’s informed my perception of the world and of people in general. And that’s just one of six experiences this game offers, seven if you count the epilogue. And these experiences are infinitely replayable and engaging in a way that most games aren’t, aside from perhaps Left 4 Dead.

And I could write an essay about the experiences I’ve had with each girl, about how they made me feel, how I engaged their characters and how I tried to piece together the narrative of the game through their experiences. I could probably write an essay all about piecing together The Path, of the joy of being given an incomplete mystery with some real meat behind it. I still think about this game while I’m doing other things.

And this is a game I bought for ten dollars.

Wanted might be a fun experience, but are you going to think about it after the last bullet has been curved? Probably not. And that game costs sixty fucking dollars. Sixty.

The Path, however, still keeps me up at night. It makes me reconsider the world around me. Even mired in new releases, purchases, and personal matters I look forward to sitting down with The Path again and seeing more of the woods through each girl’s eyes. And I spent as much on this game as I’d spend on a pitcher of PBR in Southeast Portland (including tip). In terms of bang for your buck, or in this case creeping horror for your buck, it’s a tough game to beat.

The Path’s selling points go beyond the normal equation of fun to money that must color any game purchase, however. It steps into the territory of defining games as an art form. It offers up a compelling experience that almost anyone can sit down and enjoy, an experience informed entirely by the player. It’s a game I’ve used to get an old friend who can barely grasp a controller to become more comfortable with a keyboard and mouse. And it’s a game I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every unsettling second of.

The Path is important. It’s not important in that it will sell a large number of copies, or that it will be remembered in the same hushed tones of wonder and caution as Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil. It’s important because of the experience it offers.

The Path is important the same way that so much great art is important: it shows us beautiful and horrible things inside of ourselves while telling its own story. And it looks good doing it.