The Path
Heather Chaplin
The hairs on my arms are standing up. I’m nauseous in my belly and full of contradictory emotions in my chest. I feel sad, afraid, and wistful all at once. (Did I mention afraid?)
I’m playing The Path, from Belgian independent studio Tale of Tales, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so scared and upset while playing a videogame in my life. In fact, I know I haven’t. I would describe the feeling as horrible - except it’s only horrible in the way that watching The Shining is horrible. It’s horrible because it lays open the ugly, dangerous, sorrowful side of life, which is to say it’s not really horrible at all, just incredibly scary.
How to begin? Jesus. The Path opens in a room of five girls ranging from quite young to nearly grown up. It’s a retelling of the Red Riding Hood fairy tale, and each girl - dressed in red and black - must try and make her way to grandmother’s house. “Stay on the Path!” the game warns as you start out with each new girl, but of course the whole point is not to stay on the path, but rather to wander through the forest that surrounds you on either side. You run into rusty playgrounds, old graveyards, creepy campsites, and a wisp of girl in a white slip who sometimes runs past you and sometimes stops to hold your hand, play patty cake, or even hug you. In fact, if you do stay on the path and make your way to grandma’s without encountering that infamous wolf of the fairy tale, you “Fail” that round automatically. The obvious point here is, of course, the impish game design tactic of wanting your players to break the rules. But even more interesting is what this design tactic wants to tell us about life. The game is all about the necessity of facing what’s hard - even ugly and brutal - in order to “Succeed.”
“Sometimes you have to go through something very cruel to get somewhere very beautiful,” said Michael Samyn, who co-designed the game with his work and life partner, Auriea Harvey.
Harvey and Samyn both were trained as fine artists and graphic designers before becoming videogame designers in the early 2000s. They were part of a mid-1990s Internet-based scene, wherein creating virtual worlds and playing in flash and designing interactive experiences was the cutting edge of the art world. Both Harvey and Samyn remember discovering videogames in 2001. “My god, what could be done with this!” Samyn recalls thinking.
The Path is hardly a videogame at all. It’s more like some kind of futuristic adult toy. It’s an environment wherein you wander, (full of plants whose blooms are actually replications of medieval ornaments,) picking things up if you choose, or simply wandering until you stumble upon something. For many gamers - judging from the games blogasphere and people I spoke with - this was incredibly annoying. I found it relaxing and pleasurable. My problem with a lot of videogames is I get stressed thinking about what I’m supposed to be doing and wondering if I’ll be able to. When there’s a clock ticking, forget about it – it’s like my brain freezes. I get so overwhelmed with the pressure I can’t enjoy the experience. But The Path allowed me to be fully immersed in a beautifully realized game world without worrying whether I was doing everything right let alone fast enough.
And it’s hardly like nothing happens. In my first run through the forest, I climbed into a little boat I found on the edge of a lake - I think I was fleeing gasping sounds that seemed to echo through the forest, eerily indistinguishable between a gasp of pleasure and a gasp of pain. I hopped into the boat and next thing I knew the “the wolf” was upon me - the wolf is not always in the shape of a wolf - and there my young girl self was, whirled into the air in a burst of circulating white light. It seemed both annihilating and blissful at the same time. And then the screen went blank, opening again on my young girl self crumpled in a heap, in the rain, at the foot of grandma’s house.
The next character I choose was the youngest girl, actually dressed in a red, hooded coat, with a cute, little-girl walk. And this is when I realized just how immersed in the game I was. I didn’t want to take her into the forest. I knew I had to in order to experience the game, but down in some deep part of myself I felt I was betraying her by taking her off the well-lit path. “Don’t do it, don’t do,” I whispered to myself, even as I did it. She entered a grove where she could pick flowers, and, with each flower picked, a white, mask-like face appeared on the screen. I’m not sure how to describe just how scary that was, but that’s when the hair on my arms started standing up. And for the rest of the game, I couldn’t bring myself to go back to
that part.
We ran into the little girl in white and walked together hand in hand for a while. I didn’t want to part with the girl in white. I felt the urge to protect her, and also that somehow her presence protected my little-girl avatar. I felt she represented all that could go wrong in the forest - all that inevitably goes wrong in life - and the courage it takes to survive and grow despite even the bitterest experiences. She seemed endlessly old and yet totally vulnerable at the same time. I let the two girls play for a while, hug each other. Then I took my girl back to the path, and just kind of hung out there for a while. I know I said this before, but I have to say it again. I did not want to go back into the woods. The sense of wanting to protect my girl was that strong. And I was scared - really scared, watching The Shining scared. When I did take her back in, I found myself pleading for her - to whom, I don’t know - under my breath. We came upon an old graveyard, and my heart literally jumped a beat when I saw the wolf, up on his hind legs, creeping around the edge of the screen. Up to the graveyard I marched my little girl, and then it was a montage of fangs and moans and bristly hair, and then images of my girl riding him, roughly, round and round the cemetery. Again, all faded to black. Again, my girl was dropped, in a crumbled, broken heap at the foot of her grandmother’s door.
And so it goes. The next girl, a bit older, sits next to a young man on a bench next to a playground in the forest, he looks at her - and she looks so tiny in her slim girlhood next to his muscled manhood that my heart breaks with the yearning to save her - and all turns to black before her twisted body is found at grandma’s.
After that, I brought out the oldest of the young women, and said, ‘fuck that’ and marched her straight up the path to grandma’s house, walked right into the door, found grandma in bed with a funny look in her eye and “Failed” the round. Fine with me, I thought. At least I saved her.
The last girl I played was in some ways the most difficult. She’s a teenager who walks lasciviously, swishing her hips from side to side, arching her back and batting her eyelashes. I let her play by the side of the path with the little girl in white for a long, long time. It was as if I knew I had to take her into the forest to meet the wolf, to facilitate some process that, inevitably, had to be, yet I kept thinking, ‘a little longer, a little longer.’ Maybe I’d just been playing too long at that point, but I swear that when it was time to go into the forest, my girl knew just what she was doing. This time she (I?) was looking for the wolf - not dawdling about gazing at foliage or collecting flowers, not hiding from him, but flat-out hunting him down. This girl wanted her fate as much as she feared it. When I came into a campsite with bloody Xs on the trees, a cooler of beer and a man with an ax chopping away at the surrounding trees, I knew we’d found him. Might as well let her sit down on top of that cooler and wait for him to come.
I asked Samyn and Harvey what The Path was about. They laughed and asked what it was about for me. “Confronting your own interpretation of things is what’s frightening,” Samyn said.
Okay, fair enough, but still the game is about something. Samyn spoke of the traditional coming-of-age stories for girls that always come with a warning implied – usually against men. He said they wanted to turn that on its head a bit. Maybe the wolf isn’t really so evil. Maybe Little Red Riding Hood isn’t so innocent.
“There’s this tension between is this girl walking into a trap or is she actively seeking this experience no matter what the cost is,” Samyn said. “If The Path is about anything, it’s about the fact that things are not as clear as we might wish.”
When he said this, I thought of the scene where the little girl is pulled up in a swirl of white light – both ecstatic and obliterating. I thought of the teenage girl, swinging her hips at the wolf. No, things aren’t cut and dry in The Path.
But OK, Samyn and Harvey say the game is about my own reactions. So I’ll say this: for me, The Path is about what a remarkably fine line it is that separates childhood from adulthood, innocence from cynicism, and how utterly not black or white most things in life are. It’s about the fact that, as much as we might like to believe otherwise, sometimes the places that should be the safest – childhood, grandma’s house - are actually the most dangerous; that sex can be both brutal and transendendant; that females, at all stages of their girlhood, are vulnerable in a very particular way; and that there’s a certain inevitability to that vulnerability - no one gets through life without growing up. And sometimes growing up can be an experience that leaves you crumpled and nearly broken on the ground.
But maybe that’s just me. You’d better play it yourself to see for sure.