 The Path is easy to play. The more traditional Quake keyboard+mouse skills take a degree of commitment to achieve: the use of WASD+mouse-look or in my case VBN C+mouse-look didn't come naturally for me, it took me most of Half-Life before I realised that I couldn't use the direction keys because I needed to 'strafe' (to move sideways and turn at the same time) and to be able to move through the game without thinking about what key did what.  The keyboard controls required for The Path are limited to the arrow keys, there is no reaction speed or dexterity required at all! As long as you can keep your finger on the up arrow key, and note that the horizontal arrows change the direction your character moves in; really, that's all there is to it. Letting go of the controls allows your game character to interact with anything she is 'thinking' about. You will know what she is thinking because you see it; ghostly images activated by her proximity to objects in the game. The Path will not ask you to navigate through complex timing problems as your virtual self fights her way through the inevitable reprocessing machinery (note to self -do not bother with that so called short cut through Enpro in Doom 3 again). There is no mind twisting, or subliminal mathematics, or ability to spot and hit your target as you fly through the air, as in Portal. There will be no shuffling zombies lurking in dark corners, and no rapidly approaching Apache helicopter or need to charge up your Tau canon. Nor is there WIN! Because winning in The Path means to meet with the wolf and to die. If this was a Quake game, the wolf would come looking for me and I'd have to do all in my power to kill it before it killed me; perhaps like Gordon Freeman when faced with the Gargantuan (a kind of minotaur with flame-thrower paws) I'd have to run the gamut of unhelpful soldiers, turn on the notoriously dangerous, Tesla inspired generators and lure the Gargantua to its death -fried between lightning bolts of doom! Or like Doom-Guy, on finding my base suffering an influx of demons, and my comrades turned into zombies I'd have to fight my way to hell and back again, to close the breach in the space/time continuum by throwing the Soul-Cube at some large guy with horns, until his leg fell off. On the way I'd accumulate bigger guns, and perceive the game's developers laughing at me as I fall through the trap door placed just before some prize weapon placed as a lure, dropping me into a red room, or I suffer another red incident when I hear voices and everything goes odd, or I plummet into the flesh dissolving red mist of Quake3 again...  The Path starts in a red room.. Six sisters sit or stand in a red room, they appear to be bored, there doesn't seem to be anything to do. I as player chose one girl and I take control of her direction of travel once she is on the path to grandma's house. The game instructs 'me' to go to grandma's house and to stay on the path. Staying on the path takes you to the house, to granny in bed. There is a stuffed wolf in her bedroom, and you -obviously exhausted from the walk- just take off your shoes and get into bed beside her.  At this point the game rates you as a failure and asks you if you would like to start again. We are back in the red-room, all the sisters are sitting or standing, they appear bored, there is nothing to do... I personally thought that the game had been harsh on me, it doesn't come naturally to realise that the experience of ones own death is rated by this game as success. But in the light of the other two alternatives, sleeping with granny, or waiting in the red room perhaps The Path makes a valid point.  The house of the Grandmothers is the house of death. Grandmothers are old, have known life, death and childbirth. The house of the grandmothers is no place for a young girl -for there is no shortcut into the wealth of experience grandmother represents. It is as if the game is saying that to stay on the path without knowing life or death, sex and childbirth is to avoid trouble, but to go to sleep. To sleep in the grandmothers house is the consequence of staying on the path. To step off the path is very easy, and once you have gone too far the path may vanish and the consequences may be fatal. Meeting the wolf is easy too. Curiously -and this is where The Path differs from any other game I've played- the wolf requires your permission to become your murderer; only you may not realise at what point you gave that permission. In the game you see your charactor thinking about her death, but at no point does death seem real. And yet at some point there is a fatal choice as you watch your charactor chose to sit by that man, she didn't really think it would end like this...  For instance one girl sees a camp site. There are a couple of tents, a wood-cutter is busy chopping a tree. The girl in white is there, perhaps she is the wood-cutters daughter? The girl, Carmen, sees a box full of beer cans, she wishes to drink but I could easily 'look after her' and take her back to somewhere less risky -I don't. Carmen sits down and drinks more beer, she flirts with the wood cutter and I know that this isn't a good idea and I know that this is what Carmen wants. But I as a mother in real life worry about her, not least because I have a vague idea that a game based on Little Red Riding Hood, girls who step off the path meet the wolf. But surely, doesn't the wood cutter save Little Red Riding Hood?  Then there is Ruby, who accepts cigarettes from the man lurking around the children's playground. I'm watching this unfold, thinking that it is obviously not a good idea to let Ruby accept them, let alone sit down beside him -but it is what Ruby wants. I don't make her get up and walk away, but if it were me I most certainly would not have drunk the beer with the wood cutter, or gone within a mile of the dodgy playground bloke. But Scarlet's wolf was a different matter. I didn't want to walk away. And I find that troubling. I guess it explains why I have four kids. But back in the red room, a room shut off from anywhere, but surrounded by the hum of the city in an eternal present where no one grows older or younger..all the girls are gone except one, the girl in white who until now was always running about in the forest.  The story of Little Red Ridinghood is very old with its central theme of a girl picking flowers, suddenly abducted from this world of sunlight, of order, of safety and love down into the earth and is never, let us say, the same again. The first version is perhaps Sumerian; the story tells how Ereshkigal is abducted by The Kur and becomes queen of 'The Great Below', after that the theme is found in The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, circa 600 BC I had not made the connection between the story of Persephone and Little Red-Riding Hood before this weekend, but after playing The Path (from Tale of Tales) I see the story of Red Riding Hood as focused upon the desire for knowledge aspect of the Persephone tale (the kind of knowledge represented by the colour red -of life, of sex, of blood, death and birth). Modern interpretations of the oldest version -the abduction of Ereshkigal by The Kur, also stress this aspect. In Ershkigal's case it is knowledge of Kurnagi: the place of no return, where she assumes the role of queen. This more Jungian interpretation of abduction for the good of one's own soul finds its way into films and stories with Angela Carter's In The Company Of Wolves, in which straying from the path is the more interesting, perhaps more honest even, and in some cases preferable to, the company of wood cutters. The Homeric Hymn and and Ovid's version of the Persephone myth portray the abduction of the female character as inevitable rather than a subconscious choice, reflecting the times in which they were written, and certainly not concerned with a Jungian katabasis. The idea that we chose our fate is deceptive I can just hear the voice of the judge asking the rape victim "and what were you wearing that night"? the idea that women as 'asking for it' wont go away. But if I take the Jungian notion that we chose the dark, seriously, then straying off the path is inevitable, unlike murder Yet, katabasis -a descent- occurs which ever way you chose to interpret the stories (either of our own lives, or of the mythic 'lost girls': Ereshkigal is washed away by the river, or swallowed by the gaping earth, while Persephone and Red Riding Hood 'step off the path' enticed away by beautiful flowers: ...there were irises and hyacinths and a narcissus which Gaia grew as a snare for the girl with eyes like buds to please the God Who Receives So Many -for Zeus had willed it- and the flower shone wondrously... And the girl too wondered at it, she reached out both her hands to take the lovely toy in the plain of Nysa, and He Who Receives So Many, the lord, sprang upon her with his immortal horses, the son of Kronos with many names. But what did I find out from playing the game? The Path begins with a red living room containing six sisters, I as player, chose one girl at a time to send into the woods -and to stay on the path!- taking a basket and wine to grandmother. I had known that this was the beginning before I installed the game, and I'd also known that success in this games terms was to meet the wolf and for this reason I'd thought long and hard before committing myself to play.. In short I felt as if I was good as sending each girl into the woods to be murdered; I didn't think that I would like myself if I found that I could do that. I imagined that at the end there could be some form of redemption; perhaps if one sister found the axe then she would save her sisters? I loaded the game. I found the axe. My character wasn't interested in it at all (silly girl, I thought, more girls should play Doom.) I always empathize with my game characters. Most of the time the character is of a man with a big gun, but the game has given him very little option than to use that gun and so I can empathize...Playing as a girl, it should have been more easy to empathise. Well I had a strong emotional response to each of the characters. I put off playing as the youngest because I saw myself as her guardian -and what kind of terrible guardian would I be to send her into the woods alone? but in truth this game does not let player guard her characters. And in truth, I was wondering around the woods alone when I was just nine years old and it didn't bother me at all. When I empathized with the little girl I remembered my Ladybird version of Little Red-Riding Hood, and how I, just like the youngest of the girls sent into the woods in The Path thought that I'd play with the wolf, for surely isn't a wolf just a bigger, more furry, wilder kind of dog? I crossed out the words 'Big bad' in every page of that book. Like the girl in Beauty and The Beast, I believed in love. Did I ever make a mistake so big as the girl in The Path -who thinks that the werewolf would like to play? Well, if I did it has gone behind 'the screen' and I wont remember. Then there is the tom-boy whose wolf represents being female; that you can run, but you cannot hide from what mother nature (red in tooth and claw) has lined up for you: heart-break, menstruation, fear of pregnancy, feeling too fat and too thin, pregnancy, men who are bad at sex and thinking that it is your fault, child birth, marriage, divorce and more heartbreak and then menopause (when She leaves you with your crumbling bones on the crumbling earth in the field of dead flowers...) I don't think I had even noticed that wolf before as a wolf because She had always seemed to be kind to me..but now I am growing old and I can feel the cold air of the grave. Oh hang on, the werewolf of puppy dog love? Yep, I'd gotten so used to the scar I'd forgotten how to see it. Next comes Carmen who sees a camp site, sees some crates of beer and heads for the beer. She has to work quite hard to get her *initiation* from the balding wood cutter -whose prime interest seems to be cutting down trees. If I've ever been Carmen, I don't remember? I remember having to get out of such situations, but never choosing to walk into them. Then Ruby -who smokes cigarettes with the Charming man in the playground- I have a horrible feeling that I've been there, I guess most of us have, but as with Carmen I didn't really empathize or understand why she and Ruby should try so hard. Then there is Rose whose wolf was all fire and mist, who floated above the world, taking Rose with him. He was a lovely wolf indeed and I understood exactly why she went to him. The reality is that someone so full of heat and light and steam...who seems so other and disconnected, causes immeasurable damage to those around them. I have a son from that wolf. And then there is Scarlet. I had a big problem with Scarlet's wolf -the Fey wolf- because he would have got me. As I played the game, Scarlet should have walked away for she had lots of flowers to find and memories to gather before going to grandma's house but once I'd spotted the fey wolf, I knew that he had my number. And so at that point, more than at any other, I got into the feeling of you asked for it. Until then it had been they who had asked for it, I wouldn't, couldn't be so stupid?! Finally -I was pleased to see that the archetype that fits my husband wasn't in there. Read Amy's review here-[LINK] 
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