The Path Released

is anyone else reminded of the pen and teller game for sega cd? i am having a hard time getting a handle on whether this whole game is kind of a joke or what? the pseudo-gothiness leads me to believe otherwise, because i’ve just never come across anything with those trappings that isn’t super self-serious, but i have a hard time believing anything this pretentious actually exists. is it just a trick to get people to repeatedly subject themselves to being raped, mudered and bored just because the designers think it’s funny? because if so it’s kind of hilarious.

kongming, are you dense? They’re called games for a reason. You don’t ask an oil portrait to sing. The least a game should do before aiming for some bullshit artistic validity (Do you disown all mainstream and retro games because they’re fun to play, as if that’s not some form of expression already?), is to be playable and – dare I say it – enjoyable to interact with. If developers started paying more attention to fine design first, then worry about statements afterwards, the medium would be a lot better off.

re dessgeega: Actually the game is far more interactive than The Graveyard, only perhaps 5% of it is cutscenes, the majority of it is interaction (exploring the forest, picking up items, and so on). So I agree that a game that’s all cutscene and no interaction isn’t much of a game, I just don’t think it applies to this game at all, except for the “rail shooter” parts at the end of each chapter.

re Dracko: have you bought it, or are you basing that on reviews? It works fine for me, and except for the slow walking speed I think it’s fine technically.

RobF: well, that was my soundbite.

The control scheme is “broken” in the way that it enforces a slow approach. It doesn’t even restrict your control entirely, it attaches consequences to it, seemingly mocking your need to speed through the game (zoom out, pumped up music and heartbeat, a dark layer over the screen).

If their metaphorical take on the subject matter is childish, mixing tender with harsh moments, I really would like to know what games do it better then. The conditioning arises that games supposedly have to define clear goals and give a player complete (and tedious) control over futile tasks such as shooting thousands of guys or opening hundreds of chests. Throw in a few conversations, a logbook or a cutscene, and we have a “deep” game, simply because there is so little that dares to take it further (except for interactive fiction perhaps), because it hides behind the mechanics mass appeal demands. It’s tapping into a large minority of players who want something else.

The Path gets rid of all of that, and all of a sudden it gets a backlash because it does not adhere to the medium where instantly-delivered mediocrity is king. What kind of game are you defending then?

We’ve been over the controls in the RPS thread.

They’re broken because they don’t bloody well work half the time. If that’s deliberate, it’s still shit. If it’s not, it’s bugged.

Either way – it’s *still* broken, man.

If I press a button and something is supposed to happen and it doesn’t do it – what consequences has it just attached to anything? Sometimes you do something and nothing happens?

There’s no backlash from me because it “does not adhere to the medium where instantly-delivered mediocrity is king” because in order to get on board with that statement I have to believe (or as you seem intent on inferring, I’m conditioned to believe) that games -as games- are somehow an inferior medium. I don’t believe that. It’s bollocks.

Your entire argument seems to hinge on a construct, not anything that stands up to any form of scrutiny. No-one is “conditioned” into believing that guff, man. People aren’t somehow stupid for liking that stuff. That’s a massive silly. Games are brilliant, they can and do great things.

That’s not for a second to say that there’s no room for games to do something different, in fact – over the years there’s been many titles mainstream and otherwise that don’t toe the lines of wherever the current design trends may lie. There’s not this gestalt entity of sameiness called the mainstream. Never has been, doubtlessly never will be. It’s an evolving medium, it takes twists and turns, sidesteps and more.

And yeah, I’ll defend peoples rights to like gamey games till the cows come home. I’ll even defend your right to like The Path, even though I disagree with your argument here. But then, I’m not arguing for a “large minority of players” (is that like a smaller version of the silent majority?), I’m arguing my point of view as it’s the only one I can honestly back up.

And my view is that The Path is inept and mediocre on -its own terms-.

I didn’t read the RPS thread, what’s RPS? But I did find the movement speed rather slow, but certainly not “broken”. I’d have preferred more responsive controls too, but it’s not broken enough that most people can’t enjoy the game. It’s certainly better than a lot of other 3D indie games, like MDickie’s game, or Quite Soulless. You might be forgetting this is just two people making this entire game — all the models, all the programming, everything — you can’t realistically expect perfection of polish by mainstream games standards. Maybe they’ll patch it and polish up the movement speed one day, this is just launch day.

It’s the confusion link in Derek’s post, Paul. Hive of darn fine journalism, RockPaperShotgun.

Although I’m not strictly referencing the speed when I say broken, that’s an idiotic design decision but not technically a broken one. Although I get the feeling I’m making distinctions between various shades of “a bit rubbish” here and distracting from the actual content.

“You might be forgetting this is just two people making this entire game – all the models, all the programming, everything – you can’t realistically expect perfection of polish by mainstream games standards”

Nah, I’m not forgetting that, man. I think “controls that work” is y’know, the first thing you might want to get right whether you’re one or twelvety people. If not, you’re doing it a bit wrong. Other people have made games with shit controls isn’t exactly much of a defence :)

You guys were just waiting for an excuse to start another one of these retarded threads, weren’t you?

Hmm, in what predictable directions shall we take this discussion next? Let’s complain about how modern art is a bunch of squiggles!

@Paul Eres: Have you ever regretted buying a product? I have.

@RobF: That’s your decision. Which is nice.

I didn’t really feel the controls were bad enough to interfere with the game. Perhaps that’s because I’ve played a ton of games with worse controls and don’t mind it so much.

Yes, I’ve regretted buying stuff, but that wasn’t my point — I’m just saying that if this game was as horrible as people who haven’t played it are claiming, you’d expect more posts expressing regret over buying it instead of it being a best-seller on Steam. But it really only seems to be (except for a few exceptions) the people who *didn’t buy it* who are saying it’s a horrible game.

Also, for the record, I think it was a bad idea to even have linked to the ‘this game is about rape’ “criticism” — while the comments there were interesting, the proposition that every girl is raped at the end of her chapter is a seriously far-fetched interpretation, and one which the developers themselves told me they did not intend as an interpretation.

At first I actually thought it may have been a possibility because I only played Ginger’s chapter, so it clouded even my judgment with false info. Now it’s become a sort of a meme, with tons of people who didn’t play the game thinking they know everything about it without playing it just because they read that one review. I suggest those who think the game is about rape seriously either buy the game or read the other reviews before deriding the game for being about rape, since 95% of the reviews and the developers say the game is not about rape.

Well how would you say it compares to arty non-game Killer 7?

Bought it, played a bit.
There was no rape, however, there were slow controls and a camera that annoyingly pans up when you run.
Impairing vision in this way is not a good way to raise tension.

Aside from that it was just a game of walk around looking for random objects to get some text and odd, long-winded cut scenes.

I really liked the graphical design though.

The review described the game in detail, though. If it just said that the gameplay is horrible or the graphics bog down his machine too much, I could just shrug that off. The thing is, he describes dragging his character through the forest to be murdered at a very slow pace, the graphics bogging down his machine even at very low settings and how his machine can play Left 4 Dead just fine, among other things.

The game apparently is around 6 hours long, depends on how much you explore. Which is short, but decent for $9. I imagine there’s no demo because they haven’t gotten around to it yet, there may be one eventually. Many games don’t have demos on launch day but get them later on.

Which reviewer do you mean?

Yeah, but as I said, that’s just one review — you should check out all the positive reviews the game has gotten too. Do you normally read the worst review first? Not many of the others seemed to have a problem with it, and not many of the people who have bought the game seemed to mention it in discussions of it on forums and such. Even the Steam forums for the game are free of complaints about the controls. Sometimes one guy is right while everyone else is wrong, but it’s not good to bet on it.

Anyway, I think the controls are okay. The idea that it takes you 10 minutes of just running to reach grandma’s house (as that reviewer claimed) is kind of a lie, since I saw a video of it and it only took 3 minutes, and they stopped and looked around at signs and such. You can see that vid in Tim W’s blog — 3 minutes to get to grandma’s house if you walk directly along the path, not 10. So I’m guessing that that reviewer really just hates the game and wanted it to see as bad as possible, or had technical problems that the rest of us are not experiencing. The second may be likely, since in the comments to his review he did reaffirm that he timed it and it took him 10 minutes of running to get to the house, whereas that video (and my experience) is around 3 minutes.

Personally I think ToT should have stuck up a demo. While I don’t grudge spending the money on it (if it had been brilliant I would have regretted not buying it) I can’t say it was my cup of tea, and I wouldn’t have bought it with the benefit of a demo.

i appreciate what the game is trying to do and the art direction is fantastic and the sound was damn good as well (although the loops became irritating after a while) but I didn’t find the pacing was for me and ultimately the lack of any proper narrative meant that I didn’t really fell the urge to play through all of the girls experiences.

it was pretty neat the different way the girls percieved things but at the end of the day I liken the game more to a piece of modern art where too much interpretation lies on the viewer/p;layer and there’s little actual substance to the thing itself. Though obviously this took a hell of a lot of effort than an unmade bed or an entirely blue painting or whatever so some credit had to be given.

Just not my thing in the end but certainly worthy trying and making up your own mind I can see a lot of people liking it.

Well I took the plunge and bought it. It’s like Silent Hill without clumsily hitting dogs with a pipe and no silly piano puzzles. There definitely is a gameplay aspect to it, collecting hidden items scattered all over the landscape. If you could put up with the awkwardness and non-gameplay of Killer 7 for the sake of its arty mood piece, you could definitely do worst than the Path. This is not “Passage 3D.”

“A lot of the negative reactions I’ve seen here… seem to come from people taking the game literally.”
Which ones (here)?
“I’m sure they are the sort who would be appalled at Plato, because that bastard wanted to chain people up in a cave!”
I’m appalled at Plato, because he was a theocratic wanker.