Touché, bitches!

The Path: one more comment

I don’t mean to harp-on about this topic, but it seems to have grown in to an interesting discussion. This is largely thanks to a mention on the Tale of Tales website (the creators of The Path). The developers fortunately seemed amiable to my discussion of their use of postmodern techniques.

Which brings me to this post…

I mentioned in my original post that the game seems to be made “without a clear narrative”. I feel the need to clarify this, mostly so I do justice to a well made game. The Path lacks a clear narrative only in so far as you’re not explicitly told what events “mean” and how they relate to each other. Unlike, say, Diablo, where event and quests link directly into a clear narrative that’s explicitly delivered through the gameplay, The Path just gives you the events and you’re expected to string them together yourself. You’re not told why one girl happens upon a TV and another girl a ghostly campsite. You just know they must mean something. And this something must be determined by you; the player.

The inherent polysemy (multiple-meanings) of texts, as you will know from my previous post, is a tennet of postmodernism. The makers of The Path foregrounded this and succesfully used it to create a rich, satisfying and haunting experience. That being said, maybe I only found it haunting because of the way I interpreted the events; maybe I read the events in terms of something in my life; maybe you’ll interpret them differently and find them funny or sad?

It is a deeply psychological game that is ushering in a new type of game; the postmodern game. Soon, I’ll consider the HL 2 mod Dear Esther in similar terms. Stay tuned!

PS. I refer to it as a game only because this is a convenient term for this type of text. I maintain that whether or not it is a game is up to the player and their definitional conclusions.