The Path is a darkly seductive horror game inspired by older versions of the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale. Created by artists Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn and their game design studio collaborators, this incredibly filmic piece updates the story with six sisters who may individually be chosen to be sent on errand to their grandmother's house deep in the forest.
Upon selection, the chosen sister arrives in the forest at the end of a tarmac road and the start of the eponymous path of the title. The only instructions given are to go to grandmother's house and to stay on the path, a rule which of course must be broken to experience the horrors - wolves lurking in the dark, dense audio visual foliage.
There are flowers to collect and many objects to be found which relate to the individual girls, some of which may unlock otherwise inaccessible rooms in grandmothers house when you finally arrive.
The characters have been created and modelled with great detail, their posture and poses very human, their untold stories being revealed as they discover items and buildings within the forest. This familiarity only serves to augment the intensity of the game's dark atmosphere, assisted by the constantly evolving soundscape and music created for the game by American musicians Jarboe and Kris Force.
Harvey and Samyn describe the piece as a slow game, an attempt on their behalf to engage traditional game players in a much richer experience both emotionally and aesthetically, something they have acheived to a high degree with earlier online pieces such as skinonskinonskin and their intimate performance space WireFire, created under their Entropy8Zuper! alias. Indeed to this end, they wrote the Realtime Art Manifesto, presented at MediaTerra (Athens, Greece) in 2006 as "a call-to-arms for creative people" to embrace realtime 3D as a medium and realise its enormous potential.