When you reach Grandmothers House, it is night. But once inside you discover things may not be as you remember them. It is a memory of a house, of a relationship between two generations, and possibly another more sinister presence. You head through the corridors to the Bedroom. If you haven’t met the murduring wolf GAME OVER. Begin again. If you have, you find grandmother dead. And you are murdered as well. SUCCESS! Begin Again. Only this time, there is one less Red avatar to choose from.
–From the 2006 design document for The Path.
As you get closer to her house the sun sets. So her home is always shrouded in darkness. And you can see the forest also at night by entering closer to Grandmother’s House (thus the colors you see will vary depending on the ‘time of day’ you enter the forest.)
So what, exactly, is up with Grandmother?
In the fairy tales, Grandmother is a bed-ridden enigma. So we let it be in The Path. One must think of all the possible symbolism of her Bedroom (where the story ineveitably always ends.) and her Bed (which makes an appearance at every end-game.) In this house, the girls find a way to either remember or misremember or fantasize all their love for grandmother and angst for her unknown ways. Not to mention a place to revel in their own traumatic situations. But what traumas do young girls have. Trouble at school, dark places under the bed, coming to terms with growing up.
And thus her house becomes what the girls want to see. If no wolf has gotten there first then it is simply about the relationship between the girl and her grandmother. The house can get quite odd. The overlays you see when interacting with objects in the Forest all relate back to these, half remembered half imagined ‘memories’ the girls have, that they put into their ‘basket’ and bring with them to their Grandmother’s House. They invade her home as much as the wolves do. Leaving you to wonder if any of it is really happening at all in Grandmother’s reality.
these are the various reference sheets we used to clarify what each girl’s experience of the house would be.
Of course, if you meet the wolf in the forest the path to the bedroom changes. The wolf invasions superimpose themselves on the ‘Safe’ configurations of Grandmother’s House. Suddenly rooms which before seemed dark and eerie are now damaged and transfigured, seen through the lens of the each girls new experience. Her world is changed. The house is changed. The comfort of the normal ending at Grandmother’s side is lost to her forever. Yes, an intense experience. But in every case, we hope, an experience worth having.
One of the artists whose work inspired the design of the Red Girls and helped us defined the atmosphere of The Path was Fuco Ueda. Her pictures of girls who all look like each other, as if they were family or maybe even multiple versions of the same person, greatly spoke to our feelings about our little family of Red Girls. Miss Ueda’s combination of the surreal and the horrific with the sensual and the innocent encouraged our own. Especially the recurring theme of desire -a desire that almost always leads to some form of pain (if only bloody knees)- felt very appropriate.
When creating the art style for The Path, we were influenced by several wonderful artists. We are trying to interview them all. Our interview with Lisa Falzon was published a while ago. And the interview with Ray Caesar was done in that same period. But we never got around to publishing it. What better moment than the first anniversary of The Path to share this very insightful and inspiring interview with one of the world’s most imaginative contemporary artists!
People think I paint pictures of children… I don’t! I paint pictures of the human soul… that alluring image of the hidden part of ourselves… some call them ghosts or spirits but I see them as the image of who we truly are, made manifest with all the objects and bruises that filled the story of each life.
I look at the game industry today and see only one game… it starts the same and ends the same and it’s sold in a variety of names and packages and has no mystery because it is not utilizing creativity as well as it could…
the overlay effect was originally just a manner to show which character is the focus of attention. it evolved, during beta testing into a way to show which character can interact with which object in the forest as well. We loved the look of double exposure from film photography and film:
looking at discolorations and glitches of photographic processes were a big influence as well as the false color effects done in movies to connect scenes to moods. i found the colors somehow give much more of a ‘horror’ atmosphere than darkness and grunge did.
this has nothing to do with our game.
But Momus posted this song today on youtube.
and i like it.
and it’s called “My Rose”
and its seems very surreal and sad
and we have a character in The Path named Rose (that i think about whenever i hear the name Rose.)
and I listened to his music a lot when I was working on The Path
and…
Dr. Jamie Tehrani, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world.
Whilst the European version tells the story of a little girl who is tricked by a wolf masquerading as her grandmother, in the Chinese version a tiger replaces the wolf.
In Iran, where it would be considered odd for a young girl to roam alone, the story features a little boy.
Contrary to the view that the tale originated in France shortly before Charles Perrault produced the first written version in the 17th century, Dr Tehrani found that the varients shared a common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.
He said: “Over time these folk tales have been subtly changed and have evolved just like an biological organism. Because many of them were not written down until much later, they have been misremembered or reinvented through hundreds of generations.
“By looking at how these folk tales have spread and changed it tells us something about human psychology and what sort of things we find memorable.
Auriea was quite willful about which kind of car would be part of Ruby’s story. I never asked why. Must be something that happened in her former home of the United States of America, where these “muscle cars” were supposedly all the rage in the seventies.
Incidentally, this is one the objects in The Path that was modeled by the excellent team at Dragon-Fly Studio in Ukraine. Both the rusted and the wrecked version.
This journal chronicles the making of The Path, a single player horror game developed by Tale of Tales, the game was released in March 2009 and can be downloaded via this website! Contributors to this journal are the game’s main creators Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn.
We hope you will enjoy our candid revelations about the work process. But we do want to warn you that if you truly want to experience The Path fresh, you might want to avoid reading these pages. We cannot garantee spoiler-free content!
