Ending The Journey

The Path is a game we not only like, but love. That doesn’t mean that it’s an easy game to love however, or even to like. Not only is it deeply depressing and singularly dedicated to the idea that it can make you uncomfortable in a totally new way, but it’s also deliberately obtuse.

The Path is also incredibly slow – that’s what the developers warned us when they sent a copy through for review, but even when forewarned we weren’t forearmed.

Your characters move slower than lazy snails, but that’s only the start of it. The game actually goes out of its way to make it so that you can’t speed yourself up. There’s a sprint button, but if you use it for more than a second or two then it’ll automatically shift the viewpoint up to a position where you can’t see where you’re going, making you miss things. Again, it's a message; hurry on your journey and you'll miss the details.

On top of that, though you can choose to sprint or walk any time you want when you’re ambling through the forest, once you actually get to a location where there’s something to interact with then you’re slowed to an even slower dawdle.


We may as well just come out and admit the fact that, yes, there were portions of the game where we decided to simply weigh down the forwards key and go make a cup of tea. While The Path is often slow for a specific reason, there are parts where it stifles and, once you’ve understood the reason why it has to be slow then there’s no benefit in prolonging the sensation. The Path may be emotionally explosive, but it's also hugely boring in places.

The main problem that players are going to have with The Path is this restriction on player speed, which eventually starts to feel like nothing more than a way of artificially lengthening the game. It starts off as merely punishing and, the way it ties into the sick way that you’re actually funnelling these girls toward horrible fates, it does feel deserved – but it’s so omnipresent that it eventually becomes abusive.

Here’s another thing; The Path is a short and rather oblique game with few surprises but lots of utterly expected moments of disgust and creepiness which stem from the nature of what you’re doing. It never escalates towards actual terror. It’s possible then that this little review is going to impart enough of that feeling to make you feel like you’ve already played it, despite the fact that there’s a whole load of content we haven’t discussed.


If so, then good, because the alternative is that The Path either gets ignored or misunderstood. Nearly everyone who plays it will, we think, either hate it because of the niche arty market it’s trying to target or just avoid it. It isn’t a product that’s accessible or suitable to everyone and the vast majority of people would probably do best to just leave it alone and avoid the feeling that they’ve wasted their money.

That goes for everyone except for you though. If you’ve read all this review and you’re even slightly intrigued by the concept of this game, if you like having something weird to share with your friends and if you're desperate to see something new then this is definitely the game for you. You owe it to yourself to play it, because it’s unique and fresh and interesting and beautiful, no matter how broken and stifling and horrible it is.

The Path is a wonderful game and, if I had my way, then I’d give it an Excellence award and nothing else because trying to assign a numerical score to this is almost like trying to rate a painting in the Tate Gallery on the same system. Unfortunately, the others tell me I can’t do that and they’re right. We can’t make exceptions.

The Path is a brilliant game, but it’ll divide and frustrate most audiences and because of that we really can’t recommend it to anyone. Except you.

Score Guide