The Path

The Good
The music really gets the job done; I didn't always enjoy it, but some of it is really good. Even so, when you are aimlessly wandering through the forest, confused about what you are supposed to be doing, the music may start to get on your nerves.

The graphics will start to grate after a while, but are nicely done, with perhaps too much of a tendency to try for 'artistic' effects. In general, the graphics and backgrounds are pretty muted, so that when you do get to anywhere really significant, you know it.

The Bad
This can be quite a slow game, and it spoon-feeds you nothing. You have to just go with the flow and try things, which is almost all of its charm.

This means that you just have to trust that the developers knew what they were doing, and try it for a while. Which means complete submission to a pace that seems glacially slow. There is no 'instant gratification' here; you will have to block some serious time to play this - minutes won't do, it will take hours.

So it can be quite a stretch to work through a game like this, as you never know if you have done the right thing or the wrong thing, and most of it really doesn't seem to make any sense anyway. [It does eventually make quite a lot of sense, but you have to travel quite a long way down 'The Path' to get to this point.]

There was some buzz about the graphics; for my part I found them pretty old-school, which works but wasn't quite up to what I had been led to expect. The scenery tiles away endlessly into the distance, in fact it really does tile away endlessly, as the map loops around, so you can spend huge periods of time wondering where the heck you are on the map. But in the end it doesn't really matter ...

The Bottom Line
This is really a throwback to pre-Disney times when nursery tales were meant to educate young children rather than simply entertain them. While everyone THINKS they know the story of Little Red Riding Hood, in fact it is actually a very old story that has been told in different ways at different times and in different cultures. This game re-imagines that story as a computer game. It's pretty successful at this, but modern expectations of a computer game may lead buyers to expect something different than an interactive story.

At one point, one of the characters says "Art is where the nobility of humanity is expressed. I could not live in a world without it." I would take this as being the voice of the games developers/creators. Even so, if you are not in agreement with this statement, you probably will not like this game. It definitely qualifies as Art, meaning it tells a story (or a number of them). Their meaning, like all good stories, is to be determined by the player and largely depends on what the player brings with them. Nothing is cut-and-dried - many computer games have a recognizable beginning and end, and once you have finished playing you know whether you won or lost. There is none of that here. The stories are a jumping-off point for further discussion - like the best of art, they are open-ended, a beginning rather than an end. If you were looking for mindless entertainment, you will be disappointed. If you were looking for something that may stick with you for quite a while - like the 'Dark Eye' perhaps - then you may well like this title quite a lot.

The Good
I always refer to the game (and other games from this producer) as an interactive painting. Even if you didn't play it yourself, you will have to admit that it looks really awesome. I had a brand-new graphics card when I first played this and I had to upgrade again just to run it. The world is also not very repetitive and full of interesting things.

The character design is equally as awesome and they are also characterized amazingly well. The first game I played from this company was The Graveyard, so I did expect something, but not this much. Also it needs to be said: I love it how you learn more about them by finding objects and areas which they comment on.

The story is open for interpretation and because of that I will not go deeper into my own opinion as it may clash with yours. This is really a game that you shouldn't discuss as it is much more enjoyable when you just know your own version of it.

The game is very atmospheric and I just loved it. Everything from the music to the small visual details that showed up every now and then, it got me crying while playing this game. I know a masterpiece when I see it and this is one of them.

The Bad
The gameplay could have used a little polish. Most of the time you are looking for objects that get the story going and the easiest way to find them (as opposed to the incredibly annoying way) it to follow the girl in the white dress, but she always runs and if you run the camera slowly moves to a top-down perspective making it impossible to see the girl.

Even with GeForce 9500 GT this game still runs rather poorly.

The Bottom Line
This game is only for the people who love going to museums or a very story-heavy game (or a combination between the two, like me), but maybe some other people will like it as well. The game itself has one major flaw, but it redeems for that by been written incredibly well and having an unmatched presentation!