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.