blog entry #6 - the path analysis, i guess

11/29/22 - Tuesday 5:47 pm

the path isn't a very well known game. it comes from tale of tales, who dabbled in game development before but not really to this extent. it follows the story of seven different girls, all sisters, and a specific event in their lives that would change it for the better (we'll come back to that). im pretty sure you can play the game in order of whichever sister you want to play as, but i believe it's meant to go from robin, to rose, to ginger, to ruby, to carmen, to scarlet. i'll start off explaining the general surroundings and atmosphere of the game and then the characters.

firstly, every sister can interact with things differently during their playthrough. for example, there is nothing for rose to do at the abandoned theatre, but with scarlet, her main interaction with her wolf is there. and there's also things the player can find in a sister's playthrough that prompts unique dialogue. the dialogue really shows how each girl thinks individually, like with rose finding a needle on the ground and saying that someone must need their medicine, showing her extremely innocent view of the world. there's also the girl in white, who will guide the sister you've chosen to play as back to the path if you stay still for long enough. she seems to be a portrayal of innocence, as she is trying to get the girls to avoid heading towards whatever life-altering event they're about to go through. the world itself on the actual path to grandma's house is colorful and bright, just a straight path all the way there. whereas the woods you're meant to go into are dark and scary looking.

as for the characters! let's start with robin. robin is nine years old, still a very childish and imaginative little girl who views the world as a big playground. her wolf is in the form of a literal wolf, who she hops onto the back of and rides like some kind of mount. it fades to black as robin wakes up in front of grandma's house. grandma's house changes based on the sister you're playing as (if you went through their unique event). grandma's house for robin is an absolute mess, animalistic scratches and claw marks everywhere, there's a room with an overturned crib with a birds nest in the center, and at the end, there's a bloody mattress. so...what does it mean? well, there could be multiple explanations. personally, i think it's the most likely that robin was attacked by the wolf after she tried riding on its back, and, like a wild animal would, it turned on her and possibly injured her so badly she was bedridden, hence the bloody/torn up mattress. there's also a room with what looks like birthday decorations, maybe hinting at robin's birthday being close before the wolf attack or shortly after and her having to celebrate it in bed.

rose is the next sister. she is eleven years old, and like robin, has a very innocent view of the world, though hers is more literal. everything in her mind is either good or evil, with everything needing a reason to happen in her mind. when she finds a dead bird, she ponders what evil being could have harmed it, rather than it just being that things die sometimes and we can't avoid it. her wolf is this weird muscular cloud man who floats above rose when she goes out into a lake on a rickety, falling apart boat. when she tries getting closer, it whirls her around and around until it fades to black and she wakes up in front of grandma's house. her house consists of many different things, like an entirely red (school?) bathroom, a small desk with a caged bird hanging above it, and a lot of imagery with water and steam. there's also the sound of rushing water in the background. i think like with robin, rose has to come to term with the fact that not everything in life can be so straightfoward. i personally think she might have had a near-death experience after going out into the lake and it made her have a crisis afterwards when she realized that life and death weren't so easily explained as she initially thought. there's also the red bathroom, which could have been symbolism for her getting her period or maybe it was just. yknow. red. i dunno

ginger's really interesting to me, and she's the next girl to talk about, so bazinga!! anyways. ginger is 13 years old and the most tomboyish of the sisters. she has a strong resistance to adulthood and enjoys activities that most would consider childish, like playing hide and seek, but she also sets things on fire and sprays graffiti. she's into more traditionally masculine activities, at least, ones that have been stereotypically associated with boys like playing with dirt. anywho, her area is a field of flowers that she comments she doesn't even like, she only likes squashing them to make crop circles. her wolf is a girl that mirrors the girl in white, the exception being she's wearing red, her pigtails are upturned, and her eyes are pitch black. the girl comes up behind ginger and they start playing a game until the girl in red falls to the ground and pulls ginger down with her, and they lay there staring up at the sky. in ginger's version of grandma's house, there's a lot of barbed wire and mattresses, and there's also black hair stretching all over the screen. the girl in red, to me, symbolizes either ginger's repressed femininity or her struggle with gender or sexuality. she's 13, so the idea that her wolf could simply represent puberty hitting isn't too off. the barbed wire, to me, shows ginger's discomfort and pain with her body changing when she doesn't want to change. all in all i think her story shows the struggle with growing up and accepting you won't be a kid forever.

ruby's next, and she's probably the most popular character in the game. if you've seen anything about the game, it's probably been with her. ruby's a stereotypical goth girl who resents the adults around her and has a very bleak outlook on life. her area and where her wolf is found is a run down playground, where her wolf, charming wolf, is sitting on a park bench. when ruby sits down, he offers her a cigarette, smoking one himself, and while at first she declines, she reluctantly takes one and coughs a lot before the screen fades out. ruby wakes up in a really odd position, where one of her legs almost completely blends in with the ground below her. it's probably a good time to mention that she has a leg brace, but she never states directly what it was (i'll tell you though because obviously i was there). anyways her house is full of smoke, has car engines, some flashing red and blue lights in the background, a car on fire, and a school gymnasium floor covered in skid marks. i think ruby's story symbolized a bad car accident and what she was doing before hand, namely smoking or drinking or some other various kinds of drugs. the point is, i think she or charming wolf or possibly the both of them were under the influence speeding along a road at night, by themselves or with some "friends", and something happened to cause charming to swerve off the road or just go all over the place and crashing the car, potentially kiling him and obviously badly injuring ruby and her leg. the imagery of smoke in the house could really be either from a car after it crashed or cigarette smoke, or maybe both. the red and blue lights are clearly supposed to be police or emergency lights. it's also worthy pointing out that ruby runs faster than any of her sisters despite her leg brace, and i've seen several people say it's because she's the most ready to embrace any potential threat or danger that could end her life.

now we have carmen! yknow when i said the events that happened in the girls lives were all somehow necessary to move them forwards and better them as people? yeah carmen's where i drop that statement, and we'll get to why in a sec. carmen's shown to be a very...um, promiscuous girl, for lack of a better word. did i mention she's seventeen? yeah i probably should. she's known officially as sexy red so um. gross! anyways. her area is a campsite with a middle aged lumberjack looking guy chopping down trees. carmen takes the man's hat, and sits down with him at the fire. he gets a beer and offers her one, which she takes, and they both sit there drinking while the scene fades. carmen wakes up and strangely, she's holding her neck and looking down. her house is full of some pretty obvious imagery as to what happened. there's stacks of mattresses around the place, doors with x's on them like the trees the man was cutting down, a winding upward path that becomes slowly obscured with trees with some...choice noises in the background (the noises in the files are named as woodsman_sexmoans so do with that what you will. grandma's room has a bed in the middle with a large tree stabbing through the center. i think carmen's story represents girls or teens in general who say they're very mature and do more adult things like drinking and well, sex, when in reality they're not mature at all and are usually incredibly naive when it comes to those things. not to say carmen was stupid or in the wrong for what happened, obviously shes still young and i just think she wasn't really sure what she was doing and never wanted anything past flirting. i think what happened was that the woodsman pushed sex on her and she agreed, thinking she was going to enjoy it and it was this amazing thing, when in reality she greatly disliked it and only did it because the woodsman urged her to. i dont like the argument that it was technically consensual because carmen initiated the flirting, when in reality that's all she did. she was just harmlessly flirting, and it even says in her character bio that she just likes flirting and nothing more. it's also doubly worse considering there was alcohol involved and the man was clearly much older than her.

finally we have scarlet!! she's the oldest, with a barely present mother so she basically fills in that position for her younger sisters. she was said to have given up her dreams of being a musician to make sure her sisters were actually taken care of. that being said, scarlet is clearly shown to love her sisters, just being strict. her official name is even strict red. scarlet prioritizes cleanliness and order, probably from her years of running a house full of kids. her area is an abandoned theatre with a piano on the center of the stage, a supposedly male piano instructor (or female, maybe not either, it's hard to tell) there almost waiting for her. when scarlet approaches the stage, and sits down to play the piano, the instructor comes up behind her to, well, instruct her. the screen fades out. scarlet's house is quite foggy, with most of the furniture being plastic covered or, like with the jars, empty or gone. there's a room with books all over the floor and another with instruments floating around. grandma's room has spotlights and curtains, obviously resembling a stage. scarlet's story, to me, represents one of reluctant responsibility and lost dreams. she regrets giving up her aspirations of becoming a musician, which she was quite talented at, to take care of her sisters in place of her absentee mother. i think while she loves them, she might lightly resent them but much more resents her mother for not being what they all needed. the strings at the end symbolize her feeling of being controlled and pulled along like a puppet for everyone else.

umm that was a lot!!! ill probably make another post tomorrow but this was a whole fuckin lot

signing off, atlas ♥