The Path has stayed in my mind for almost 14 years, now. I originally found this game through an ad on some random gaming news site, back when I had a Macbook and nothing else. I bought it as a standalone .dmg file, and years later re-purchased it on Steam. The Path is a self proclaimed short horror game modeled after the classic tale of Little Red Riding Hood, a story over 300 years old at this point, with countless adaptations, though I might consider this the most inspired, although it is a loose re-imagining at best.

I wouldn't hesitate to call this one of my favorite games, although it does seem a bit unfitting to call it that as the game itself feels like it would be offended at the title, and multiple mechanics and design choices made during development openly seem to spit in the face of the idea of a traditional "video game". The goal is to lose. You are supposed to die. You get shamed for following the game's instructions. The goal of the game, at least to those unfamiliar with it, seems to be to aimlessly wander until you are killed by the Wolf, which is unique to each of the six playable characters, all girls of different ages and personality; a psuedo-"villian" meant to counter each girl's personality and archtype, designed to be an effective and unfeeling lure to them. The goal for those familiar to the game is to find as many landmarks as possible and die intentionally to the Wolf. There is no victory except a more glorious death. The Path is oft labeled a walking simulator, although made before the birth, or at least the indie popularization, of the genre, though The Path feels wholly unique to any contemporary due to its heavy focus on open exploration as opposed to canned linear stories. Still, despite this tag, The Path has never fit this description to me. "Pretentious" is another word thrown around when describing this game, although I have never agreed with this, either. There are even other Tale of Tales games (I have played them all, even the mobile games and defunct screensaver MMOs) I would wholeheartedly describe as pretentious (most of them, in fact, but especially Bientôt l'été and The Graveyard), but The Path is not one of them. Everything in The Path seems purposeful to me, and despite the limited content, I feel like I'll still get enjoyment out of this game in 10 more years.

The atmosphere in this game is the main attraction. This is accomplished not only by the game world, art style and graphics, but the mechanics as well. The game has running, but discourages using it by making the (seemingly) randomly placed collectible flowers (144 in total) disappear. This, in turn, encourages slower playthroughs and more rose smelling as you take in the scenery and moody atmosphere, while still ensuring players are never frustrated by being forced to move slowly the entire game, although there is little reason to run. A map is available but intentionally obscure (you need to complete three runs by never veering from the titular Path, something the game discourages), and I see this as another happy medium, like the running mechanic, between developer vision and player quality of life. You are supposed to get lost in the forest. The map loops at the edges. You are supposed to feel trapped. However, this is simply not fun for most people, so the option (while intentionally hard to find) is at least there. This accomplishes a few things. Firstly, obviously, previously stated, it ensures that players who would be frustrated without a map have one. Secondly, it ensures that players who take the game's only given task (to follow the path and deliver Grandmother her basket of medicine and food) seriously get incentive to explore the forest. It should be said that the trip to Grandma's house involves only holding the W+Shift key for about 3 minutes down a perfectly straight path, an intentionally dull chore designed to make you want to ignore it; the walls of the forest all but singing a siren song, flirting with the player, tempting you outside the confines of safety. After all, if there's nothing to see, why have a map? Thirdly, it lets players see where they've been and more importantly, haven't, in any given run. Landmarks are marked, but not terrain, keeping the layout of the forest obscure enough to remain mysterious, further cementing the feeling you are in uncharted territory. The terrain of the forest is kept intentionally flat, as any hills or valleys could provide familiarity as well as show technical cracks in the forest's looping nature. There is not much else in the way of gameplay other than walking (there isn't even an interact button, instead you have to let go from all controls for your character to interact with an object or point of interest), but I have always found the bare bones mechanics of The Path satisfying enough, and perfectly capture the feeling of isolation, helplessness and getting lost in a spooky forest. Aesthetically, the game offers a game world that feels decayed, eerie, melancholy, sinister, storied, and moody. The horror aspects of the game are admittedly not that strong, and I wouldn't describe The Path as scary, although entering Grandma's house after encountering The Wolf is mildly disturbing and genuinely nightmarish; a stark contrast to the downright relaxing nature of the rest of the game.

The Path is really special to me. It's a shame to me that ToT has essentially given up due to negative feedback on Sunset (which is probably their next best game). Even though I dislike most of their games, there's still something about them as a company that made sure I tried every single game they put out. I feel like their response to the criticism was childish and disappointing, similar to that of Phil Fish, but I think as pretentious as almost everything they made outside of The Path was, they still exhibit ideas and aesthetics unique to their games, and an attitude to experimentation with the medium that few developers possess. It's a shame we'll never get to see 8, their in-development-hell ongoing passion project, completed.

I really like this game. For 10 bucks, it's a steal.

Organ Quarter is very rough around the edges. The PS1/PS2 era graphics are clearly intentional, as the game's devs were very open about their Silent Hill inspiration, but there were a few oversights I had more trouble defending. There's one alley wall in the overworld that doesn't have collision on it, meaning you can just walk through it and be out of bounds, which was utterly immersion breaking. After completing a game, I realized I skipped over an entire area (The Theater) because I couldn't find the item I needed to progress and just assumed you had to come back to it later, though it's unclear whether this is an optional area or one of two possible paths I could have taken in the story route. Only a second playthrough will tell. Judging from the trailers, I missed a significant chunk of content. When playing on the Index, it always felt like my in-game left hand was always a few inches in front of my real hand. For some reason, at one point during the University section, all the stamps on my map duplicated, causing me to have to test and erase all of them one by one to get back under the map marker limit. Other than that, there were a few instances of cheesy texturing, that while clearly intentional, did take me out of the game a little bit, namely in the Nightclub. Perhaps a little petty, but I think "Organ Quarter" is a silly name for a town, even in a surreal world like this. The reason "Silent Hill" works so much is because it feels like a normal, quiet town you could find anywhere across rural-to-suburban America. "Organ Quarter" feels like it's trying just a bit too hard to be spooky. This next one is a huge pet peeve, but I really hated having to grab railings to teleport up and down stairs instead of just walking up and down them. In addition, there are also these mandatory, ugly black vignettes every time you use stairs, intended to ease motion sickness. I don't need them, and I suspect I'm not alone, so it really would have been nice to have the option to remove them and walk up and down stairs normally. I felt, by the end, that the lore and the setting were missing quite a bit of context. It's not uncommon for horror games to leave a lot up to the imagination (things are usually scarier that way), but I just felt like it was slightly lacking in explanation for my taste. Perhaps the Theater, which I managed to completely skip, has a lot of the context I was looking for. If so, it makes the fact that I was able to skip it more unforgivable. All it would have taken was one key item at the end of the Theater that unlocks the next area to turn it from optional to mandatory. Quite confusing why things were set up this way. There's a bit of backtracking, and the walk from the ol' Organ Quarter to the University felt just a little bit too long. There are only about 5 enemies (with an extra, extremely rare, and very scripted enemy), excluding bosses, which was a bit disappointing, but not deal-breaking. My final complaint is that the game is extremely short, even on a first playthrough (accounting for exploration and puzzle solving), coming in at around 4 or 5 hours. That being said, I can't be sure how many hours the Theater adds to the playtime, but I can't imagine it being more than 2 based on the other areas, and that's if I'm being generous.

Now that I've got all my gripes aside, let me tell you why this game is still worth your money, because my praise for this game does outweigh my complaints. The atmosphere in this game is on point. It may not be as dense or professional as the atmosphere in Silent Hill, but by its own merits, the game is sufficiently immersive. It was very refreshing to see the game intentionally veer away from just being a complete Silent Hill ripoff, instead replicating the gameplay loop and the concept, but providing a handful of strange and unusual settings, complete with color palettes you would never see in a Silent Hill game. While the game does have dreary, gritty looking areas akin to a proper Silent Hill environment, it usually opts in for colorful and surreal landscapes, and more often a bizarre tone than a creepy one. Being able to aim the gun and flashlight is, as always with VR games, a complete blast, though I felt guns were a bit less accurate than what I was used to. This could be intentional, to increase the feeling of helplessness, or it could be a result of the off-center hand tracking I mentioned earlier. The first puzzle you solve is very clever, and has a gross "aha" moment that the devs should be proud of. I really wish there were more intelligent puzzles and moments like this in the game, it would have seriously bumped the game's quality up a few notches if they were a larger part of the gameplay loop. The monsters are mostly dangerous and intimidating, except for the generic monsters which have no ranged attack, are slow, and can easily be walked around in almost every situation. I also absolutely love the save dimension, which reminded me, aesthetically, of something out of LSD Dream Emulator, or even a Yume Nikki area. The save rooms are nice, too, and are reminiscent of Resident Evil. Sticking your head in a flesh TV to save surprisingly never lost its novelty and remained fun, gross, and creepy the entire way through. I would say this was due to the short length, but I think it would hold up as one of the most unique and fun save mechanics I've seen in a game even if the game was as long as I'd hoped it would be, and a great example of the kind of fun integration VR can have with otherwise static mechanics. I'm enamored with the various paintings, posters and in-game art hanging on the walls of the environments. They look warped, disgusting and disturbed. Ammunition and health pickups are carefully and craftily hidden around the environment, and are fun and engaging to search for. Physically stamping out markers on a map is as satisfying and intuitive as I'd hoped it would be. Health is a bit over-abundant at first, but quickly becomes more scarce. The soundtrack hammers a lonely tone into the game, although some tracks, like the Nightclub theme, are both eerie and upbeat. Speaking of which, the Nightclub (named Jupiter's Belly, I think) is such a standout area, and by far my favorite. As soon as you find your way into it for the first time, your ears are hit with this beautiful, dense, bellowing, haunted track, your eyes with the most vivid color palette you've seen in the game so far. It's very clear that this night club is incredibly seedy, and without spoiling too much, the environmental storytelling in this area paints an uncomfortably vivid and genuinely sickening picture of what a normal day in this establishment must have been like. Walking through the halls, you can almost hear the springs from the cots in each room creaking as if they were about to break. The entire section of the game feels like a fever dream, especially the boss fight. I really do wish the game was about 10 hours longer with the same pacing, because areas like this that not only add flavor to the town, but the game as a whole, were criminally rare throughout. Nostalgia baiting, maybe, but it would have been great to see this game's take on areas like a school, or a hospital. That being said, all areas had their own aesthetic and none felt weak, though Jupiter's Belly was by far the strongest.

Organ Quarter is a title that has inexplicably gone under seemingly everyone's radar. It's eerie, moody, and lonely, and while too short for my taste, nevertheless provided me with a few very solid hours of enjoyment. To sum everything up, the game feels like it could have used necessary polish in more than a few areas, and should have been significantly longer, but if you are a fan of Silent Hill, and are looking for a complete story experience to play in VR, you can do much, much worse than this. If you see this on sale, please do yourself a favor and jump on it.