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singedsunWith everything upset at home, I haven't had a chance yet to join in on the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sunshine_challenge posts. I keep meaning to start and then by the time I would normally sit down to write, I'm just exhausted. So while I do like this year's colors theme and want to participate, fair warning that I might be drawing these out into August at this rate.
RED
Maybe it's cliche but the color red brings to mind, Little Red Riding Hood. I loved that story as a kid. I'm not sure what appealed to me, but I always had a taste for the macabre as a kid so maybe that's it. I've written a fair bit of what qualifies I guess as fanfiction using LRRH as a backdrop, or as an AU opportunity. In fact, there's a whole, big fic a friend I wrote for Dragon Age like a million years ago, using it as a backdrop for a gender-swapped AU. But that's not specifically what I wanted to talk about.
Instead, let me talk about The Path. A video game from Tale of Tales, a little indie video game design team that made a few very atmospheric games, though I think this one was the most popular. The Path is a game about Little Red Riding Hood, only 'Little Red' is six sisters who go out from their mother's house one at a time to visit their grandmother. Each girl has a different 'red' name: Scarlet, Ginger, Ruby, Robin, Carmen & Rose, and they're different ages (each about two years a part). There is a goal in the game: "To go to Grandmother's house". But if you do that, you're not actually playing the game. As was once noted in an article by Justin McElroy, "You get one instruction in the game and you have to disregard it."
The point of The Path, is to get off it. You explore as one of these six sisters, taking your basket and interacting with the world. Each sister has a different experience. Each sister encounters the Wolf, but it's not THE Wolf, it's A wolf. Each sister has their own. And at the end of the path, each girl finds their grandmother's house different than the time before. When you finish the path with one sister, you start over and get to choose another sister to take the path. And when you've been through the sisters, the cycle seamlessly starts back over.
The game itself is about exploration and adolescence, about trauma and acceptance. It's scary and disturbing and beautiful. It's not a long game, though I think it bears repeating The Path for each of the sisters multiple times, as there is always something to find on subsequent playthroughs. Even if what you're finding is just a different interpretation of a sister's particular story.
There is another character in the game, a seventh girl available for interactions who is neither a sister nor a wolf. There's been some theories about her too, and the tie-in to another ToT game, 8.
The Path is more than a decade old at this point and the simple design and graphics reflect that now. But the story is still engaging and I often go back to it. One of the most beautiful things about this game is the music and sound design. The characters aren't voiced in this game, so there's nothing to break the sound of a heartbeat and footfalls in the forest and the sounds of the wolf as it closes in, laid over the music. It's really, really good.
If you've never heard of The Path, or played it, the trailer is below. It's available at the Tale of Tales site and a variety of other places like Steam or itch.io.
sunshine_challenge posts. I keep meaning to start and then by the time I would normally sit down to write, I'm just exhausted. So while I do like this year's colors theme and want to participate, fair warning that I might be drawing these out into August at this rate. Maybe it's cliche but the color red brings to mind, Little Red Riding Hood. I loved that story as a kid. I'm not sure what appealed to me, but I always had a taste for the macabre as a kid so maybe that's it. I've written a fair bit of what qualifies I guess as fanfiction using LRRH as a backdrop, or as an AU opportunity. In fact, there's a whole, big fic a friend I wrote for Dragon Age like a million years ago, using it as a backdrop for a gender-swapped AU. But that's not specifically what I wanted to talk about.Instead, let me talk about The Path. A video game from Tale of Tales, a little indie video game design team that made a few very atmospheric games, though I think this one was the most popular. The Path is a game about Little Red Riding Hood, only 'Little Red' is six sisters who go out from their mother's house one at a time to visit their grandmother. Each girl has a different 'red' name: Scarlet, Ginger, Ruby, Robin, Carmen & Rose, and they're different ages (each about two years a part). There is a goal in the game: "To go to Grandmother's house". But if you do that, you're not actually playing the game. As was once noted in an article by Justin McElroy, "You get one instruction in the game and you have to disregard it."
The point of The Path, is to get off it. You explore as one of these six sisters, taking your basket and interacting with the world. Each sister has a different experience. Each sister encounters the Wolf, but it's not THE Wolf, it's A wolf. Each sister has their own. And at the end of the path, each girl finds their grandmother's house different than the time before. When you finish the path with one sister, you start over and get to choose another sister to take the path. And when you've been through the sisters, the cycle seamlessly starts back over.
The game itself is about exploration and adolescence, about trauma and acceptance. It's scary and disturbing and beautiful. It's not a long game, though I think it bears repeating The Path for each of the sisters multiple times, as there is always something to find on subsequent playthroughs. Even if what you're finding is just a different interpretation of a sister's particular story.
There is another character in the game, a seventh girl available for interactions who is neither a sister nor a wolf. There's been some theories about her too, and the tie-in to another ToT game, 8.
The Path is more than a decade old at this point and the simple design and graphics reflect that now. But the story is still engaging and I often go back to it. One of the most beautiful things about this game is the music and sound design. The characters aren't voiced in this game, so there's nothing to break the sound of a heartbeat and footfalls in the forest and the sounds of the wolf as it closes in, laid over the music. It's really, really good.
If you've never heard of The Path, or played it, the trailer is below. It's available at the Tale of Tales site and a variety of other places like Steam or itch.io.
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Date: 2020-07-07 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-14 04:44 am (UTC)