At it's heart, The Path is an adventure game that breaks design tradition by tempting the player away from the most obvious correct route. The player plays one of several red riding hoods, and the game presents the player with a path through the forest with a house at the end where Grandma awaits.
Rather unfairly, the player fails if they go straight to the house. The aim is to explore the forest away from the path, learning more about each character and the forest itself.
Audio cues and ghostly images populate the forest and give it a deeply unsettling atmosphere, giving The Path very much a feeling of the Blair Witch Project.
The presentation is consciously arty, a trick which can impress if used correctly but I'm not sure it works here. Art for arts sake? Maybe. The game would feel exactly the same were it to have a standard front end and in-game UI.
Now we come to completely unfair arbitrary death that the player will suffer many times. I still don't know how to avoid these (which seem to crop up with most forest encounters), however I understand that it's a mechanic to further the story. There's nothing worse in a game to fail and not know why, because it's impossible to learn from such encounters.
Is The Path important like Jason Rohr's work, Braid, or Ico? I don't have the answers, go ask Roger Ebert.
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