The Path
I know a couple of entries ago I said I didn't play many games any more, but I've been playing a fair few this past few weeks. My favourite of the bunch has been an Indie game made by, not a game developer, but a group of 'artists' from Belgium. The game is called The Path, by Tale of Tales.
You know how when you give a young child a present and they proceed to play with it for ten minutes before moving onto the box it came in for the next few hours? Box forts, box hats, boxes to put other boxes in. Hours and hours of fun included in every single one. That's kind of what The Path was for me.
A lot of the people who've reviewed the game have said that... well... that it's not actually a game. So many people have picked up on this point. The Path is not a game at all, it's an intelligently engineered piece of software that resembles modern art. A reviewer made an interesting point that even cinema is, these days, in the category of well aged literature and art in the fact that it can be deemed artistic or even have cultural implications. The question has to be asked, why can't software also find itself in this category? The Path, in my opinion, transcended everything I've ever thought a computer game to be and instantly planted itself into my thought patterns. The very nature of the game caused me to think very deeply about what I was looking at, listening to and various other things for example - the feeling you get listening to heavy rain on an empty road - immediately scerene yet so frantic. The path, instead of having a highly intuitive User Interface or a compelling plot, simply takes an abstract concept and proceeds to make it stranger and stranger. I'm not going to touch on much of what it's actually about save to link to the equally strangely designed website. Browse at thy leisure.
http://tale-of-tales.com/ThePath/
Also, my internet's back on at home. Woop. But for how long who can tell.