It’s a brilliant, evocative work of interactive folktale that interrogates our assumptions about choice, success and failure, and the medium of the videogame itself. It’s a supremely boring collection of FMVs with pretensions to interactivity that very quickly wears out its joke about control and becomes a tedious slab of nihilistic whimsy.

Those, at least, are two possible responses to The Path. Choose your own! Me, I think The Path bears the same relation to the craft of videogames as ‘video art’ bears to the craft of filmmaking. Perhaps you have wandered into a darkened art-gallery space and seen a film of an artist bouncing up and down on a trampoline for 15 minutes. “Meh,” you might have said, “I suppose this is making a point about some aspects of performance and film, but there is, in fact, considerably more artistry in most 30-second beer commercials.”

The Path affects to be something different from a traditional game experience (though gamers who have been around a bit, playing Pimania or Seaman as well as Halo and Zelda, know that there is no such thing as a homogeneous ‘traditional gaming experience’). At the same time, The Path is much more gamelike than it likes to admit, exploiting some standard paradigms of control and status indication, albeit executed in a manner that, depending on taste, you will call ‘ironic’ or just plain broken. Eschewing most of the pleasures of interactivity, however, the game plainly has greater aspirations to the literary and the cinematic.

Consider how much text and explicit narrative that The Path finds necessary to invoke its mood, compared with the beautiful austerity of exposition in Ico, and how much less fluid and pleasurable is its player movement. Or, if it is unfair to compare an indie game made by two people to a highly polished commercial product from a much larger team, compare the deeply intriguing Linger In Shadows, a feast of pure experimental game aesthetics with a similarly limited (but much more satisfyingly engineered) palette of interaction.

The Path doesn’t do itself any favours, either, with the specific choices it makes: for example that, in an area of interest, you are no longer allowed to run, limited instead to a tediously slow walk. This is probably a comment on the impatience and hyperactivity of other games, but that doesn’t stop it being extremely annoying. Meanwhile, the way in which, when at grandmother’s house, you are forced to keep pressing any button in order to proceed on rails towards the ending might give you a feeling of nightmarish inevitability, but I felt more as though I had to keep jabbing at a dying remote control in order to keep my DVD playing.

In a way, The Path is the opposite of survival horror; it is death-seeking horror. (“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” “Yes!”) So imagine my frustration when I navigated a sister to the edge of a big lake, and discovered that I couldn’t just make her throw herself in and drown, Ophelia-style, which might have made for some prettily haunting melancholy. Instead, I was doomed to trudging the periphery with excruciating lack of haste, until I could start blindly running again in any random direction, hoping that next time a zombie squirrel would bite my head off.

The Path is well-named, after all: there is a predestined, authored storyline for each of the characters (her path), and your task as a player is to find that path and walk it. That is all. You cannot change anything. Your job is merely to scrabble round in the possibility space (the wraparound forest) until you bump into what the designers wrote.

Even so, in its ornery and precious way, The Path is a triumph of atmosphere, coming much closer than the cruder shocks of games such as Silent Hill or BioShock to a dramatisation of what Ernst Jentsch and Freud analysed as the ‘uncanny’ in literature. There is a lugubrious, Lynchian surrealism to the mise-en-scène of a forester indefatigably chopping at trees while a girl hops in and out of her tent; a tableau image of chairs arranged underwater around a tree-trunk; or the climactic house with its perspectives and interiors gone increasingly wrong. The shivering opaque scribbles on the screen, smudges of wolfprints or pummelling bursts of static and flashes of barbed wire, make the game’s ‘window’ a kind of occult palimpsest, and Jarboe’s beautiful music is a model of minimalist suggestion.

We are living in a fascinatingly rich era for videogame experimentation, when works such as The Path (or Linger In Shadows or Flower) can achieve wide distribution and prompt passionate discussion. Deeply flawed though it is, we should be glad The Path exists. But it also suggests a general truth about many ‘art games’: they would be better as art if they were better as games.

Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life Of Videogames. Visit him online at stevenpoole.net.