A metaphorical journey into the nightmares of six girls turns into an actual nightmare of monotonous endless wandering.
The game opens in a room of six girls out of a film noir, each wearing an outfit that contrasts their black and white complexion with bright red. After choosing your protagonist, you find yourself on a dirt path leading into the woods with the simple instructions that you are to go to grandmother's house. Your one admonition is to not stray from the path.
Simple enough, but you soon find that this red riding hood tale requires you to stray from the path if you are to reach a successful conclusion to the story of each girl. The controls are very easy to learn: using either mouse, keyboard, or game-pad you can walk, run, and interact with your environment. Interacting with an object is a simple as standing in front of it and not doing anything. The game makes it easy to find out which objects to interact with by showing an enlarged transparent image of the object on your screen as you get near it.
With its haunting music and creepy sounds it is easy at first to figure out why Tale of Tales labeled this game as a horror game. From the very start the game sets a foreboding atmosphere. The well lit golden path that you travel on seems like a blessed haven from the encroaching darkness and mysterious evils of the surrounding forest. The Path gives you a wonderfully frightening sense of the vulnerability of a lone girl in the dangerous woods.
The game-play consists of maneuvering your chosen heroine around the sparsely populated forest; randomly coming across bizarre scenes that you may be able to interact with. A number of the objects in the game can only be interacted with by a certain character and you are forced to come back later when you play through with a different one of the girls. The game does do you the kindness of informing you which of the girls is required to interact with certain objects. Unfortunately, finding that object again is a mission in frustration as the game only briefly flashes any type of map on the screen after you have traveled a certain distance. Once you get lost in the forest, you are truly lost, and will spend a great deal of time wandering almost aimlessly looking for something to interact with.
The game's graphics are not in and of themselves spectacular, but are very artistically done. The manner of presentation of color, lighting, visuals, and animations add a great deal of depth that the game would otherwise lack. Random images sometimes bombard the screen leaving you wondering what meaning they have. Initially, I found myself immersed in the game world, but after an hour or so of play, that immersion faded. The game lacks much diversity in the scenes and since you are required to play through with multiple characters, you will soon find yourself traversing over the same terrain over and over again.
Slowly, it becomes apparent that there is nothing directly frightening about the game. All the horror aspects are implied indirectly and can be triggered at your leisure. The once haunting music starts to get annoying as it rarely changes and the creepy sounds in the game are shown to be meaningless. Eventually you discover that all the items you find in the game serve no purpose other than to help portray the character traits of your protagonist. You could in fact head directly for the end of your protagonist's quest without finding any other object as the objects cannot be used with anything in the game.
There are some minor control issues in the game. Camera angles can sometimes be difficult, characters may become stuck on certain objects and difficult to maneuver off of them, and triggering object interactions sometimes requires several attempts. The pacing of the game is very slow and you are often forced to a walking speed in certain areas. The game also discourages you from running too much as the screen starts to darken and your point of view moves to a top down perspective that limits your ability to see things around you. For a game with an already slow pacing, this becomes nearly unforgivable as it forces you to spend way too much time traveling through a forest with no map, unchanging scenery, and almost nothing interesting going on around you.
One of the more interesting aspects of this game is that your end goal is to have something bad happen to your character. While I initially found that to be shocking and disturbing, I quickly found myself hoping that something gruesome would happen just to alleviate the frustration and monotony of being forced to wander endlessly through the woods. The adventure for each character is intended to be rather short; lasting anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour. If you intend to experience everything there is for each character you'll find that it takes considerably longer as you'll spend far too much time trying to find your way around a realm with few landmarks and an extremely unhelpful map feature.
Much of what happens during the interactive adventure are metaphorical for unexplained events that are left for players to interpret on their own. If you're hoping for answers, you'll be disappointed because even at the end, the game requires you to provide your own. Ending scenes for each character's adventure play out like bad acid trips from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In fact, that adequately sums up my experience with this game. Like what I imagine a hit of LSD to be like, the game starts off interesting and novel but slowly degenerates into a bad trip that goes on for far too long and leaves you hoping it will all end soon.