"The Path is a Slow Game," its makers warn, and perhaps that should have scared me off, for I am a Slow Gamer. It's not merely that I'm dunderheaded. I'm also a plodding, open-mouthed, rose-smelling completionist. Games that others play through in five, 10, or 40 hours routinely require 10, 20, and 80 hours of my time.

So when The Path's designers, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn of the Belgian game company Tale of Tales, predict that players will need "about six hours" for "a satisfying experience," I should have anticipated that I would need more than 12 just to get an alternately frustrating and curious one, and that it would take me seven hours just to figure out what in the name of all that is holy I was supposed to do.

I would have handed over my $10 anyway, just for the chance to download and play the current It Game of the game blogosphere, the title that the Brainy Gamer's Michael Abbott called "a small milestone in the evolution of an art form."

But the game is pleasingly weird and a good proof of concept that a video game needn't include any fighting or puzzles in the course of telling a story (something I'd like to see more of)

A yellow basket can be moved about the room to begin each girl's journey. Once chosen, each character begins The Path in a mysterious forest, beyond a shrouded cityscape, with a single instruction: "GO TO GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE … AND STAY ON THE PATH." Doing as the game tells you, however, results in a message: "FAILURE!"

Only by exploring the woods can each girl find "SUCCESS!" in the form of her "wolf." The music can be chilling. The words and images grow increasingly disturbing, and sometimes sexual, though opaque.

The game's poor design repeatedly gets in the way of its narrative ambitions. The gameplay in The Path and the instructions in its manual (which I resorted to after my first couple of hours of aggravation) emphasize the importance of letting go—of doing nothing. The gameplay mechanic is noninteraction: To get one of the girls to take an action, players must resist the urge to tap at the controls. So I resisted, a lot, but to no good end. At one point, the youngest girl, Robin, stumbled upon the façade of a ruined building in the forest and disappeared behind it. The game faded in and out, the images fuzzy then clear, fuzzy then clear. Where did she go? I wondered. Is this her wolf? The music would swell, then vanish. There was a noise. The jangle of a collar? I couldn't tell. After perhaps 20 minutes of this—yes, 20 minutes of not interacting, of letting go, of letting the game play me—I came to the sad realization that nothing was going to happen, that this was a bug, not a feature. I punched some buttons on my keyboard, and Robin ran out from behind the walls of the ruin. Not much later, Robin and the "Girl in White" got stuck in a pond and couldn't walk out. I rebooted.

And that is, perhaps, the point, to ask gamers to resist the "fast food" of twitchy action spectacles and shoot-'em-ups in exchange for something more contemplative. The Path does at least try to present an interactive way for game players to experience empathy rather than to exert agency—to walk in the footsteps of young girls without trying to author their stories for them. And it's also worth praising a game for having girl characters who look like neither Lara Croft nor Barbie.

The game has hit a nerve with many players and critics because we're so used to eating french fries instead of steak, even if the meat is a bit mediocre. Like Michael Abbott, Tom Chick (of Sci Fi's Fidgit site) gives The Path an A for effort, for presenting an experience that is "a set of powerful images revolving around a unique theme" instead of a set of impenetrable puzzles.

Fun is not everything, of course, and games are often hobbled by the requirement that they be "fun," rather than simply engaging or attention-grabbing. Choice is also wildly overrated as a characteristic of video games: "Games let us author experiences," designer Jonathan Blow told game journalist Stephen Totilo in an interview two years ago. That mandate allows for narratives like The Path that require players to interact with them without allowing players to insert themselves into them.

It's a promising path (pardon the expression) for games to take. If you want to see the seeds of how such a game might work someday, then The Path is for you. It's interesting, head-scratching, exasperating, and occasionally rewarding. Too bad it more often feels like a promising false start rather than a satisfying journey in its own right.