The actual thought that ran through my head at the time was, 'Oh my God, am I going to be raped?'

That was the reaction of Brenda Brathwaite to a scene in The Path. Miss Brathwaite is a game designer and teacher. She was interviewed in NPR's coverage of The Path, a brilliant and unsettling horror game that has only a tenuous claim to being called a game.

And while Brathwaite admits her perspective on the scene in question (pictured) is colored by her own experience, rape is implied in a couple of the game's scenes. The more disturbing one to me is when one of the girls in the game stumbles into the hunter's camp. Unlike the hunter of the Little Red Riding Hood myth that informs The Path, this hunter isn't a dashing young hero. He's a middle-aged balding man, slightly creepy and not just because he's got an axe. The 12-year-old girl takes a beer (!) and starts sipping it. The hunter sits with her, waiting. Whatever is going on, and whatever is going to happen next, ranges through the broad territory between inappropriate and disturbing.

"I think we've succeeded in making a game that's about the player," says [designer Michael] Samyn. "What's frightening about it is the confrontation with your own interpretation of things, and probably realizing that they're your own."

The genius of The Path is also the problem with it. After the segment played on my local NPR station, the anchor, a woman named Alex Cohen, all but dismissed it with the following comment:

I don' t know, maybe I'm an old fashioned gal. I kinda like Guitar Hero, Tetris. Simpler games.