Tale of Tales, the Belgian indie developers currently hard at work on the very intriguing experimental game The Path, released a brief but very interesting little game today.

Called The Graveyard, it's a ten-minute scene that they describe as "more like an explorable painting than an actual game."

The gameplay, if you can call it that, is simple: You walk an old woman up a graveyard path to a bench in the distance. She sits. A scene takes place. When it's over, you lead her out of the graveyard.

The value here isn't the gameplay, it's the carefully crafted aesthetic experience and its (successful, in my case) attempt to draw an emotional response from the player.

You can download it for free (PC and Mac) and try it for yourself if you like. When you're finished, my thoughts are below.

Interactivity is a powerful thing. The Graveyard could have been a short film on YouTube and lost none of its presentational qualities, or its message. But the very limited interaction you have with the character -- you can walk her forward and backward, or turn -- instantly makes the connection deeper and more powerful than it would have been if you were simply watching.

One very specific reason for this is that by controlling the woman, you immediately understand how old and frail she is. She hobbles convincingly toward the bench, which seems very far away. After a few steps, she can't keep up the pace on her bad leg, so she starts limping, leaning on her cane for support.

By the time she makes it to the bench, you're glad to be able to just sit down and rest. Soon after you do, the scene starts up -- it's a song, with lyrics in some European language that I do not know and subtitles in English. At first the lyrics seem a bit ridiculous, maybe something lost in the translation. But after a few seconds it's clear that it's a melancholy song about death and dying.

The woman's face comes into clear view and we see the deep wrinkles, the roughly chopped hair. She listens to the song playing in her mind, looking over the gravestones, thinking about all the different ways that she's seen people die. Much like how the close-up of her face is superimposed over the shot, images of the gravestones you've passed by start appearing.

When the song is over, it repeats again without subtitles. At any time, you can end your morbid reminiscence, get up, and walk out of the graveyard. When she ambles back through the front gate, the game ends.

This alone had been a solid use of my ten minutes. Tale of Tales is doing an excellent job at pushing the envelope in regards to game design. I've played the first level of The Path, which has the same economical style of character design and storytelling, giving you an intentionally vague idea of what's going on and encouraging you to fill in the blanks yourself.

But then, one more twist. For $5, I could buy the "full version" of The Graveyard. It would be identical to the trial version, they promised, but with one more feature: The woman might die.

What could I do? I spent the five bucks.

I played it again -- no death.

I played it again -- and was sitting there, listening to the song, wondering if I was maybe doing something wrong, or if perhaps despite all appearances this woman was actually in robust health and it was going to take a while.

Then, without warning, her head snapped forward and lolled lifelessly in front of her as her shoulders slumped. She sat on the bench, dead. The closeup of her face was still superimposed, but now it was a closeup of the back of her neck as it craned grotesquely forward

The song kept playing.

Once I was over the sudden shock of the death scene, and come to terms with the fact that nothing else was going to happen, it felt like the proper ending. She'd been traveling long enough, lost everyone dear to her, and had nothing left but to visit the graveyard and count all the headstones of those she had lost.

Death was a release. It was a release of five bucks from my Paypal account, too, but that's neither here nor there.

The idea of a videogame about an old woman pondering death, and then (maybe) anticlimactically dying herself, randomly, in the middle of a cut scene? Somehow I doubt they could even get this onto WiiWare. But Tale of Tales continues to show that they're filled with very clever ideas about how to use games to get an emotional response from players.

"(Designers) Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn are determined to explore the potential of interactive media. They believe that for the medium to grow (up), designers need to have the courage to abandon the game format and dare to explore other types of interaction, other types of emotions, stories, etc.," writes Tale of Tales in their press release for the game.

Indeed. I don't know if it's going to happen en masse anytime soon, but for now it's great to see some very talented people make a point of trying.