American McGee's Grimm, Episode 2
Little Red Riding Hood
8/11/2008 7:25 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 2
Erin Bell
Status: Getting a jump start on the Game of the Year arguing!
The story of Little Red Riding Hood is pretty creepy when you think about it. A little girl is sent by her mother with a basket of goodies to visit Grandma in her cottage in the forest. She dallies along the way, picking flowers, and meets a wolf who tricks her into naively telling him where she's going and why. The wolf ends up swallowing both Granny and Riding Hood, but they're eventually freed when a passing woodsman chops open the wolf's belly.
According to Grimm, the only good flower is a dead one.
There's all sorts of disturbing subtext here: the danger of children wandering off; the wolf as a sexual predator; the menace of the unknown (the forest). Then there are the twisted variations on the tale that predate the Brothers Grimm version: In some instances, the wolf is a werewolf; in another, he actually kills the grandmother and forces Riding Hood to eat her meat; in another, the wolf asks the little girl to get into bed with him.
But like the first episode of American McGee's Grimm, a collection of downloadable vignettes that are supposedly darker spin on traditional fairy tales, Episode 2: Little Red Riding Hood ignores these more sinister themes in favor of the pre-pubescent boy approach: Let's just turn everything dirty and stinky!
I'm starting to realize that Grimm, the dwarfish title character who turns beautiful things into disgusting things just by touch, is a bit of a pedant. He loves to harp on obvious plot holes in the tale (what kind of mother sends her young daughter into the woods alone; how could Riding Hood not notice that a wolf had slipped into Grandma's nightgown)? Well, duh... Grimm is probably the kind of guy who likes to explain the secrets of how various magic tricks are performed while breaking the news to little kids that there's no Santa Claus.
It's a wonder Grandma doesn't get eaten more often – she should really lose that sign.
Like the first episode, you'll control Grimm as he makes way through scenes from Little Red Riding Hood, such as the flower bed where Riding Hood meets the Wolf for the first time, the woods and Granny's cottage. Everything Grimm walks over decays, and as his power meter charges you can stink up ever larger objects until the entire area is a putrid mess.
Beds of flowers erupt into tombstones and grasping skeletal hands clawing up out of the dirt (the same as in the first episode, in fact!), a puffy bird in a cage gets drawn and quartered with a splat, and so on. Like the first episode, these transformations range from gross (wolves impaled on stakes), to mildly amusing (woodsmen who turn into homicidal maniacs and start hacking each other with bloodied axes). Unfortunately, though, the camera is positioned over Grimm's shoulder so it's hard to admire your handiwork unless you're constantly swivelling around.
Mouthy Red Riding Hood argues with her nasty mother over who should take the old bat her food.
The scene that takes place inside the wolf after Riding Hood and Granny are swallowed verges on psychedelic as Grimm hops among the wolf's innards turning everything blotchy shades of fuchsia and purple. There's a surreal and well-crafted moment where the woodsman's axe suddenly appears, cleaving downward, and the camera angle shifts to show the woodsman's face peering in.
