For this week’s critical play, I played BABBDI, created by Sirius Lemaitre and Léonard Lemaitre for Steam.
The game targets more mature gamers seeking an alternative experience. With an interesting aesthetic, there’s a grim, slightly unnerving world to slowly explore by walking — and motorcycling — around.
The game is single-player with a very basic set of controls, centering around moving and interacting with players and objects. There’s no fighting and very little actual game mechanics. The explicit objective of the game is to escape BABBDI, however, the real objective players end up embarking on is to explore the world. In general, there isn’t much nudging of the user; instead, they’re free to explore the world at their own pace. Some may opt to speed run, while others will make sure to meet every character in the game.
The type of fun intended is discovery. Even through graphics seemingly from 2008, the ominous audio, dialogue, and characters create a world where players want to understand the limited narrative of BABBDI. In parallel, there’s some level of narrative, however, the lack of structure limits this type of fun. To me however, the game ultimately fell flat after the first 5 minutes. The world was interesting in the first moments, however, the gameplay devolved into seemingly mindless wandering around without a clear direction. This would be fine if the world continued to be as dense as in the first moments, but what ended up happening was I would wander around for minutes without a new character or find myself doing circles. The world is definitely full of potential and reminiscent of some subgenres of horror movies, but without it being as fleshed out as I’d like, I ultimately found myself bored and frustrated — not because of any actual challenging gameplay — but because I wanted something new to happen.
The moments where the game did shine was in the dialogue with NPCs, but without the frequency I’d like, these moments were far and few between. Additionally, the audio was great in helping to flesh out the world, but I would’ve liked a consistent soundtrack throughout the gameplay. Through these observations, the solution is pretty clear — the game simply needs to be fleshed out more (at least for me). As someone coming from a non-indie game background, I’m used to more nudging and funneling of gameplay, so for more casual gamers, having more guardrails, more things to do, and people to talk to would all make the game better. The world itself is one that’s super interesting and one that I’d like to spend more time in exploring, but without clear direction or new things to do, I found myself leaving the game sooner than I’m sure the developers would’ve liked.
