Critical Play: BABBDI

BABBDI is a video game created by the Lemaitre Bros, available on Steam. BABBDI is great for anyone who wants to play a walking simulator with an overall creepy, unsettling mood that sparks your curiosity for exploration.

In this first-person, single-player game, there is only one objective: leave babbdi (the city that the player starts in). As a zero-sum game, the only possible outcome is that you leave babbdi or keep playing until you do. Because there’s only one outcome and one objective, the game is very simple. That simplicity is what facilitates the aesthetic of discovery. The game imposes no restrictions on how to meet the objective, allowing the player to walk around the map as they wish and play for as long as they want. The player’s urge for discovery is what begins to reveal the aesthetic of narrative in the game. As you walk through babbdi, you find new people to talk to that reveal a little more about the narrative, such as how some people in babddi also have the objective of leaving:

In order to learn how to meet the game’s objectives while experiencing the narrative, you have to walk around the city, entering different rooms and talking to different people. Walking is the core mechanic behind how you explore babbdi and find out more about what this place is and why you and others want to leave. 

But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t left dissatisfied because the game didn’t reveal enough of its narrative. At first, the NPC’s intentionally vague dialogue was a great mechanic at driving my sense of discovery and search for narrative. But the more I played, the less likely it seemed like I’d get any solid answers because what was revealed by the objects I saw and interacted with was never addressed by any person’s dialogue, such as the content on this TV:

This seems like it might be important to the context of babbdi. The man on the screen could be a politician. It shows him eating. Could this be a commentary how on babbdi is underresourced and has left its people to die while this politician is broadcasting himself eating? I don’t know. None of these questions were ever officially answered. The more I talked to NPCs, the more questions I’d have:

How does Holfred know me and my mother? What happened to my mother? I would guess that these things are never revealed — the intentionally vague dialogue given by NPCs discouraged me.

After playing BABBDI for one hour and successfully leaving babbdi, I’d say that the game initially does a great job at inspiring discovery and narrative, but as I discovered more I started to lose hope that I’d find a satisfying explanation to this game. If you’re someone who likes stories that are mostly left up to your own interpretation, then this is the game for you. But I’m someone who prefers the satisfaction of a clear answer.

 

 

 

 

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