For this critical play, I played a game called Babbdi, found on the Steam platform and made by creators Leonard and Sirius Lemaitre.
The main objective of the game is to explore the world (called Babbdi) and ultimately escape it by collecting the items and interacting with the various people in the environment. There aren’t many mechanics of the game — the main things for the players to do is walk around with the set of controls and pick up the objects. Thinking back to the short exercise we did identifying the core, supporting, and extraneous elements of the ‘cheese or font’ game, most of the elements in this game are core elements. The supporting elements are the instructions on how to play the game and the main menu, and I’d say there are no extraneous elements. There’s no timer or anything to put pressure on the player to discover. And all the other elements are pretty necessary in order for the player to do anything.
This game ended up being dry for me. Within 10 minutes of the game, I was struggling to continue playing the game. In my opinion, while the concept has a lot of potential, the lack of obstacles, clear instruction, and developed graphics made me lose interest almost instantly. The type of fun of this game is ‘discovery,’ and I think it would be a lot more fun if there was more of a ‘narrative’ component to the game. Also, the range of motion is pretty limited as a player — I found myself backing myself into corners and not being able to zoom out and take a look at the surroundings.
Ultimately, I wasn’t able to play this game for more than 20 minutes — I got pretty frustrated at the fact that I was going in circles and wasn’t able to reorient myself to find items. This could be a fun game if there were a lot more supporting and extraneous elements incorporated to foster more excitement.
