I played Baabdi, a short PC walking simulator by Sirius & Léonard Lemaitre. The game is completed by leaving Baabdi by train, for which you need to find a ticket and navigate to the train station. There are few rules and procedures to the game, other than that you may walk around and interact with objects. The only resources are the objects you can find, however the fact that you can only hold one, and that none are necessary for the main objective, means that resource acquisition doesn’t play an important part inn the game. There is a strange sense in the game that everyone is trying to help you escape, and because of this the only real conflict is between you and your lack of a train ticket, or perhaps agains the concrete architectures you navigate. The process of playing the game mainly consisted of, as expected, walking around. Every once in a while I would see an item of interest, such as a person or interactable object, but the world was pretty sparsely populated overall.
Aesthetics was definitely where the game really shined. Baabdi was a strange and beautiful game to look at, combining brutalist soviet architecture with a rustic bad-unity-game-core aesthetic. The plot fit into this as well, with the npc around you seeming to regard the train out of Baabdi with a strange, almost religious reverence. It seems that every disheveled figure in your concrete apartment building wants this, but they are all stuck, waiting. The collectible items also contributed to the aesthetic, as you filled your libraries with things like cigarettes and alcohol, items it seemed natural that those in Baabdi would find valuable, despite their value often being unclear. This thematic cohesion meant that I enjoyed Baabdi for the sense pleasure of experiencing the environment. Exploration and discovery was sometimes rewarding, but faded after I found that most explorable regions were simply more concrete, inhabited by more forlorn residents. There was also a little bit of fellowship, in how me and all the npcs were stuck in the same place and wanted the same thing (except for a few spanish-speaking dancers in the sewer, they were perfectly content). Everyone was saving the one last ticket for the player, which felt good to experience. If I could change anything, I would’ve wanted more lore, but I think that desire also goes somewhat against the sparse, mystical nature of the plot, and searching for a goal that I didn’t really understand was part of what made the experience good.
