I played the walking game BABBDI for this week’s critical play assignment. Personally, the main draw of this game, as opposed to completing quests and advancing the game, is exploring the intriguing setting and architecture of the dystopian city, and interacting with its strange zombie-like inhabitants.
I played the game on a laptop, after downloading the game from Steam. Although it is not specified by the developers, it is likely suitable for age 12 and above due to the mild horror themes of the game. The gray and brutalist architecture reminds me of communist bloc of the 20th century, but this feels as much as set in the past as in the future, as a possibility to what our living spaces can become with uncurbed pollution and environmental destruction. It successfully builds up an atmosphere of hopelessness and quiet horror (think Midsommar?), without being too overtly terrifying.
Staying true to a walking game, there is only a minimalistic set of actions that the players can take, including walking, jumping, crouching, interacting with other people/objects. I’m surprised to find out that even falling from great heights wouldn’t kill the player, and the only action so far that has led me to respawn is walking onto the train tracks (which carries the train that the player is supposed to board to achieve the ultimate goal of the game – to ‘leave BABBDI’). This enabled an open-world exploration where players roam around the expansive and uncharted map area with vast swathes of horizon and vertical exploration possible (example: scaling buildings and taking clunky escalators). This in turn creates the fun of discovery for players.
Another dynamic created by the mechanic of walking is that palyers have to interact with various characters they encounter on their journey of exploration. As such, users have to piece together the story of what happened to the area piece by piece, as each character seldom says more than a few lines of text. In the process, they can also discover random items and complete side quests. (eg. I accidentally got the achievement ‘Flat Face’ after being hit by the oncoming train leaving BABBDI from the back) As such, this creates the fun of narrative for players, as they are driven to uncover the story and eventually obtaining the train ticket to leave BABBDI.
Something that could be improved about the game is that personally, I became really nauseous after 30 minutes of playing, and just physically could not continue anymore, even though I was intrigued and really wanted to continue exploring and attempting to solve the game.
