For this critical play, I played the game Babbdi by Leonard and Sirius Lemaitre on PC Steam. This game is made for teens and young adults because the aesthetics are spooky and creepy. The players also have to like games in this genre because it is very open ended leading to confusion on the point of the game and too much idle time.
This is walking simulator where the player has to walk around the world, complete some tasks, and figure out what happened. The narrative here can be emergent because the player interacts with the system, characters, and world and finds out what happened.
An interesting mechanic the game uses is the big world. This also the dynamic of the player roaming around and discovering the narrative through interacting with the characters and objects – discovery aesthetic. This shows that the narrative was multi-layered and draws the player in. There multiple buildings and vertical levels also let the player feel like they are more involved in exploring the world as they can look around the expanses, austere architecture, or deep abysses. The train station was particularly evocative because many of the characters wanted to leave the place but the player could not get any tickets as if they were trapped there too.
Another mechanic I think added to the game was the absent description of the narrative and directions. This allowed the player to be more creative in evoking their own narrative. This leads to the fantasy aesthetic where the players imagines a new world that they are in and how all the people there fit together. For example, this place could be an abandoned planet where everyone wants to go back but their minds were altered by some radiation and they are stuck in this mental and physical bottomless pit.
Some improvements can be to make the graphics better because players can get dizzy while walking around looking at the screen in the first person view. Another improvement is to give the player options to engage more explicitly with the narrative because some people don’t know what to do if all they can do is walk around. This could be a tutorial / story at the beginning to prepare the player for the rest of the game.
In the end, the best quality about Babbdi is its ability to provide a template for the imagination of the player.
