How does walking tell the story?
Target audience: 16+
Name of the game: BABBDI
Game’s creator: Lemaitre Bros.
Platform of the game: Steam, Mac and Windows
Babbdi is a short, first-person walking sim that leverages the genre’s strengths to create an unsettlingly immersive story that left me in a state of surreal awe. In this short game, you play as an unnamed protagonist trapped in the titular Babbdi tasked with a single objective – escape the city. To do so, players must explore the biome’s empty buildings, speak to its jarring denizens, and master various tools to successfully obtain a train ticket and beat the game as it tells you a story about Babbdi and its people.
The first way that walking tells the story in Babbdi is through its world design. From the very start, players are dropped into a muddied liminal-space of an apartment building painted in muted grays, browns, and yellows, conveying a tone of melancholic resignation which is carried on throughout the game’s entire map design. The game’s art style leans into it, feeling like an unfinished Blender project with rough edges and pixelated textures. This, along with its rows of abandoned skyscrapers and sparse and uncanny, unwell citizens – both physically and mentally – make it clear that Babbdi is not a place that anybody would want to stay in, and before ever being told to, the environment makes players want to leave. In addition to the colors, Babbdi’s architectural layout remains similarly barren – the map consists of just a few huge buildings, whose massive gray masses are occasionally interrupted by a colorful sign. These signs may initially seem inviting, but closer inspection reveals that they spell out nothing more than gibberish, and going inside these buildings shows that no matter where you go, almost all that you will find inside is rubble. However, sometimes, secret rooms will contain a treasure, or a certain action will trigger an achievement. Add to this a few puzzles, like floating staircases which require parkour-like finesse to ensure you don’t fall between the cracks, and you get a map which invites you to explore and walk around without ever asking you to.
All this is bolstered by the few characters that you encounter throughout the overworld. Though most of their physical form may seem normal (ignoring the giant floating head you meet at the information center), interacting with them will prompt them to to turn their heads towards you, revealing their twisted, disfigured faces that seem otherworldly and inhuman. Speaking with these NPCs with missing eyes or giant teeth is an unpredictable experience – sometimes, they will give you hints as to where you can progress next, other times, they will spew gibberish, and if you’re lucky, they may share a small bit of lore about the protagonist or the city. The point is though that other than one character near the end of the game, none of these ephemeral interactions are mandatory to progress, a large part of what makes Babbdi a walking sim, which makes uncovering these nuggets of lore and worldbuilding organic and rewarding. After all, it is only after characters decide to explore, often aimlessly, that you will meet such people and be rewarded with a few short lines of dialogue.
Finally, another huge component of how the walking in Babbdi tells a story is by how few mechanics the game really contains. All players can do is move around with typical WASD controls, crouch, jump, look around, and interact with people and items. Even the items, such as the motorcycle which allows you to move around faster, serve exclusively to aid in moving around. One example was at the beginning, when the player is given a baseball bat. Immediately, I tried seeing if I could fight the NPC which had just given it to me, but to no avail – instead, all it could do was cause me to bounce in the opposite direction of the surface I hit (allowing me, for instance, to ‘bounce’ to great heights by hitting the floor). This limited array of mechanics leaves decidedly few options for the player other than to simply walk around, explore the world, and slowly piece together the world and hints around them to be able to leave the game.
To conclude, Babbdi uses the strengths of the walking sim’s limited mechanics and vague objectives to tell the story of a small and somber city whose sparsely populated skyscrapers, abandoned sites, and uncomfortable citizens incite deep intrigue and uncomfortable immersion. Through it all, it was able to create an aimless discomfort which I find hard to describe but that I know I’ll think about for quite a while to come.
