BABBDI is a first-person walking simulator created by Leonard Lemaitre and Sirus Lemaitre. The game’s target audience is players aged 16 and up and it is a digital game that can be played on platforms such as Steam, Mac, and Windows.
This game uses the act of walking to develop a narrative that immerses players in a desolate urban dystopia. While playing, you uncover elements such as faceless, deformed men, the general dystopian world, and constant ruins. Through its minimalist game mechanics and striking world design, BABBDI transforms walking into an essential tool for storytelling, emphasizing exploration and discovery within a bleak and dystopian environment.
While playing, it becomes apparent that the game’s setting is crucial to how walking narrates the story. BABBDI drops players into a dim cityscape filled with liminal spaces and an extremely melancholic and dreary atmosphere. The color palette is gray, brown, and washed-out yellow, and the features are rough, unfinished textures. These all communicate that the land is decayed and abandoned as you walk through it. This creates a visual storytelling element that sets the emotional tone and is further explored through walking. As players navigate through these spaces, their movement becomes a way of uncovering the game’s history by piecing together its backstory through the visuals.
The few characters encountered in “BABBDI” enhance the walking experience. These characters are honestly frightening. They have grotesque, surreal appearances, and provide eerie interactions that make the player feel even more alone as they walk through the world. The conversations with these characters range from cryptic hints to disjointed ramblings. They serve as narrative rewards that further the mystery of the world and uncover things about the city. The player’s choice to engage or bypass these NPCs influences their understanding of the game’s lore, making each walk through the city a unique story shaped by chosen interactions. This design choice emphasizes the game’s focus on discovery and exploration because understanding of the game unfolds at the player’s pace.
The game mechanics in BABBDI are deliberately sparse, with players limited to basic movements such as walking, jumping, and interacting with objects. This simplicity forces players to focus on the act of walking as their primary means of engagement with the world. Each step becomes meaningful, whether it’s navigating precarious ruins or triggering hidden elements within the environment. For instance, a seemingly useless baseball bat actually allows the user to bounce to new heights. These mechanics ensure that walking is not just a mode of transit but a key to unlocking the deeper, hidden aaspects of the game. It enriches the experience by adding a constant element of discovery.
Additionally, the inclusion of a motorcycle and the bouncing mechanic expand the walking experience, allowing for faster travel and access to areas that you wouldn’t be able to get to by walking. These elements serve to enhance the exploratory aspect of walking, making it both a physical and strategic component of gameplay. They allow players to cover more ground and experience a greater portion of the game’s world, and in turn deepen their immersion.
In BABBDI, walking is more than just a functional activity; it is the heart of the game’s narrative experience. The design of the world, the interactions with NPCs, and the minimalist mechanics all serve to enrich the story that unfolds with each step the player takes. I personally thought the game was scary and deeply unsettling, which means that it did its job right!
