Walking tells the story because it allows you to explore the world. You learn the lay of the land, and that becomes context for your experience. As you interact with the environment, you feel a sense of agency that lets you really take on the game’s world and the narrative it’s telling. A slower pace and more freedom in movement give players space to define the game on their own terms. In a lot of other games, you’re funneled into systems and rules that shape the player experience exactly how the designers intended. But in games like Places, the meaning is yours to make.
In Places, there’s not much of a narrative unless the player brings imagination. I think that’s powerful. I really enjoyed the meditative aspect of the environment and the pace of the game. It reminded me of when I was a child. I believe childhood felt so joyous because there’s a kind of groundedness and presence that is inherent to your experience as a child. In that stillness, (or boredom depending on how you view it) there’s so much room for imagination and synthesis.
There was no violence in the walking simulator I played. I think the absence of violent elements broadened the emotional range of the experience. That could make it boring for some people. A lot of us turn to games to escape the overwhelm of the world and its endless choices and responsibilities. So for players who want immersive entertainment in a more traditional sense, this might not land. But the emotional possibility here is real, if the player is open to it.
After reading about how the U.S. government has used video games to promote military ideology, I started to think about how powerful violence is in shaping behavior. We’re wired to prioritize our survival, so even if a game’s violence isn’t directly tied to our own lives, the stress it creates still triggers real psychological responses. It limits decision-making and makes us reactive. And then the game reinforces what’s good or bad based on those limited decisions. That’s a kind of dark psychology—conditioning players to think in binaries under stress, reinforcing certain behavior. Positive reinforcement of distorted realities and extreme behaviors can lead to things like learned helplessness. When you’re constantly punished or restricted in a high-stress system, you start to believe you have no real control, even outside of the game. That kind of stress-induced framing teaches players to act fast, suppress complexity, and accept harm as normal. And that can carry into real life.
But when a game leaves that out, it shifts the whole meaning of the experience. In Places, there’s nothing pushing you to react. The game invites you to just exist, to observe, to walk. It doesn’t define what counts as success. That freedom creates a different emotional space that feels both quiet and expansive.
I think the game could do more with how it frames the environment in an ethical way. It treats the landscape as static, like something to pass through, rather than something you’re part of. In real life, the environment responds to us. It holds us accountable. In Places, you can trample over wildlife without any consequence or awareness. That stuck with me. I think it would be powerful if the game gave players a way to learn more about the environment they’re moving through. Even just an optional way to engage like learning about local wildlife or understanding the ecological impact of their actions could help players be more mindful. I think this would deepen the positive impact the game has. That kind of presence and awareness could carry into the real world. It could help players move through nature with more care, more knowledge, more respect. It could even help with safety, like knowing how to navigate animal encounters.
Places doesn’t try to be more than it is, and that’s part of its beauty. But the experience it offers—slow, quiet, open—has the potential to do even more if it leans into that openness as a space for learning, not just wandering.
