If you’ve ever played a game that made you feel like something was off – like the world itself was trying to tell you something – you’ll get what it’s like to walk through BABBDI. Created by Yves Paradis and Gorka Cloquell, this free indie game is available on Steam for PC and Mac. It’s not flashy. There are no enemies, no puzzles, no combat. The only real goal is simple: find a train ticket and leave the city. But somehow, that simplicity is exactly what makes it so powerful.
BABBDI is a walking simulator – part of a genre that prioritizes exploration, narrative, and atmosphere over traditional mechanics. Instead of “doing,” you just move. You observe. And that’s where the story lives. As I wandered through the game’s towering brutalist cityscape at 3 a.m, the silence and stillness felt heavy. There were no quests, no cutscenes – just footsteps echoing in empty stairwells. The environment told the story: this was a place people had abandoned, or maybe were trying to escape.
In terms of formal elements, BABBDI uses space brilliantly. The brutalist architecture, the vertical level design, and the hidden paths reward slow, observant players. It also leans heavily into discovery and narrative fantasy as its types of fun – not mastery or competition. You aren’t proving anything to anyone; you’re uncovering pieces of a world that doesn’t need you.
In section, we played a role-playing game with violent mechanics. But it was funny, honestly – because it was social. We were all improvising, laughing, and making choices together. Violence in that context felt like a joke, a shared mechanic to move the session forward. It wasn’t deep. But in BABBDI, I played alone. And at one point, I walked into a small, quiet room where a man offered me a wooden stick and said I could “hit things with it.” That moment disturbed me. There had been no hint of danger up until then. The stick, it turns out, is used to launch yourself off surfaces (a clear traversal mechanic) – to explore harder-to-reach places. But being handed something framed like a weapon in an otherwise nonviolent world made me pause.
That disturbance wasn’t accidental – it was good design. The designers deliberately removed traditional fail states (death, combat, time pressure) to shift the player’s attention. This ties into course concepts like narrative immersion and emotional engagement: the game isn’t about “winning,” it’s about feeling. Introducing the possibility of violence without enforcing it was a brilliant choice. It created ethical tension without needing actual combat. I had to ask myself: Would I become violent if given the chance, even when nothing demanded it?
Still, if I had to critique the design slightly, I would say the stick mechanic could have been introduced with just a little more clarity. The moment was powerful, but it left me confused whether I was supposed to destroy something or hurt someone, which briefly pulled me out of the emotional flow. A small environmental hint like a visible broken wall above could have nudged players toward understanding the traversal mechanic without diluting the ethical ambiguity the developers clearly wanted.
This is what separates walking sims like BABBDI from traditional violent games. In most action games, violence is expected and rewarded – it’s the central mechanic. You defeat enemies to unlock more story. In BABBDI, you unlock story by walking. By being curious. And when violence shows up, even quietly, it feels alien – because the game has retrained you to view the world differently.
By stripping away traditional mechanics, BABBDI turns walking into storytelling and it proves that sometimes, the quietest games can leave the loudest echoes.
