I played Babbdi, a walking simulator created by Sirius and Léonard Lemaitre and published by Lemaitre Bro. It’s available for free on Steam, and seems like it’s made for ages 15+, with a dark feel, setting, and visuals, but also low violence levels. I played it on my Mac, using Steam.
You learn about the story of Babbdi pretty much entirely through walking. Without walking, there is no way to learn anything about the town. There isn’t any narrator or quests or anything other than an area, a mission – to escape the town – and basic commands. The only way to figure out how to actually accomplish the mission is to walk around the town and start interacting with the people there.
This fits what we’ve learned about narrative-based games and narrative architecture, as this was what the game was focused around – spending time to build up and learn the story of the place, with walking as your tool to do that. Walking also gave me as the player a lot of autonomy, letting me decide where and when to go places, if I want to interact with strangers, if I want to accomplish the mission at all, unlike other games that force the player to take action and push the game to move forward. I missed something I thought was really important at the beginning of the game in that environment, but there is no exclamation point or mechanism to tell you if you missed information, if you have enough, or where to go – it is also self-explored through the walking.
It is environmental storytelling, with me learning about my environment based on the placement and distribution of what is around me on the board. However, it definitely was a lot less clear than other environmental storytelling like escape rooms, because the walking creates a wider distribution of items and information that contains more noise.
From a design perspective, the few commands that are given define the game a lot, telling the player what they can do with the space. I know, from the commands, that I can talk to people, pick up objects, use the objects, jump, hide, etc. I know that I can’t, for example, climb something, build structures (outside of using my objects), etc. So in a walking game where someone is exploring the limits of their space, the commands given are everything.
I think this can sometimes inspire violence. At least for me, I got bored with walking around. And a little frustrated at the lack of visible progression. Therefore, I think my instinct, as well as other people’s, is to explore the limits of the space. Oftentimes, those limits include violence. When the violence works, sometimes it’s more exciting than walking, and especially without consequences or when the violence is able to get you information, this can incite more violence. I personally don’t think game violence reflects on larger life, but it’s possible psychologically it does – telling people, especially kids, that violence gets you information and accomplishes your goals.
In Babbdi, however, violence gets you nowhere because the places didn’t react at all when I tried to hit them with an object. There is no mechanism to hit, and the object just gets placed down, and the person doesn’t react. I think this reinforces good behavior about not using violence to solve the game, but I think it’s also an interesting tradeoff to consider as a designer, as it is a large potential way to explore the game that is left out.
Overall, I am not a fan of walking sims, and Babbdi was no exception – the absence of physical progression, direction on where to go and what to do, and seemingly endless walking did not inspire me but rather bored me. However, walking sims are a fascinating study about how to let a player explore a story themselves, and what the layout, behavior, and controls – alongside any other game mechanisms are – as they are the critical parts of these games, the only direction and boundaries, players are given.
