Babbdi is a walking simulator game created by Sirius and Léonard Menchiari in 2022, available on Steam for PC, Mac, and Linux. Its target audience is players aged 13 and up.
Through Discovery and Challenge, Babbdi builds an eerie atmosphere that blurs the line between narrative and environment. This intentional design choice mirrors the player’s own sense of isolation and confusion, making the player’s journey truly feel like a haunting, dreamlike exploration.
Leaning on Curiosity & Discovery
From a design perspective, the developers made a clear choice to limit explicit goals and guidance. When I was immediately dropped into the building at the start of the game, I was struck by the eerie atmosphere, including the brutalist concrete structure and eerie sounds. This amplified the sensation of isolation and forced me to rely on my own curiosity to navigate.
A lot of vast spaces with many options of where to go and unknown people/objects
However, this also leads to moments of deep frustration. In one instance, I spent several minutes navigating through a long, dark tunnel only to find a dead end. With no feedback or reward, the experience felt tedious. While this design choice supports the mood of confusion and desolation, adding light touches of player feedback, such as perhaps subtle audio cues or flickering lights toward a direction, could have preserved the aesthetic while reducing slight feelings of aimlessness at times. I do not necessarily think these cues would make the experience easier, but would instead encourage me to keep playing when I felt frustrated.
Challenge in Babbdi
Babbdi introduces a unique form of Challenge to the player: psychological endurance. It makes the player feel confused, amplifying the essence of the Single Player vs. Game structure. Furthermore, without traditional storytelling cues like cutscenes or dialogue, players are forced to build meaning through what they choose to pay attention to. This design invites slower, more intentional play, creating Challenge as this requires intense navigation and patience.
In my experience, this freedom to explore was slightly too challenging for me sometimes. There were times I did not know at all where I should be going next, felt too overwhelmed by the amount of decisions I could make, or just extremely confused at what certain objects or people were meant for. One possible solution could be to add slightly more guidance like a map embedded in the game like on a scratched wall or easily findable secret object. This could help shape some sort of feedback system that encourages sustained play, especially for players who might not be familiar with nonlinear game formats.
Ran into several objects and characters like this dog and people dancing in a circle that felt arbitrary/disconnected from the game
Despite these frustrations, I recognize that Babbdi’s form of challenge serves its narrative. The confusion and frustration I felt as a player mirrors the disorientation of a character trapped in an extremely unfamiliar city, allowing the mood and space to take narrative precedence over plot.
Ethics
In many games, violence is a mechanic used to drive the plot forward, create urgency, or establish stakes. Playing Babbdi, I did not experience any explicit violence as there were no enemies, weapons, or combat. In this case, however, the exclusion of violence is a deliberate and central design choice and made me feel deeper feelings. I felt violence within myself playing the game, and at many points, the game left me feeling extremely confused and alone with no clear purpose or direction.
These emotions raise ethical questions not about what players are doing to others, but about what the game is doing to themselves and reframes violence as psychological. From a design standpoint, this choice is clever and provocative and challenges dominant games by proving that conflict can exist without explicit combat. However, the emotional toll (as I experienced) might push some players away too quickly. A few additional design nudges like subtle cues that can help affirm a player’s path could still preserve the game’s tone while making the experience less emotionally taxing.
