Game Name(s): The Stanley Parable, Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch
Creator(s): Davey Wreden for Stanley Parable, Campo Santo for Firewatch, Giant Sparrow for Edith Finch
Platform: I played on Steam running on Mac (with a PC emulator for Edith Finch) with a controller
Target audience: Adult players interested in narrative, indie, experimental games
Many video games use movement as a tool to get from fight to fight, but a “walking simulator” turns movement into the main game mechanic. The term has been used both descriptively and pejoratively to describe many games, but there’s a gradient in what it’s actually describing. I’ll be comparing three games I played and how they met, subverted, and expanded the genre’s expectations. It’s one of my favorite types of games. I’ll be taking a look at The Stanley Parable, Firewatch, and What Remains of Edith Finch. All three games use walking as not just a filler, but as the main purpose of the game.
While playing these games, I couldn’t help but think about Henry Jenkins’ “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” and especially how each of the games elicit not only distinct emotional responses, but also sensory and mental responses. The games toe the line of “enacted stories,” a term Jenkins defines as games that either “enable players to perform or witness narrative events,” and “embedded narratives,” which he looks at as a non-chronological take on narrative gaming, where the player has to put together what happens based on clues found around the world. The latter definitely applies to Firewatch the most. In Firewatch, you are Henry, a fire lookout new on the job who discovers a mystery in the open-world (ish) woods, and your job is to walk around the forest, completing small tasks. There’s a fair amount of freedom, especially when it comes to walking simulators, a genre famous for “illusion of choice” mechanics (which I’ll touch on in a moment). For example, you can run around the entire forest and discover tertiary story elements hidden in cache boxes across the map, but you’d never be able to find an item that you’re not supposed to find yet; the game guides the player towards those things pretty directly.
Edith Finch takes the former element on pretty strongly. I didn’t make it far into the game (I will finish it, one day), but it definitely gave the feeling of being locked into the chronology of a single story. Upon a cursory Google (without seeing spoilers), there appears to be only one ending, as does Firewatch, however the path to get there is much more linear in Edith Finch. You’re essentially playing through what feels occasionally like an extremely interactive visual novel, with amazing mechanics that change in every “chapter,” giving the player no chances to get bored. For example, one early moment in the game involves inhabiting the mind of an older relative. When we go into her mind, she imagines herself transforming into various animals, eating larger and larger prey. It’s a freaky, visceral experience, and you experience it only once in the game. This moment both breaks and fits the walking simulator mold. You’re still exploring, but now the mechanics themselves are metaphors. The walking—now slithering, swimming, flying—becomes symbolic of deeper emotional currents.
Stanley Parable takes on both of these elements at different points in the game. Weirdly, the game feels almost roguelike in the first hour you play it—you can make different choices on the same setup, over and over again, with differing results. Obviously, it branches beyond that the longer you play as the office worker stuck in a loop walking around in his empty office building. I think also, the longer you play, the more you’re able to find elements embedded into the different minor narratives, hinting at some overarching story about the main character, but it’s hard to exactly piece it together in this truly non-linear game, almost defiantly so. If Firewatch leads you down a carefully constructed emotional path, Stanley Parable keeps yanking the floor out from under you.
Something that these three games have in common is a stripped away sense of violence as a main mechanic. In the reading about walking simulators, Nicole Clark points out that the first video games were all war simulators. Video gaming has become synonymous with “causing problems” with “violent youths” and allegedly perturbing violence onto our society, but there are so many examples of games like these that go outside of that bubble, and reframe what it means to even be a video game. These games don’t offer shootouts or boss fights. They offer questions. Questions about grief, routine, loneliness, memory, and agency. And they do it not by telling you what to feel, but by making you walk through it.
In the end, walking simulators show that stories don’t need to be won or beaten—they can be lived. And sometimes, just putting one foot in front of the other is the most powerful choice a game can give you.
Evidence:
