Last Friday in section, Ellie handed out this one-page printable tabletop role-playing game (RPG) The Witch is Dead by Grant Howitt. The game uses “simple action resolution mechanics” and centers on using violence as a premise of the story. In The Witch is Dead, a group of 2-4 players work together, in which the story progression depends heavily on the creativity and improvisation skills of the players to ultimately gouge out the witch hunter’s eyes and return them to the murdered witch to resurrect her.
To better understand how violence affects storytelling in games, I decided to play The Stanley Parable, a PC-based walking simulator (also playable on the IOS) by Davey Wreden. The Stanley Parable tells its story by exploring the environment with a somewhat creepy narrator. Even though the games are different in format, both games target and appeal to players who enjoy enacting stories, narrative design, improvisation, and choice-driven gameplay. Both The Witch is Dead (tabletop RPG) and The Stanley Parable (PC game) demonstrates that powerful, meaningful gameplay can emerge without traditional violence and designers can instead rely on narrative, agency, and emotional tension to drive meaningful engagement and creativity.
How Walking Tells the Story
When playing the walking simulator, walking as a Mechanic helped tell the story of The Stanley Parable because by shaping the rhythm, map constraints, and player agency, walking turned any physical movement, or the absence of it, into a choice. It became a way of controlling the player’s actions, emphasizing the meaning behind motion and creating an emotional connection with the player. In this critical analysis, we will explore how walking or narrative “walking” reveals narrative layers, subverts traditional mechanics, and expands design ethics.
Movement as Narrative
In The Stanley Parable, walking shapes the player’s relationship with agency. The only movements allowed were forward/backward and clicking, yet every corridor and door offers a branching narrative moment.
Players could not interact with the office supplies or tables, creating a Dynamic where boredom forces them to focus on progressing further in the story because it preserves narrative momentum without forcing further interaction from the narrator or other game mechanics.
The Stanley Parable demonstrates how the primary Mechanism of “walking” can convey a deeply immersive, reactive narrative by offering players narrative fun and discovery fun instead of just action-based fun. That mechanic, when combined with branching narration and level design, generates Dynamics of subversion, defiance, and disorientation. The aesthetic outcome is philosophical introspection and absurdist humor. The game also offers a compelling example of “meta-narrative” design and a dynamic where the more the player is aware of the game’s structure, the more it becomes a core part of the experience, influencing the player’s decisions.
This tension of deciding whether to obey or rebel against the narrator creates meaning. The design cleverly uses the narrator as both a guide and unreliable antagonist, turning the act of walking into a dialogue between the player and the story. Even though violence is absent, there is this psychological tension and fear of retribution for simple disobedience. The absence of combat forces the player to confront deeper questions: Am I truly making choices, or am I simply following the illusion of choice?
As such, the narrator’s voice adapts to your disobedience. The game doesn’t exactly punish the player for not listening but the narrator responds with dry wit and increasingly accurate meta-commentary. For example, one of the most powerful moments in the game is giving the player the choice to choose between the left and the right door.
In my first play-through, when given this choice I was an obedient little child, listening to the narrator and getting the “happy ending.” The second time around I decided to deviate from the narrator and disobey every command whenever possible starting with choosing the right door. By refusing to listen to the narrator, the game heightens reflection, especially when the narrator mocks or undermines your decisions. It almost feels unsettling and ominous like something bad is about to happen if the player continues to disobey. Although the narrator narrates and urges the player to choose the left one, choosing the right door instead of the left prompts the narrator to use the Mechanics of narration and humor to say, “Stanley’s just taking a quick detour to the break room.” This shows how the game integrates the act of walking into its narrative structure.
After disobeying a few more narrations, the narrator sourly said, “Stanley was so bad at following directions, it’s incredible he wasn’t fired years ago.” This comment lowkey made me laugh. At this point, I was anxious about what would happen to me/Stanley if I continued to disobey but the use of humor assuaged some fears of mine to keep pushing forward and disobeying.
The narrator scared me with a mannequin. This was very creepy and just reinforced the game’s underlying psychological tension. Even without explicit violence, The Stanley Parable maintains an atmosphere of unease through unexpected jumpscares.
These instances underscore how a player’s actions or inactions become the traits of the character, not just game states. Unlike traditional games that reward or penalize actions with points or death, The Stanley Parable rewards deviation with narrative surprises and even humor.
Imagination as Movement in The Witch Is Dead
On the other hand, The Witch Is Dead has no visuals that involve walking but spatial storytelling drives the game. The Mechanics are simple (roll dice, assign traits), but the Dynamics arise from interpersonal play: collaboration, sabotage, problem-solving, and humor. Players aim for this whimsical revenge through theatrical storytelling rather than mastering the rules. It shows that a light ruleset can empower players to construct personal, creative, and expressive narratives. While there’s no walking in the digital or first-person sense, players verbally “walk” through forest paths, villages, and social dynamics. Revenge for our beloved witch is the premise of the game, yet the tone of the story is light, making the game easily explorable to dark themes in a safe imaginative environment. For example, the story subverts traditional revenge tropes with magical animal familiars and spells like “distract/confuse” or “make fire.” The themes of violence and revenge are softened with these additions and violence almost becomes optional rather than necessary.
In The Witch Is Dead, our gameplay featured a dog that can read books, a spider with some level of slyness, a rat with a third hand, and a frog that can conjure light. For most of the story, our team consistently deployed the frog, whose only magic was to conjure light, to “distract/confuse” any enemy within the story. This player-created absurdity didn’t detract from the story, it became a silly part of the story. The light rules and emphasis on narrative over combat show how freedom and creativity, not violence, can drive engagement.
Game Design and the Evolution of Walking Sims
“The insult is in categorizing a genre by its limitation, rather than its capability” (Clark).
Compared to violent digital games like Call of Duty, both The Stanley Parable and The Witch Is Dead challenge the assumption that meaningful gameplay and “fun” require violence, but neither games are dependent on violence to engage the player. Instead, they offer narrative fun, discovery fun, and expression fun through player choice and story-driven exploration. In fact, the design of the games almost rejects violence unless when necessary (for example: gouging out the witch killer’s eyes) which in turn encourages players to turn to unique ways to storytelling and humor the game.
In The Stanley Parable, the violence is existential, and the game accomplishes this by critiquing the players’ reaction to conformity and corporate monotony. In The Witch Is Dead, violence is narratively justified but tonally humorous, encouraging players to play with morality rather than simulate it. Both games suggest that the exclusion of violence opens up space for player interpretation, humor, and most importantly, introspection.
Walking games offer alternatives to games that only offer combat as your power. What if your power was introspection, reflection, and a bit of absurdity to create the ending the player wants? Both games showed me that ethical design doesn’t mean removing all the gore, sanitizing all content, and desensitizing players to violence it’s about making intentional choices that shape how players feel, act, and reflect.
All in all, walking simulators aren’t “less” than other games. Instead of enemies to fight all the time, they offer emotional stakes. This kind of agency makes the gaming experience much more personal and meaningful and the story becomes something more than a game we just survive, it becomes a world players helped create. Walking sims don’t just change how players interact with environments, they change how we interact with ourselves and the best of these games provoke laughter, thought, and introspection without having a single bullet fired. Clark writes, “Art gets criticized at the end of each movement.” Just because walking sims are different, it doesn’t mean it’s bad. It might actually be the most powerful way to start a conversation.
