The game I played this week is Paperbark, a walking simulator designed by Paper House and available on iOS, Android, and Steam. Unlike traditional games that emphasize combat or conflict, Paperbark is a gentle wildlife exploration game that focuses on atmosphere, envrionmental storytelling, and discovery through the wombat’s journey. So, players who prefer in exploration games in a relaxing pace may enjoy this game. Since “walking” is the core mechanic of the walking simulator genre, Paperbark uses movement as more than a way to travel. Walking tells the story in Paperbark through its exploration-based design, where each step uncovers the environment, guides players to understand the wombat’s life, and transforms movement into an emotional experience.
One of the main design decision that Paperbark make is it used walking to tell the story through uncovering the world. This is achieved through the fog mechanic. Players begin as a wombat living in a paperbark tree surrounded by fog. By clicking a point within the fog, players guide the wombat to move. Each step the wombat walks, the part surrounded in the environment will clear out. Instead of revealing the full view of the map at once, Paperbark lets players dicover the world gradually, creating a sense of curiosity and discovery. Like children learning about the world step by step, players explore from the wombat’s perspective to discover the environment with the same pace of the story being told, giving an immersive experience.
To prevent players from getting lost, Paperbark also introduces footprints and animal guides to hint at the right path. However, though these mechanics are helpful, they do not always appear consistently. During the play, I still frequently wadered back and forth because the footprint and guide didn’t appeared when I expected them to. Since the game also provide less sign of where the wombat can go and where it can’t, navigation can sometimes interrupt the relax-exploring experience. An ealier guidance could be incurred so that players won’t get frustrated while playing, especially if they are playing for the first time.
Beside creating an immersive sense of discovering, Paperbark also used walking to encourage players to experience the world from the wombat’s perspective. As players uncover new areas, they are encouraged to collect various items, such as insects and plants. The wombat eat the plants it encounters, while the insects found by carefully observing the environment as the wombat walks. Along the way, the wombat also interacts with its surroundings by scratching against trees and encountering other animals, such as birds. Together, these mechanics imitate the natural behaviors of a wild wombat, making players feel less like they are controlling a character and more like they are accompanying an animal through its natural habitat. Although these mechanics may seem boring compared to many traditional games, they perfectly support the games intention of “exploring”. Combined with the fog, rather than rushing toward the destination, players starts to notice plants, insects, and animals the same way a wombat would, creating a peaceful experience and a strong connection to the environment.
This design decision also differs Paper bark from games like Gone Home or Firewatch, where exploration uncovers human stories through objects and dialogue. In contrast, Paperbark uses exploration to tell a story about wombat while introducing players to Australia wildlife its ecosystem.
Although Paperbark is a gentle exploration game, it still tells a story, and a story has a climax. This occurs in “The Bushfire” chapter, where the meaning of walking changes completely. In the earlier chapters, players explore the environment through walking to discover plants and insects while learning wombat’s everyday behaviors. However, once the bushfire begins, collecting is no longer the focus. Instead, the player’s goal becomes finding a shelter for the wombat to survive. While the core walking mechanic remains unchanged, the purpose behind every step shifts from curiosity to urgency.
This is one of Paperbark’s most effective design decisions. Rather than introducing new mechanics to create tension, the game changes the context in which the existing walking mechanic is still used. The darker atmosphere, urgent music, and the wombat’s hurried movements immediately create a sense of danger. Even small accidents, such as the wombat slipping while running, reinforce the feeling that it is frightened and vulnerable. Since players have spent the previous chapters calmly exploring alongside the wombat, these subtle changes make them feel anxious for the wombat’s safety. As a result, the same act of walking no longer represents exploration and curiosity but survival and hope, allowing Paperbark to tell an emotional turning point in the story without changing its core gameplay.
Paperbark demonstrates that walking can be much more than a way to move through a game world. Through gradually uncovering the environment through the fog, encouraging players to observe in the persective of wombat, and transforming the purpose of walking between peaceful exploration and urgent survival, the gmae makes movement itself the primary storytelling device. This design reflects the idea presented in Clark’s article, in which walking simulators do not rely on combat or complex mechanics to create meaningful experiences. Paperbark is a perfect example, it shows that simply guiding a wombat through its natual habitat can communicate curiosity, empathy, and emotional reasonance. Every step the plaer takes not only moves the wombat forward but also promote the storytelling, proving that walking itself can become a powerful form of narrative.
