Walking simulators challenge the idea that games need action, combat, or clear objectives to be meaningful. Instead, they use movement, environment, and player experience as storytelling tools. Babbdi, created by Sirius Lemaitre and Léonard Lemaitre, available on Steam, is a strong example of this genre. Designed for players who enjoy experimental and atmospheric games, Babbdi demonstrates that walking itself can function as narrative. Through its level design, spatial structure, and player-driven exploration, the game turns movement into meaning. In Babbdi, walking tells the story by creating disorientation, shaping player interpretation, and generating emotional impact through the environment rather than traditional narrative techniques.
One of the most important ways Babbdi uses walking to tell its story is through its environmental design. The game places players in a large, empty city made up of repetitive concrete structures, long corridors, and minimal visual variation. There are no clear objectives, maps, or directions. As a result, the simple mechanic of walking becomes the player’s primary method of understanding the world. Using the MDA framework, the mechanic of unrestricted movement leads to the dynamic of aimless wandering, which produces the aesthetic of confusion and isolation.
This design choice is intentional: removing control over the player’s movement highlights the disorientation experienced in an abstract, unfamiliar system. Whereas walking simulators like Gone Home feature plenty of visual, environmental cues for the player to piece together a linear narrative, Babbdi strips this away and makes walking the central mode of narration. In order to glean meaning from Babbdi, the player has to perform it through exploration, although this lack of explicit direction may be infuriating. Adding gentle visual and auditory environmental cues would prevent the game from being disorienting, while retaining its sense of freedom.
Walking also tells the story in Babbdi through player interaction with non-playable characters (NPCs). These characters are scattered throughout the environment, and players encounter them only as they move through the world. The NPCs speak in strange, fragmented, and often nonsensical dialogue, which adds to the game’s surreal tone.
Instead of delivering a clear narrative, these interactions require players to interpret meaning themselves. This reflects a key idea from game design theory: players are not just consumers of story but active participants in creating it. Compared to What Remains of Edith Finch, which presents carefully scripted narrative moments, Babbdi is far more abstract. Its strength lies in how it uses walking to connect these fragmented interactions into a larger experience. However, the lack of clarity can also weaken player engagement. Introducing slightly more coherent dialogue could help balance interpretation with understanding.
Finally, Babbdi uses walking to create emotional impact. The game’s atmosphere is quiet, empty, and often unsettling. As players walk through dark hallways and abandoned spaces, they begin to feel a strong sense of loneliness.
This emotional response is not conveyed through cutscenes or dialogue but through movement itself. The formal elements of space, sound, and player motion work together to produce meaning. Unlike more narrative-driven walking simulators, Babbdi prioritizes mood over plot, making it stand out within the genre. While this is effective, the experience could be strengthened by adding moments of contrast, such as brief areas of warmth or activity, to make the loneliness feel even more powerful.
The ethics of a game are on display here when Babbdi questions how much emphasis the game gives to the player’s interpretation over accessibility. The design choices frequently lack any real direction, and it seems to force a reliance entirely upon exploration. The player could be doing nothing but walking for long stretches, having no idea why they are walking in the direction they are or what any of the in-game NPCs mean.
From my own experience playing the game, it suggests that whilst uncertainty and confusion are strong methods for storytelling, they place responsibility on the designer to consider accessibility within this form. Babbdi challenges the idea that games must always offer closure, although perhaps with this game, some sense of closure and direction would increase the player base and not detract from the overall narrative.
Ultimately, Babbdi proves how walking, given intentional design, can be incredibly effective in storytelling. Its open-ended environments, fragmented conversations between characters, and the emotional feel it imbues upon spaces manage to turn locomotion into a story. Instead of a linear progression of plot points that a player guides a character through, Babbdi allows for abstracted, player-driven narrative construction to arise from their movements and perceptions of the space. The design decisions may not suit everyone, but they certainly prove that just moving through a space, in the right way, is able to convey an equally valid kind of story, influenced as much by the player as by the game.
