The tunnel before acquiring the flashlight
Target Audience: This game is free! It seems to take on newcomers who don’t want to spend money on a simulator game. And it’s definitely for those who enjoy a grim, damp mood in their games.
In Babbdi, walking isn’t enough. The story progresses by walking becoming obsolete.
The distances to traverse are long. Sprinting makes you long for an even faster mode of transport. Flipping through the game library, you see there’s a motorcycle achievement. This gives you some respite: there is a faster method of transport after all. But the motorcycle soon doesn’t measure up to the height you must scale. Again, the libary points to a potential solution: reach the heighest point of Babbdi. And so you realize, you must have an element for scaling vertically. The elevators don’t seem to take you far. And that’s when you find a leafblower. Ta-da! At first you blow against the wall, blowing yourself back. And then you get a clever idea: how about blowing the ground? A whoosh emerges, propelling your player several stories into the air. And your imagination gets off the ground. You begin traversing all sorts of areas faster than you ever could before. Just as soon as you were getting bored, the leafblower showed you that the steps you took at the beginning weren’t the largest steps you were meant to take. And they hinted at it in the lethargy of walking at the beginning.
This was mirrored in the other objects I found. For example, the bat that you’re practically handed at the first part of the game. My first use for the bat was breaking a door open. Then I found a dark tunnel I assumed was a canal, and I was too frightened to go down it. This was quite surprising for a walking simulator with no enemies and no fail state. To my amusement, nothing was at the end of this tunnel. Where Clark exclaims how hard it is to make a game feel threatening when the player can’t die, Babbdi does it with sound and darkness alone.
The mechanics of walk, acquire skills, then move further lead to the dynamic is an escalation that re-legitmizes the quest to explore. A rooftop that was scenery in minute five is a destination by minute thirty. The emergent aesthetic is Discovery, not purely Narrative: though you uncover story, it is a dynamic, not content.
Where Babbdi falls short is its lack of a visual weenie in the game. Disney’s Imagineers call a visual magnet a weenie — Cinderella’s Castle closing Main Street. Carson, the Imagineer Jenkins builds on, insists the space itself should do that work. Babbdi has a non-game based weenie: the achievement list. Every time I needed orientation on what to do next in the game (the motorcycle, the highest point), I got it by flipping through the library, not by looking at the city. That’s environmental storytelling bailed out by UI. Firewatch puts its tower on the skyline so every walk has a vector.
The other critique of the game is that you can’t quickly reorient yourself after losing a tool — leading to a gameplay cliff where the player has to sulk around walking again and engage in slow, painful discovery. I came back after a break with no idea where I’d left the leafblower or pickaxe, and walking became mandatory again. The curve is supposed to only rise; Babbdi lets it fall by accident, making the second-session onramp excruciating. My fix: a compass that reveals nothing about the map but points toward the nearest tool you’ve already found. This allows rediscovery become a way to discover new ways to reach old places on the map.
In this walking simulator, all you do is walk until you don’t.
