How Does Walking Tell a Story?
Video games train us to read movement as a resource: a sprint bar, a stamina meter, a dodge-roll. Movement is usually a tool you use to do something else — reach the checkpoint, flank the enemy, solve the puzzle. Walking simulators strip that away, making an argument most “real” games never state outright: that the pace and manner of moving through a space can be the story’s delivery mechanism, not just the vehicle that carries you to one.
Salon’s 2017 piece on the genre’s history traces how contested that idea has been. “Walking simulator” started as a forum insult in the late 2000s and calcified into a culture-war flashpoint after Gamergate, when games like Gone Home and Firewatch were dismissed as “not real games” — no fail state, no combat, no legitimate design. The article cites developer Sean Krankel, who argues that removing combat doesn’t remove challenge, it relocates it: dialogue becomes “your superpower” when you can’t shoot your way through a scene. The absence of traditional mechanics isn’t a lack of design — it’s a constraint that forces meaning into the one verb left: moving. I spent time this weekend with BABBDI, a free first-person exploration game on Steam, which is almost a pure test of it. No combat, no quest structure, no HUD — just a bleak, Soviet-industrial district you wander, hunting for 21 hidden objects. Barely any text or dialogue. Whatever story you leave with is built entirely out of how the space makes you move through it.
A few ways that plays out mechanically:
- Pace is authored, not chosen. BABBDI’s default speed forces you to actually look, rather than treat the environment as a corridor between objectives — a bet that dwell time produces mood in a way efficient traversal can’t.
- Navigation is disorientation as storytelling. The layout doesn’t signpost where to go; you loop back, dead-end, backtrack through streets that read differently the second time. That confusion isn’t a level-design failure — it’s the level design, doing the work a memory-space is supposed to do.
- Discovery is optional and unscored. The 21 objects aren’t quest markers; finding them doesn’t unlock plot. That’s a statement about what these games think narrative is — not a reward for correct behavior, but something that accretes just from spending time somewhere.
Part of my tension was unintentional: BABBDI ran a little laggy on my Mac, stuttering whenever I turned into a new stretch of the district. Normally that’s just annoying. Here it worked for the game almost by accident — each hitch made the space feel like it was catching up to itself, reluctant to fully render around me. No one designed that lag, but it’s a reminder how thin the line is between technical friction and atmospheric friction in a genre built on slowness.
Salon’s central defense is that emotional resonance is a legitimate design goal, comparable in ambition to something like BioShock Infinite, just achieved differently. I’d push further: the payoff isn’t only what these games show you, it’s the friction and rhythm of the walk itself — intentional or not. BABBDI could’ve told me “you are lost and alone” in a loading tooltip. Instead it made me be lost, at walking speed, stuttering, until I felt it. That’s not the absence of gameplay. That’s the gameplay.
