For my walking simulator critical play, I decided to play Babbdi (I actually purchased What Remains of Edith Finch on Steam before realizing it was only available on Windows… anyway, I digress). Babbdi is a short, first-person exploration experience game developed by
brothers Sirius Lemaitre and Léonard Lemaitre and published under Lemaitre Bros in 2022. The game description describes the game as having light narrative and platforming elements. You visit the town of BABBDI, a forsaken district in the outer ring of the megalopolis, meet its inhabitants, and discover how to escape. Various items you can find along the way give you special abilities, such as the bat I found that let me break through a boarded-up door. The game explicitly states: “there is no combat in BABBDI.”.
How does walking tell the story?
I think walking tells a story in multiple ways. One way that I see it telling the story is similar to Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, in that you kind of make your own story. BABBDI is basically an open world, although the game designers use the space to create limitations for the player. This means that you are to some degree making the story for yourself by exploring the different parts of your surroundings and discovering what’s going on. Throughout that discovery, you also find clues that the game designers have left to the “true narrative” behind the narrative that you create for yourself. These clues are discovered through walking and because most of the game is just walking and picking up clues, with very light interaction with the game or world around you, that walking becomes a super central part of the narrative.
Additionally, the physics about walking also cause interesting narratives because you can jump out of a super tall building (as I did) and not take any fall damage, which leads to some unrealistic, but really fun and interesting ways to engage with the world around you. Furthermore, the game is not super polished, which means that there are certain glitches that occur as you walk which are quite funny.
Ethical question about violence:
This assignment asks us to compare this game to violent games we played in Section or otherwise. And I think going back to what I mentioned earlier, it’s really interesting how the game explicitly states that there is no combat in BABBDI. Nonetheless, I still picked up the baseball bat and tried to hit the different characters. To no avail. I think, as a gamer, I’ve been somewhat conditioned to always assume that violence can be a part of the game. And so even though this is just a walking sim, I still tried to figure out ways to engage with said violence. I think violence does play a role in the game, though. In the fact that the game seems like you’re in some kind of deserted, Eastern European, super poor area/war zone. There’s an implied darkness and violence to the game even though there isn’t any actual violence occurring, as if violence has occurred in the past and now it’s just desolate. I think the lack of explicit violence in the game made it less engaging for me (which is quite sad) but for me, any game where I’m controlling a character like that needs some kind of violence, even if it’s just a bubble shooter or something without actual gore.
Last note:
On a separate note, there were very few clues in the game, which meant that I did have a lot of freedom to explore, but also sometimes it felt confusing or unclear what I was supposed to be doing. I did have fun playing the game, but it definitely wasn’t my favorite game I’ve ever played.
