Clara Lu — Babbdi Critical Play
Babbdi, released on Steam in 2022 by brothers Sirius and Léonard Lemaitre under Lemaitre Bros, is a free first-person exploration game for PC. Its target audience is players drawn to atmospheric indie experiences, the kind of people who find dread not in jump scares but in the feeling that something about a place is fundamentally wrong. The game drops you into a brutalist, crumbling district at the edge of a nameless megalopolis with one goal: find a way out. There are no weapons that work, no score, no minimap, no waypoints. What remains is walking. My argument is that Babbdi is a more radical walking simulator than its genre peers. Where games like Firewatch and Dear Esther use walking as scaffolding for beautiful vistas or voiced narration, Babbdi strips all of that away and makes walking itself the entire story. That total commitment is what gives the game its atmospheric power, and it is also what makes the whole thing so fragile.
The Salon piece by Nicole Clark on the history of walking simulators notes that critics tend to “buy into the term in order to talk about what is missing.” Babbdi is built around that absence. There is no combat, no cutscenes, no voice-over, no visual spectacle, and barely any information. When you first enter the game, there aren’t even instructions to guide you on how to act. The mechanic of first-person movement with proximity-based NPC interaction and no progression barriers produces a dynamic of self-directed spatial discovery: players walk toward whatever catches their eye and sequence the narrative in their own order. The aesthetic this generates is discovery layered under a growing sense of entrapment. You are always finding, and never quite escaping.
What matters is what Babbdi does not do that its peers do. Firewatch gives you Henry’s voice in your earpiece, Delilah’s radio commentary, and sweeping Wyoming vistas that pull you forward visually even when nothing is happening mechanically. Dear Esther gives you poetic monologue and a Hebridean island rendered in lush detail. Both games know that walking alone is not enough to hold a player, so they layer other systems on top. Babbdi refuses that scaffolding. The architecture is deliberately rough and brutalist. The NPCs speak in non-sequiturs. The environments use harsh light-dark contrast rather than visual beauty to hold attention. This is not a game compensating for its walking sim mechanics. This is a game that believes the walking is enough.
Walking up to Madeline [Fig. 1], perched on a beam above an empty courtyard, she says: “make my head spin.” There is no follow-up, no context, and nothing useful to give you. But the encounter communicates something true about the world. The people here are incoherent and stuck, and their incoherence is the world you are moving through. The eerie music that underscores every step tells you something is wrong even when nothing is actively threatening. You hear gunshots, but you never get shot. You can fall from six feet and never die. The threat is entirely atmospheric, which means the only way the game produces stakes is by making sure every moment of walking feels weighted.
Fig. 1: Madeline, an NPC in Babbdi, says ‘make my head spin’ with no further context.
Every other interaction in Babbdi follows the same rule: see a prompt, press E, something happens. The elevator shows you the prompt from outside the shaft, but pressing E does nothing until you physically step inside first. The game signals that the interaction is available before it actually is. I spent ten minutes circling it before accidentally triggering it. This is a different problem from the cryptic NPCs. Madeline’s incoherence is a deliberate design choice that communicates the world’s brokenness. The elevator is an information design failure: the principle of distributed rules holds that interaction cues should be legible where they appear, and this one actively misleads. Because walking is the entire story in Babbdi, a broken spatial rule does not just frustrate the player. It breaks the magic circle the atmosphere depends on.
Fig. 2: The elevator prompt appears outside the elevator, but you’re unable to interact with it unlike every other interaction in the game.
That is what drove my boyfriend, who played with me until he felt frustrated, to quit after fifteen minutes. Babbdi’s bet is that walking alone can carry a game. When the walking works, the bet pays off spectacularly. When it doesn’t, there is nothing else to fall back on.
Ethics
In Krunker, violence is the core formal procedure, and after a few minutes of play I noticed something uncomfortable: I didn’t really care that I was shooting random strangers (or even a cat… sorry Butch!). The game had trained me to see other players as point sources. Playing Babbdi a few days after, I instinctively picked up the baseball bat and swung it at the first NPC I saw. Nothing happened, and I was a bit shocked by my own disappointed reaction. Babbdi’s designers made a deliberate choice to withhold violence even when the player expects it, and the effect is that the NPCs, incoherent as they are, remain people rather than targets. This is a small ethical stance, but it’s one worth noting. Games teach players how to look at the beings inside them, and most violent games teach indifference by design. Babbdi’s walking-only constraint is not just an aesthetic bet. It is a refusal to train that indifference.
