Last year, I came across BABBDI for the first time through a YouTube video about strange and unusual games. At first, it seemed like the kind of game I would watch for a few minutes and forget about, but its bizarre architecture, empty streets, and strange movement mechanics stuck with me. More importantly, BABBDI eventually inspired one of my current game projects. Created by brothers Sirius and Léonard Lemaitre, working as Lemaitre Bros, BABBDI was released on Steam in 2022 after first appearing on Itch.io. I played it on PC, and it is aimed at players who enjoy self-directed exploration, unusual environments, and ambiguity rather than players looking for traditional goals, combat, or a clearly explained narrative. BABBDI is ultimately a game about leaving, but its most important story is told through the way the player moves through the world.
The central strength of BABBDI is that it makes traversal its primary form of expression. Instead of relying on dialogue or conventional storytelling to give the player meaning, the game uses movement, exploration, and the player’s decision to either leave or remain in Babbdi. This makes the game’s atmosphere feel player-authored. Its lack of guidance can occasionally be frustrating, but that same refusal to explain everything is what gives the game its distinctive identity.
BABBDI takes place in a strange, forsaken district on the outskirts of a huge city. The game’s basic objective is surprisingly simple: obtain a train ticket and leave Babbdi using the subway. The ticket can be acquired fairly quickly, meaning that almost everything else in the game is optional. The player can instead explore the city, discover hidden objects, interact with strange residents, and find different ways to move through the environment. This structure makes the absence of a traditional plot important rather than accidental. The player is given a destination but not a reason to hurry toward it.
The most important formal element is resources, particularly the movement tools. As the player explores, they find objects such as the baseball bat, pickaxe, and motorcycle that provide different ways of navigating the environment. However, the player can only carry one tool at a time. This is a clever constraint because movement becomes a decision rather than something that simply happens in the background. Choosing one tool means temporarily giving up another, encouraging experimentation with the environment. The mechanic of limited movement tools produces the dynamic of searching for new routes and figuring out how the environment can be traversed, which creates an aesthetic of discovery and experimentation.
The architecture reinforces this dynamic. Babbdi is full of tall structures, gaps, strange pathways, and locations that appear inaccessible at first. Rather than placing an obvious marker on the screen telling the player where to go, the game encourages the player to notice something interesting and attempt to reach it. A successful jump or climb therefore feels like something the player accomplished rather than something the game explicitly instructed them to do. The spatial environment becomes a puzzle without formally announcing itself as one.
At the same time, BABBDI‘s ambiguity can be alienating. Characters make short, cryptic comments and often refuse to provide additional information. The city rarely explains why it exists or what happened to it. This creates a strong feeling of isolation, but it can also make the player unsure about what is worth investigating. A small environmental affordance could improve this without destroying the game’s philosophy. For example, a distinctive architectural feature, unusual light source, or visually interesting path could subtly encourage players to explore upward without adding a quest marker or explicit instruction. The player would still have to discover the meaning of the environment themselves.
This emphasis on optional exploration is especially important because the game’s primary objective is so easy to complete. The train ticket can be obtained without discovering most of Babbdi’s secrets, while the game contains numerous optional objects and achievements. This creates an interesting tension between the game’s explicit objective and its actual experience. BABBDI tells the player to leave, but its design gives them many reasons to stay. The player ultimately decides whether Babbdi is something to escape from or something worth understanding.
Compared with other walking simulators, BABBDI is unusual because it removes many of the genre’s traditional methods of storytelling. Dear Esther, for example, uses linear movement and narration to deliver an authored emotional experience. Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch use environments and objects to help players reconstruct understandable stories. BABBDI is much less interested in giving the player a story to reconstruct. Instead, it gives the player a place to experience. Its use of platforming, parkour, and vertical exploration also makes the game feel less like a traditional walking simulator and more like a traversal simulator.
That distinction is part of why BABBDI influenced my own game development. Discovering it through that YouTube video last year made me interested in the idea that a game could create an atmosphere without needing a conventional story or constant objectives. One of my current projects has been influenced by that approach. Studying BABBDI more closely has made me realize that inspiration is not simply about copying a mechanic; it is about understanding why a mechanic produces a particular experience. BABBDI showed me how movement can communicate the personality of a world just as effectively as dialogue or cutscenes.
Ultimately, BABBDI demonstrates how a game can make movement itself into storytelling. Its strange world, limited traversal tools, minimal dialogue, and optional objectives all support an experience based on discovery rather than completion. The game I first encountered casually in a YouTube video ended up influencing how I think about my own games. More than simply being a strange walking simulator, BABBDI shows what happens when a designer trusts the player to find meaning through movement.
