Yeah, i agree with you that Flower is unnecessary. I played it some years ago and it did not leave me anything.
The same goes for Proteus (sorry, Daphaknee!)… I used to be reading rockpapershotgun, back then, and they were defining it poetic… Well, if so, not poetic enough? Anyway, I found it boring.
Is The Stanley Parable still a must, or just a great precursor? I have not played it yet.
Maybe not a must, but fun and pretty brief. You can experience many of the endings in a sitting.
Yume Nikki.
SOMA is definitely my favorite, that game’s particular kind of doomer cognitive-science horror feels like it was made for me. I know it’s a horror game with (quite rare) fail states, but the vast majority of its campaign is just exploring and finding information logs. If it’s straddling the walking sim and horror genres, I think it has much more of a foot in walking sims.
Devotion is beautiful, and I’m still mad about what happened to that game.
I didn’t like Stanley Parable very much, but Beginner’s Guide blew my mind at the time. I wonder how well it will age, but when it came out I’d never played anything like it. It was very exciting to think about the potential for museum-style guided voice tours of virtual worlds.
Gone Home is a stone cold classic, unimpeachable in my book.
Definitely love Crypt Worlds, and I’m excitedly awaiting that sequel. Lilith’s other smaller games are mostly cool little walking sims too. Or maybe you’d call some of those “archaeology tours”, as Astromech put it.
Bernband and A Mind Forever Voyaging are my fav two walking sims, but Cosmology of Kyoto is excellent too
idspispopd/idclip
iddqd
Flower, Sun, and Rain has a step counter if that counts for anything regarding walking as primary mechanic. Progression through the game gives greater and greater scope for steps.
I guess Death Stranding is one of the more literal simulators of walking but I suspect it’s not necessarily in the scope of this thread? Or is it?!
No, Death Stranding is a platformer that comes from re-examining traversal, like Grow Home
Although it clearly falls within a horror paradigm and has motion control combat, one of the best walking sim experiences I had was in Cursed Mountain. The final sections where there’s just you and the deafening, crushing cold of the mountain peak barely budging from your insignificant progress. I have craved more of this in a walking sim-esque game ever since. Mountain climbing sim?
super mario bros. 3
it’s completely cheating to say outer wilds but outer wilds
but maybe somewhat more seriously I quite like paradise killer
Walking sims which I have found enjoyment in:
Games that probably do not qualify as walking sims despite obvious similarities which I have found enjoyment in:
Lists to be finished after I’m not at work!
Gravity Bone is a good reminder, using the walking sim as the most minimal framework possible to explore things like cutting, nonlinear storytelling, and non-textual storytelling
Surprised at people treating Gone Home as an the design endpoint for this genre. Walking through a cluttered empty mansion was a perfect way to realize the potential of exploring a dense but contained 3D environment at your own pace (who didn’t want to just to explore the Resident Evil manison without any pressure?). However, Gone Home feels like a prototype. It looks like an FPS mod and you leave feeling there is a lot more to be mined from the game’s novel design.
This isn’t a great comparison, but it’s like if Narbacular Drop was released instead of Portal: the ingenuity of the idea and design would still excite everyone, but the potential isn’t fully realized without better craftsmanship and pushing the idea to its limits.
I honestly think there is still a space for this - there’s a lot of room to expand and improve upon Gone Home’s basic idea. Most other walking simulators are about traveling from A to B rather than the pure exploration aspect. Maybe Outer Wilds is closest to this, but it’s far more than just exploring a closed space. I don’t know if Devotion also achieves this since as far as I can tell there’s no way to play that game anymore.
gone home more like gone homo
play Yume Nikki
groan home
I think the question in defining ‘walking sim’ is where we draw the line in interactivity. The most obvious statement a ‘waking sim’ makes is its rejection of traditional adversarial mechanics. At what point is it no longer a ‘walking sim’ but now a more traditional adventure or horror game? Outer Wilds is clearly an adventure game in the vein of Riven, a core of watching systems and demonstrating understanding through puzzle inputs.
Horror games without combat or stealth/evasion are a nebulous case, but as long as the aesthetic aims are similar: exploring narrative primarily through level design, tight player/avatar connection, I think it makes sense to wrap them together.
On the other hand, we have adventure games without puzzles, like Firewatch, which I think is better-described as post-walking sim. Firewatch builds on the construction of Dear Esther and Gone Home but in service of different goals. I think it’s properly one of the new-wave of adventure games like Night in the Woods and Kentucky Route Zero that live between western adventure games and visual novels; their goals are expressing narrative through characters; they may intimately tie the characters to their environment but it doesn’t primarily use the environment to tell the story.
Firewatch’s biggest weakness was the plot whereas the walking around and minor-interactions was very well executed, so I would say that if it were closer to its walking sim antecedents it would have been more successful as a game design.