The best walking simulator to this day

King of Posters
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you are like little baby. watch this:

connor sherlock makes walking sims at a rate of knots and many of them are excellent:

  • birthplace of ossian : one of my absolute favourites. it feels so cool and lonesome. i love to see how high up the mountains i can climb.
  • sunken citadel (this is not accessible by itself. you have to either sub to the patreon or purchase it as part of volume 1 of the walking sim a month club) : i made this slightly embarrassing video about this one a few years back which sums up my feelings on it.
  • last visit to the shard : this was one of the first connor sherlock games i encountered and it still ranks very highly against some of his later works, imo. the atmosphere is excellent and the jump is unparalleled.

there are others but you get the idea. he makes good shit.

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jake clover makes some of the most artistically compelling work that i know of and a bunch of those works are walking sims:

  • gradient addiction : big weird walkaround time lookin at stuff and hangin out w freaks.
  • hernhand : “like bernband but worse, 8/10”. i really like hernhand a whole bunch. it’s very good for that particular videogame feeling of “can i do this? can i go over here? oh hey yeah i totally can heck yeah”

i need to play the rest of jake’s stuff cos it’s all cool.

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kitty horrorshow was mentioned before (anatomy is good but i like her weird stuff more) and is maybe my fav walking sim creator. go sub to her patreon all her shit rules:

  • haunted cities volumes 1, 2, 3, and presumably 4 in the future? (she’s on hiatus atm and i’m not sure what her next project is) : you like spooky atmospheres? gnarly textures? weird slow grating music? well you’re in luck, pal, cos all these games have that in spades.

i haven’t played any of her standalones recently but really all her stuff is the same kinda vibe and it’s an excellent vibe.

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lilith zone yall already know from cryptworlds (i am so hype for cryptworlds 2 omg) but i first encountered her work in onieric gardens which also slaps hugely. really good for wandering around strange zones lookin at stuff. after i am done writing this stupid post i am going to go catch up on her new stuff which looks excellent.

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barchboi’s deios ii :: deidia is something i’ve yelled about before in the grotto thread and it still owns real hard and is definitely his best work. i play through this about once a year and every time i am astounded by how beautiful it is.

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pol clarissou makes a whole heap of cool stuff (probably best known for orchids to dusk, which is p chill) but my favourite of their’s is definitely the static. it’s very simple, but it left such an impression on me, and i have found myself thinking about it many times since the first (and only) time i played it. it just has such an evocative atmosphere/mood. it’s also tiny so i highly recommend trying this one.
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nonoise is an artist who seems to have come outa nowhere and produced one of the most beautiful and memorable walking sims i’ve ever played: 0_abyssalSomewhere. it’s the first (0th?) chapter of a series of mixed-format works. it’s really cool and beautiful go play it.

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thecatamites’ 10 beautiful postcards yall (hopefully) already know. it’s maybe my favourite game ever? maybe? it’s defs way up there. i love to hang out in cool zones w my friends and this is chock full of cool zones and friends to hang out with.

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liz ryerson’s problem attic is one of my fav things ever. i’m sure some will refute its walking sim status and call it a puzzle platformer or w/e but it qualifies in my eyes; it feels like a walking sim to me. anyway it owns real hard regardless.

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ian maclarty is a delight and his games own!

  • the catacombs of solaris : this is the one he is best known for (at least in melb) and it’s p cool but some of his other stuff is better imo.
  • red desert render : this one slaps so hard! u wander around a big desert and roll down hills and find strange cubes and it’s just great.
  • a road that may lead nowhere : this is the one i have played the most by far. pick some nice music and wander down the road in search of a nice view (there’s no shortage). it’s great!

i am 100% sure that i have forgotten a bunch of cool ones (there is one particular artist who is kinda hard to find and whose name i have forgotten but if i remember i will plonk em in here) and heaps that i just haven’t played yet (there are several games in my backlog that i am certain belong in this thread and may recommend in the future) and of course i haven’t even touched on the bitsy scene which is full of really excellent little games (and huge sprawling things like porpentine’s almanac of girlswamper territory etc. which is cool if you wanna have the strange experience of being thoroughly overwhelmed by a thing which otherwise exudes quaintness from every pore).

anyway you should all just go to itch and look through the walking sim tag for the true canonical works.

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I remember Ramble Planet as a good dense version of these with a beautiful art style - trying it again I realise I completely forgot that it technically does have “combat” even if it’s just For The Frog The Bell Tolls-style sequence gating.

In terms of definitions, I think for hobbyist or new developers “walking” is often just the first thing you get working in Game Maker or RPG Maker or Unity or whatever else. Or maybe not the first, but the first thing that gets your attention, that makes you feel surprised or engaged in some small unexpected way by your own work, via the stupid but somehow lowkey compelling process of moving a little guy around an empty screen or a viewpoint through an area. And then there’s the problem of, what do you do with this feeling, how do you get from this valueless psychic sludge up to some more apollonian level of justifiability or importance (such as: a game that’s Well Designed, or Conveys Meaning Through Puzzles, or has Fun Factor, or imparts Morals.) I think in this context “walking simulators” can just be the name for stuff that tries to sit with that initial sense of possibility, and just follow and extend it, without really knowing where it goes.
The Manhole is a good early example, so are LSD and Yume Nikki, and maybe so is the first version of Colossal Cave Adventure.

It’s sort of funny that the format only really started being named and acknowledged when the same space started being explored from the opposite direction: taking an existing and codified genre (that blobby mixture of immersive sim/FPS/physics toy from the early 2000s) and then seeing what could be removed from it. Which I think is where more of an emphasis on narrative and environmental storytelling came from. So it’s almost like two different categories which ended up sharing a space for a while. And they did crosspollinate to some degree - games like Off-Peak feel to me like works of the first category that picked up some of the baroque environmental density of the second, while stuff like Edith Finch and Beginner’s Guide seem more like works of the second category trying to incorporate the structural looseness of the first.

From there it feels like “pure” walking sims moved in opposite directions: the hobbyist ones got smaller, in the vein of things like Bitsy and flatgames, neither of which are really connected to the FPS tradition. And the immersive sim branch seemed to get ever larger, turning into a kind of arms race of high-quality art assets and ever deader wives. I do agree that horror games are essentially what fill the space of Continuity Walking Sims, both from the extent they came from that tradition and also because they’re one of the few spaces where hobbyist and studio works still share a niche and talk to each other in the same way.

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I do think Gone Home was a high water mark especially at time of release, but I feel an instinctual resentment toward the sentiment ITT that it’s the ideal of the form

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oh yeah crypt worlds is one of the only video games to have given me that indeterminate feeling of “i have missed something” in the same way that you would miss a limb you never had, but i couldn’t put my finger on it. just a big hole in my chest

oh wait no that was transness nvm

anyway i have no idea how that game communicated that to me because none of it made any sense to me. but i did love it

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Crypt Worlds is a nice find for me, thanks guys! I think I’d have never considered it if it was not mentioned here.
There are other gems I will look into, that are not so mainstream and I did not know.

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i don’t consider it by any stretch of the imagination a walking sim, because it’s not in 3d and it demands way too much of players. it’s also kind of making fun of 2d platformer tropes in some ways. but i guess that’s mostly a semantic argument. also thank you =)

the game makes very little sense to me either and i worked on it (admittedly my contributions were small in the big picture though). i still find it really funny how the voice clips are people speaking random unrelated phrases in Portuguese. but anyway i think that’s one of its strengths! i guess i have thoughts about how the sort of alienation and decay of the world is something a lot of trans people can relate to… also Crypt Worlds manages to be funny and whimsical at the same time it’s creepy without undermining either, which is hard to do and i think makes it appeal to a lot of younger kids.

i do find it funny that i did the music for Dys4ia a year before Crypt Worlds and that got a ton of hyper/coverage at the time, whereas it seemed like Crypt Worlds was just another goofy short game put out into the void… but it ended up having way longer of a tail than the other. i guess you can never predict those things.

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btw i’m just going to throw in another mention of a recent product of my obsession and a game i’m sure that no one else is liable to recommend on here, Soul Axiom

(i haven’t played the “Rebooted” version but from what i can tell it’s not that different from the original).

does it look like a generic tech demo-y walking sim that you’re liable to find on steam? yes. but is it a bizarrely ambitious, totally clunky, unique mess that aims to be a ‘prestige indie’ game in a lot of ways but fails spectacularly in a way that makes it not quite feel like anything else and makes you ask “what were they thinking here?” about 20 different times while playing it? absolutely. is it a good game that i align with ideologically or whatever? probably not? but it is way more interesting than it has any right to be, and absolutely sticks out like a sore thumb among games of the type that i’ve played.

i also did a podcast episode about it:

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And it’s getting a remaster which is :doomdie:

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yelling at drunk teenagers to not start a fire and then commiserating over walkie talkie over how teens suck: chefs kiss

IT’S AN X FILES CONSPIRACY: fuck this

IT’S NOT ACTUALLY AN X FILES CONSPIRACY ITS JUST CHILD ABUSE: fuck off forever

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They bought a lot of mileage with me when they started out from a miserablist place. I’m kind of surprised that I wasn’t repelled by how interlocking and by-the-book (by the Save the Cat book specifically) the main plot was but I think they did a good job keeping it from taking over the protagonist’s relationship.

And! They weren’t arguing that it was an example of a redeemable relationship and that stern, emotionally abusive dads are secretly cool like the new God of War. Gosh, that was real pathetic

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Gravity Bone has been mentioned but its successor Thirty Flights of Loving is executed much better. Blendo has such a style that you could call Brendan Chung the “Wes Anderson of games” and that energy really helps a walking sim.

PT is the what-if a walking sim had a AAA budget. It has puzzles that are intentionally obtuse to put you in a state of despair. It has an aura and an attention to detail that has me returning to it every few months which I can’t say for the rest of the genre.

I followed this genre really closely during its early years but after a while any innovation had to come in the form of adding traditional gameplay elements. So maybe it’s more of a cultural antigame touchstone moment than a subgenre.

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I played through Sagebrush today and while it isn’t an elite level walking sim it is a pretty okay one. It is basically about walking through a cult compound some time after things have gone wrong, and while that makes things a bit predictable it actually handles things fairly well.

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moderately sized nature parks in suburban areas where you can’t hear any traffic but where most paths will eventually lead to a side-street in the corner of someone’s neighborhood

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you fly more than WALK in tranquility, but its definitely a game about just wandering around til you find the exit

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Cradle was ppretty good despite its horrible puzzle sections. It’s similar to Obduction but way less puzzly. It has the same density of details in notes and worldbuilding primarily in a yurt your character lives in. This makes sense because why would there be an evenly breadcrumbed trail of text logs in most games? This yurt is situated on a massive plateau in Mongolia which you can explore Serious Sam style before mysteriously passing out.

Also the scifi premise of what would happen if science discovered an objective measure for beauty is as compelling as it is ludicrous.

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the timed arcade 3D platforming bits in the fair? they were atrocious. The proper puzzles were fine

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Yeah the fairground stuff is what I meant. Everything else is fine. A shame the game has a slightly rushed ending but it still stuck in my memory despite its flaws.

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i mean i feel like by this point it’s not too controversial to say that there’s depth and mystery to crypt worlds that keeps people thinking and talking about it, and that it was a great moment for a bluntly didactic mini game collection about how being trans is hard to get a lot of buzz

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yeah… i mean that part definitely makes sense. though plenty of more abstract/arty games like Crypt Worlds never got anywhere near the attention that particular game did. so it’s just weird to think about… like what causes a particular thing to be so broadly known when there’s so much that very few people seem to remember from that area. i’m sure the Vinesauce guy playing it had a lot to do with everything.

also this is a horror-tinged walking sim that came out this year and looks cool:

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the artist that i couldn’t remember from my last post is Strangethink!

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they’re probably best known for their neon walking sims/art galleries like Abstract Ritual and Secret Habitat, but they’ve made quite a variety of works as i understand it. i remember seeing mention of a first-person climbing game where you scaled a procedural cliff(? jungle gym? playground? mess of boxes all mushed together) but i have never found a link to it. i think it was called like Badclimb or something.
anyway here are links to their itch and their website but, as is their wont, they are both bereft of games now (they have a history of uploading stuff and then tearing it down soon after), so here is a link to another forum where folks have been collating their games: link