#walking sims

[prokopetz]

I don't even consider "it's gay" to necessarily be a selling point in games, but I've played enough zero-budget indie walking sims where what initially appears to be wonderfully imaginative meta bullshit is eventually revealed to be a strained allegory for the straight male developer being sad about breaking up with his girlfriend that at this point I get red flag vibes from the faintest whiff of heterosexuality.

[pocketseizure]

Birds Watching (on Steam here) is a short walking sim about a lone man who takes refuge at the top of a mountain as an unending fire rages below. As he does his best to survive in the company of the birds who have fled to the last unburned peak, he realizes that they can talk... and that they hate him.

[purplecowbell]

As a new player of Paradise Killer: it's a great walking sim!

So I've heard some complaints about this game having not great assets, weird gameplay progression, not proofread text, etc. And since I'm a new player I don't have enough experience to disagree But the one complain that I absolutely can not agree with is the 3d exploration/movement being bad. It's perfect (at least for me)!

I don't know why, but it perfectly tickles my brain when I can explore a 3d space with platforming and exploration that is obviously non mandatory but with rewards to acknowledge the exploration. I love wandering around and jumping from rooftops to rooftops to find objects and talk to Shinji. I like how audio is used to tell you to look specifically, but it can't be fully relied on so exploring on your own is still worthwhile.

I don't know why, but slowly piecing together the lore and finding clearly marked collectibles and trying to do the occasional precise platforming is the best experience I could have in a game. I've barely talked to any characters, I've just been wandering around for 3 hours.

[prokopetz]

Given limitations of 'Unity asset flip made in 10-20 hours; game does not have to be polished or particularly good, merely functional', what would be the easiest genre of 3D game to make?

Probably some sort of first-person walking sim. The first person perspective lets you avoid the need for any assets for the player character, and the walking sim format is amenable to simply turning off physics and collision detection entirely and letting the player move the camera around directly on a 2D plane, with some basic bounds checking to prevent them from moving it inside of objects or terrain. Throw in some NPCs represented as shitty flat bitmaps superimposed over the 3D landscape (it's a valid stylistic choice!), and use an off-the-shelf dialogue plugin for all interactions – no need for animations when you can just have a text box pop up and describe what happens in florid, typo-ridden prose. (The typos are also a stylistic choice.)

[prokopetz]

Plays a nonviolent walking sim on stream for six and a half hours and spends the whole time remarking how impressed I am with how much effort the developers have put into this prologue and loudly wondering when I'm going to get my first gun.

[prokopetz]

Some soulslikes want to be walking sims so bad it makes them look stupid.

[prokopetz]

Look, I'm willing to put up with a lot from a self-consciously meta liminal spaces walking sim. The inappropriate use of ray-traced specular reflection; the clearly asset-flipped androgynous white marble statues; the corridor-that-makes-four-left-turns-without-intersecting-itself bit that was impressive when Duke Nukem 3D did it in 1996 but has since become practically expected – all this I will forgive. However, that wooden ladder I just climbed clearly made the sound of stepping on metal rungs, and this I cannot abide.

[bloofbloofbloof]

Been going to the deepest parts of Yume 2kki and they’re so underwhelming. Doesn’t have the charm Yume Nikki has where you find a funky lil guys at dead ends.

Someone who leads Yume 2kki needs a funky lil guy as part of the dev checklist. Find some cubist dude and slap him in and make him dance.