Ranking walking simulators by how good the walking is

I mentioned in class on Tuesday that Gone Home is one of the originators of the genre: walking simulators, a term that was originally intended to be derisive because it wasn’t violent enough to be a game, but that it has since been embraced with a bunch of games that can all be designated as walking simulators. We’ll be playing a few other games this semester within the genre this semester.

Which reminded me of the video below, which is a Polygon video that ranks some of the examples from the genre according to how accurately they simulate the actual walking within the game.

Note that one game that makes a couple of cameos in the video, even though it is not ranked, is Night in the Woods, which was included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. We won’t be playing that one together as a class, but if you want to play the game for a podcast episode, you might begin by asking whether it qualifies as a walking simulator. In the game you play as College dropout Mae Borowski when she returns home to the crumbling former mining town of Possum Springs seeking to resume her aimless former life and reconnect with the friends she left behind. But things aren’t the same. Home seems different now and her friends have grown and changed. Leaves are falling and the wind is growing colder. Strange things are happening as the light fades. And there’s something in the woods.

 

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