After playing and enjoying Gone Home a while ago, I played a few more walking simulators. I can almost remember enough about the three of of them to write them up, so here we go.
The Suicide of Rachel Foster (PS4, 2020)
A woman receives a letter from her mother upon her death telling her to return to the family hotel and sell it. The woman (Nicole - I didn't remember the game well enough to recall this) returns to the hotel and a wave of memories from her adolescence come flooding back as she goes on a trip down memory lane.
I didn't really care for this. From a mechanical perspective it was annoying. You moved just a bit too slowly, and the game was split up into days where you'd finish at one part of the hotel, then awaken somewhere else only to have to walk back to where you'd previously been to start the next bit. This happened more than once in the two or three hours the game lasts for. This is bad. Despite this doubling back I often found myself getting lost which didn't make it any more enjoyable.
Considering the setting is a snowed-in hotel somewhere in the forest, the location is lacking too. It's clearly inspired heavily by The Shining but doesn't have any of the atmosphere, intrigue or characterisation that makes the Overlook the dominant character in that film.
The uncovering of the story comes in standard procedural walking sim order, and it doesn't really make much sense. Or at least it doesn't have as much impact as it clearly did on the characters at the time. I think too much happened and the bits we get to see here don't do enough to convey the significance of what's affected the characters so much. Nicole seems to have repressed much of what happened around this time but the balance between that and what's being discovered by the player isn't met very well.
The final crucial thing a walking sim needs is an engaging player character and Nicole isn't one. Part of the reason the plot doesn't really have any impact is what we see of Nicole - she's not a typical girl, she plays the bass and plays hockey and is really really fierce and independent, honest! There's a contradiction between how she's depicted in isolation versus in relation to the events we learn about, and it undermines everything that happens. Plus her teenage years supposedly happened in the 1980s yet she's clearly got a hand drawn picture of Alex Ovechkin on her desk.
The ending is also, well, no. It has the same problem as being a bit of an overreaction to what's come before. I think this might be a game that benefits from a second playthrough, but I'm a busy man. That's why I've probably played fewer games in the past six months than at any point in the last ten years.
Tacoma (PS4, 2017)
This was made by the same people who brought us Gone Home and you can tell. It just feels and looks the same and has a suitably ethnically and sexually diverse array of characters. You arrive on a space station and are told to investigate what happened to the ship's crew. You do this with the help of the ship's computer which logged conversations you can eavesdrop on, as well as doing the usual exploring to see what interesting artefacts are lying around.
Tacoma is a hard game to split up into paragraphs because every part of the game ultimately suffers from the same problem. There's too much stuff squeezed into too small a space. There are seven characters for you to learn about. The game lasts for two hours, maybe three depending on how thorough you are. It's about capitalism, it's about AI, it's about the ethics of human and machine consciousness. It spurts these out in really condensed sections that don't let anything sink in before you have to move on. It's a game filled with a lot of ideas and elements which could be sustained for a lot longer than they ultimately are.
The space station is a well-realised environment and is enjoyable to move around. The atmosphere is good, the controls are good and the characters you uncover are all varied and complex enough, there's just never enough time spent on anything for it impactful. I feel as if the story and premise is the sort of thing that Netflix could make as a six parter which would go viral for a week then never be heard of again. As a game though, I just feel it could have been more.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (PS4, 2014)
Paul Prospero turns up in a town to discover what happened to Ethan Carter. You are Paul Prospero, a detective whose voiceover says he's seen all this sort of stuff before, man. You start the game by emerging from a tunnel into some trees before going on to investigate some murders as you find dead bodies lying around.
This is a strange game, structurally. It follows a largely linear path out of the woods and then in and around some houses in an apparently abandoned town next to a river and dam. You're free to explore as much of this as you want and there are some additional bits of information that flesh out the world if you do, but for the most part there is one route you need to follow. This is different from almost all of the walking sims I've played (it's like a more structured version of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture) but this just weakens the sense of place. You don't feel the weight of the town weighing on the characters as you do with the other two games mentioned here.
Despite this, the game looks and sounds outstanding. A lot of work went into the views and things depicted here. Wikipedia tells me the environment was inspired by a mountainous region of Poland. Lucky Poles is what I'll say if this is any indication. The combination of the environment, music and sound effects constantly had me thinking of something else, and about the highest praise I can give a game. It reminded me of Shadow of the Colossus. The mountains, lakes, trees, the huge, seemingly abandoned human environments like a train station, a dam, some houses, a church, the haunting orchestra music in the background, it was constant. The imagery of the game will stay with me for a long time.
The central gameplay mechanic is a pain in the arse. You know how in Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human you have to investigate crime scenes, only since it's a video game they had to include a button which would instantly reveal all the relevant evidence as long as you walked around? That doesn't happen here. You find a body, then you need to find the spots nearby where the events leading up to the murder happened, then you need to move things back if they've been moved, then you go back to the body, then you get some ghostly outlines of people in places and have to pick what order they go in to reveal what happened. And the game doesn't actually tell you any of this, you have to figure it all out for yourself.
I finished this a few days ago, though I actually tried to play it about a month ago and got annoyed because it took me an hour to get past the first area. I think the game is supposed to encourage the player to work things out themselves but if your central gameplay mechanic is something that David Cage can do a better job of you may want to rethink.
The game has pretensions towards the supernatural. As you discover various family members and see what they did there are frequent references to The Sleeper, some kind of evil force which is controlling the people and making them do bad things. As you go through each recreation you try to piece together what this actually is and what it means and I'm pleased to say that I guessed what was going to happen about halfway through.
In a way I think Ethan Carter is probably the inverse of both of the other two games I've mentioned here. The setting is physically huge and memorable, yet empty and largely redundant. It doesn't have any bearing on the characters or events outside of enforcing a general sense of isolation. What you uncover is dotted around and could have been framed within a contained location, with a bit of imagination. It's still distinctive and good that the location is what it is, but it's interesting to consider three similar games at the one time and make this comparison in real time.
I don't know if I've already reached the high water mark of the walking sim. The three games here ranged from foregettable to I Wish This Did More, but they were all cheap and all clearly made with heart, even if they didn't all fully realise their potential.