Connor Sherlock is a master moodbuilder, and his collection of worlds leverages the most basic elements — color, space, scale, sound — to completely possess you. Brief text files frame your visits as ‘far future tourism’, but there’s this constant sense that you’re not supposed to be there. They’re not for you. You’re trespassing on the universe. You encounter abandoned megastructures, but they’re monuments without referents, full of dead intentions, unreadable but still somehow feelable. Yet not in a way that draws you closer. They remain alien and inscrutable but also specific, gesturing not at something generic or universal but exact and absolute and final. The only gods left here are Wonder and her sister Horror. The rest is silence.
So you walk. What else is there to do? The universe is vast and the best way to really feel that is to walk it. Walking Simulator A Month Club Vol. 1 takes that old open world cliche — see that in the distance, you can go there! — and reaffirms its natural power. To see there from here. And then here from there. These worlds answer important questions like: what’s it like on the far side of a megalith? What’s the end of the day like for an alien archive? How big, how far away is that strange silhouette really? Everything works together — the light, palette, texture, depth of field, movement speed, the stunning score — to answer these elemental questions. Are you lost? Overwhelmed? The music will tell you what to do.
Here’s an interstellar nightclub for sentient vapors. Here’s a secret platformer where a superstructure insertion went wrong. Here’s an honest to god dungeon, with choking halls and vast chambers and the buried aqueduct of Leviathan. Here’s an overmined crystal planet just before its death. Delve deep enough and you’ll fall through the bottom, into the wild pink. You’ll visit these worlds pre or post or mid apocalypse. Mind your step among the gassy foothills. Nevermind the shadows of comet debris. Is that a world engine burning below?
This collection of worlds, taken together, is the greatest walking simulator I’ve ever played. It takes a primary complaint against the genre — a lack of interaction — and walks it right off the edge of its worlds. It makes walking feel not like a limitation but an end in itself. Because it understands the walking simulator as ultimately a game of distance and desire. There’s no end to either, no end to the universe. The only question is: how far will you go?
So you walk. What else is there to do? The universe is vast and the best way to really feel that is to walk it. Walking Simulator A Month Club Vol. 1 takes that old open world cliche — see that in the distance, you can go there! — and reaffirms its natural power. To see there from here. And then here from there. These worlds answer important questions like: what’s it like on the far side of a megalith? What’s the end of the day like for an alien archive? How big, how far away is that strange silhouette really? Everything works together — the light, palette, texture, depth of field, movement speed, the stunning score — to answer these elemental questions. Are you lost? Overwhelmed? The music will tell you what to do.
Here’s an interstellar nightclub for sentient vapors. Here’s a secret platformer where a superstructure insertion went wrong. Here’s an honest to god dungeon, with choking halls and vast chambers and the buried aqueduct of Leviathan. Here’s an overmined crystal planet just before its death. Delve deep enough and you’ll fall through the bottom, into the wild pink. You’ll visit these worlds pre or post or mid apocalypse. Mind your step among the gassy foothills. Nevermind the shadows of comet debris. Is that a world engine burning below?
This collection of worlds, taken together, is the greatest walking simulator I’ve ever played. It takes a primary complaint against the genre — a lack of interaction — and walks it right off the edge of its worlds. It makes walking feel not like a limitation but an end in itself. Because it understands the walking simulator as ultimately a game of distance and desire. There’s no end to either, no end to the universe. The only question is: how far will you go?