Walking Simulator | Code Like It's 198x

“Press E to do nothing. Tap space to stand still.” That was Edge’s summary of Dear Esther in February 2012. The game was a first-person shooter with the shooting taken out, and that is still the best short definition of a walking simulator. The player walks, looks around and pieces together a story from what the place and a voice reveal. There are no enemies and usually no way to lose. The name started as an insult from players who thought such games were not games at all. Within a few years developers, critics and storefronts were using it too, often while saying they disliked it.

Fast facts

What it is: a first-person game of exploration and story, with no combat and little or no failure.
Other names: “story exploration”, “first-person snoopers”, “exploration games”.
Key early games: Dear Esther (modification 2008, commercial release 2012), Gone Home (2013), The Stanley Parable (2013).
Later examples: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), Tacoma.
Ancestors: the text adventure, and exploration games such as Myst (1993).

Dear Esther

Dear Esther began in 2008 as a modification for Valve’s Source engine. It was the work of Dan Pinchbeck, who lectured at the University of Portsmouth, and Pinchbeck said it “came out of obsession with FPS games” and the question of “what else you could do with that format”. Four years later the environment artist Rob Briscoe, who had worked on Mirror’s Edge, rebuilt its world. The Chinese Room published the new version for the PC on 14 February 2012.

The player walks round a deserted island in the Hebrides while a narrator, voiced by Nigel Carrington, reads fragments of letters about the loss of his wife, killed by a drunk driver. The walking pace is fixed: “shift is just another of those unresponsive buttons.” The four chapters last a couple of hours, and Jessica Curry’s score carries the player through them. Edge admired it and spelled out the objection it expected: some would say that “its reduction of the firstperson shooter to a walking tour makes for a mechanical dumbing down of a richer and more mind-taxing medium”. The review ended with the two questions the game leaves behind: “what is a game, and why do I play?”

Pinchbeck rejected the idea that he was correcting shooters. “I don’t think the FPS needs fixing — give me Bulletstorm and I’m happy,” he told Edge. He saw the same thing happening in short bursts inside big games, such as “the ghost sequence in Metro 2033, the village sequence in Uncharted 2”.

A house with nobody home

Gone Home (2013) moved the idea indoors. Steve Gaynor had designed levels for BioShock 2 and led its add-on Minerva’s Den at 2K Marin. In 2012 he founded The Fullbright Company with two colleagues from that team, Johnnemann Nordhagen and Karla Zimonja, in the basement of the house the three of them rented in Portland, Oregon, living on their savings. The pitch, Gaynor told Edge, was: “What if it was just you and no other people, no other characters, you in a single environment and you can explore and find stuff in the environment to reconstruct the story of what happened there, and that’s the whole game?” He called it a “story exploration” game.

The player is Kaitlin Greenbriar, back from a year abroad to find her family’s new house empty, a note from her younger sister asking her not to go looking, and the front door locked. The spare key is under a goofy-looking Christmas duck in a cupboard of holiday decorations. Edge praised a house “fit for both a game and a family”, in which the story of the sister’s coming of age is assembled from things left in drawers and on shelves. It called the game “a love story dressed in horror clothing”.

Small budgets shaped these games. Kate Craig, an environment artist at Fullbright, explained in Wireframe in 2018 that animated characters are costly to model, rig and animate, so Kaitlin is “simply an invisible capsule collider that moves through the house picking up objects”: “The girl’s got no hands.” A pair of flip-flops was cut from a closet because there was no time to model any other shoes. “The best walking sims,” the article noted, “incorporate the limitations of their budget into their storytelling.”

The Stanley Parable

The Stanley Parable, created by Davey Wreden, also began as a Half-Life 2 modification. The remake by Galactic Cafe, released in 2013, turned the walking into a joke. An office worker leaves his desk and a narrator describes everything he does, including the things he refuses to do. Edge called it “a game about walking from A to B that acknowledges the existence of the rest of the alphabet”, and gave it nine out of ten.

The name

The phrase was already a put-down by 2013. In Edge that July the columnist Tadhg Kelly, who had worked in games for nearly 20 years, argued that adventure games had brought story to games “at the expense of the player”, that Heavy Rain and The Walking Dead showed the same trait, and added: “So too the more exotic walking simulators like Proteus.” Craig wrote in 2018 that the form had been “subject to a curious backlash from some gamers in the late 2000s”, and offered alternatives: “stroll-playing games, first-person snoopers, exploration games – take your pick”. Reviewing an adventure game in Wireframe in 2019, one critic called it “a term I loathe”.

The label stuck anyway. Developers came to use it themselves, sometimes to describe their own games and sometimes to push their games away from it. Inasa Fujio, the pseudonym of an illustration student whose Inaka Project has the player deliver letters as a postman in the Japanese countryside, told Wireframe that he “assumed my interests were very niche and walking simulators are not in demand”. Jan Kavan of the Czech studio CBE Software expected the trailer for its horror game Someday You’ll Return to bring “immediately this ‘walking simulator’ connotation”.

Roots and successors

Craig traced the form back to the earliest games: “Text adventures were, after all, about soaking up the details of a world and figuring out how to interact with it – violence and combat were rare occurrences.” Wikipedia’s history of the genre names an even older relative, Phipps Associates’ The Forest, a ZX Spectrum orienteering program that CRASH reviewed in 1984 and called “much more than a sport simulation”, with “an enormous area of geography” to explore on foot. Cyan’s Myst (1993) put players on an island with no enemies and no way to die.

The games that followed Gone Home include The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2014), The Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Firewatch (2016), Fullbright’s Tacoma and Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch, which Wireframe said “plugged the walking simulator gap” in 2017. Edith Finch contemplates “the inevitability of death through a series of whimsical walking-sim narratives”, and, Wireframe noted, gives each chapter different controls, “specifically to stop the player ‘mastering’ the controls and feeling like they were in charge”.

Sources

Edge issue 237, February 2012, pp. 120–122: Dear Esther review (The Chinese Room, PC, 14 February; Rob Briscoe and Dan Pinchbeck; the 2008 original; the Hebrides; Nigel Carrington; the controls; four chapters; Jessica Curry; “what is a game, and why do I play?”) and interview with Pinchbeck and Briscoe.
Edge issue 255, July 2013: Tadhg Kelly’s column, “the more exotic walking simulators like Proteus”.
Edge issue 259, November 2013, pp. 114–117: studio profile of The Fullbright Company (founded 2012; Gaynor, Nordhagen and Zimonja; 2K Marin and Minerva’s Den; Portland; the pitch for Gone Home; “story exploration”).
Edge issue 261, Christmas 2013, p. 104: The Stanley Parable review (remake of the Half-Life 2 modification; Galactic Cafe; nine out of ten).
Edge issue 262, January 2014, pp. 108–109: Gone Home feature (Kaitlin Greenbriar, the house, the Christmas duck, “a love story dressed in horror clothing”).
Edge issue 263, February 2014: “creator Davey Wreden” on The Stanley Parable.
Kate Craig, “Artful avoidance”, Wireframe issue 1, November 2018, pp. 44–47: the invisible player, the flip-flops, other names for the genre, the late-2000s backlash and text adventures.
Wireframe issue 7, February 2019: interview with Jan Kavan of CBE Software on Someday You’ll Return and the “walking simulator” connotation.
Wireframe issue 8, February 2019: Sumo Digital’s purchase of The Chinese Room, “developer of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture”.
Wireframe issue 14, May 2019: review of Whispers (“a term I loathe”).
Wireframe issue 15, May 2019: What Remains of Edith Finch and its changing controls.
Wireframe issue 21, August 2019, p. 46: Inasa Fujio and Inaka Project.
Ian Dallas, “Roads not taken”, Wireframe issue 24, October 2019: the creative director of Giant Sparrow on What Remains of Edith Finch.
Wireframe issue 30, January 2020, p. 23: What Remains of Edith Finch among the games of 2017.
CRASH issue 2, March 1984: review of The Forest (Phipps Associates, 48K Spectrum, £9.95, by Graham T. Ralph).
Wikipedia, “Walking simulator” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): the pejorative use of the term from the late 2000s; The Forest among the genre’s precursors; The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2014) and Firewatch (2016). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_simulator