#walking sims

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.

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.

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.)

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.