B.Abbdi’s secret weapon is the trumpet. It’s an unexpected comic flourish that looks like a lo-fi gory horror game unearthed from a tower atop a stagnant shipyard. Making music is easy. Hold the left mouse button until you run out of breath and change the pitch with the cursor. If you want, you can experiment with the tools along with the in-game radio. Instead, it’s best to seek out a climbing ax, but it’s hard to stop. It turns this world-weary first-person platformer into a game that tests the acoustics of abandoned spaces. Depressing but fun.
Released for free at Christmas by little-known French developer Lemaitre Bros, Babbdi is a slender masterpiece drifting in a small abandoned city. All you have to do is leave. This is easy. Naturally, this heightens the intrigue. Too many video game environments feel disposable. There’s plenty of scenery to just ignore or blow up while chasing enemies or waypoints, but it’s seldom actively introduced as such. What is this guy hiding?
It turns out there are a lot. Babbdi can be read as a study on post-industrial urban depression. Crumbling Soviet-era blocks and fragile electrical signs tense up to brighten a lead-colored sky. In reality, the city is not a dead end, but a tolerant vertical playground, complete with parkour his routes, magical collectibles, toy paraphernalia, and smaller, often implied goals to accomplish in his spare time. I have. Entertaining dogs, persuading guards, chatting girls. There is even a sense of live-in. The inhabitants sound like broken modems and look like ghost potatoes, but are recognizable as people. An old lady struggling to get home from shopping can be anyone’s neighbor.
Babbdi has a retro vibe that goes beyond low-res textures. Its brevity and freedom bring to mind the level of magazine demo discs I hoarded and played back as a teenager. But it also feels like targeted relief from the angst of 2023, blending a strange sense of ease with a sense of possibility.
