Babbdi’s secret weapon is a trumpet. Unearthed from a tower above a stagnant dockyard, it’s an unexpected comic flourish in what looks like a lo-fi brutalist horror game. Making music is simple: hold left mouse button until your breath runs out, change pitch with the cursor. If you like, you can try tootling along to an in-game radio. The trumpet won’t help you navigate Babbdi’s vertiginous architecture – best search for the climbing axe, instead – but it’s hard to put down. It transforms this world-weary first-person platformer into a game about testing the acoustics of abandoned spaces: melancholy but joyful.
Released for free over Christmas by little-known French developer Lemaitre Bros, Babbdi is a slender masterwork that cuts you adrift in a small, forsaken city. The only thing it requires you to do is leave, which is easy enough. Naturally, this heightens the intrigue. So many video game environments feel disposable – just so much scenery to ignore or blow up while chasing a foe or a waypoint – yet they are seldom actively introduced as such. What could this one be hiding?
Plenty, it turns out. You can read Babbdi as a study of post-industrial urban depression; collapsing Soviet-era blocks and frail electric signs strain to lighten a leaden sky. In practice, the city is no dead end but a forgiving vertical playground, dense with parkour routes, eldritch collectibles, tools to toy with, and smaller, often unspoken objectives to be completed at leisure: amuse the dog, persuade the bouncer, chat up the girl. It even feels lived-in. The residents sound like broken modems and look like haunted potatoes, but they are recognisable as people – that old lady struggling home with her shopping could be anybody’s nextdoor neighbour.
Babbdi has a retro ambience that goes beyond its low-resolution textures. Its brevity and open-endedness makes me think of the magazine demo disc levels I’d hoard and replay as a teen. But it also feels like targeted relief from 2023’s anxieties, blending a strange restfulness with a sense of possibility. And yes, it lets you play La Cucaracha.
• Babbdi is out now; free.
