Nothing Better Than Walking Around And Looking At Stuff In Video Games

thegamer.com:

I've been playing Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong recently and it has some environments you can really *ahem* sink your teeth into. In one mission fairly early on, Galeb Bazory, one of the three protagonists, is sent to investigate the murder of a human who works closely with the vampires. This guy has a ridiculously spacious penthouse apartment. One wall is made up entirely of windows, there's an indoor greenhouse — complete with Adirondack chairs overlooking the city — multiple home offices, a wall-length fish tank, and a massive golden lion statue.

I like looking at this stuff. I even like games where gasp the main thing you do is look at cool stuff.

Though games like Gone Home and Dear Esther were originally given the descriptor "walking simulator" as a pejorative, there's no shame in that moniker to me. Critics of those games often dismissed them as insufficiently game-y. The common refrain was, ‘This could just have been a movie.’ But, that line of reasoning dismisses the walking simulator's primary accomplishment: letting you inhabit a space in three-dimensions. Unlike in film where an environment can only be viewed from the perspectives the director chooses, video games like Gone Home allow players to take in their locations from all angles, poring over a box of books stowed in a closet or a Post-It note stuck to a mirror.

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Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong isn't a walking simulator, per se. It's a story-driven adventure game with role-playing systems and a focus on narrative choices. It's more Life is Strange: World of Darkness than Gone Home to Vampire Boston. But, the pleasure of playing Swansong arises from the