Game called “Bambas!” offers an unexpected twist on walking experiences. Created by DevilishGames, this city-based simulation invites you to navigate a quaint seaside town as a wandering pair of sneakers without a body! It’s all about immersive exploration with its innovative control mechanism and emphasis on unrestricted discovery. The game aims to rekindle memories of carefree afternoons spent exploring your neighborhood, causing trouble, and allowing your feet to guide you to new adventures!
Getting your feet wet
Title Translation: Bambas! – A Sandbox Walking Simulator that Revisits Childhood Freedom
In Bambas!, you’ll experience the carefree spirit of your childhood with a creative twist. Instead of traditional game controls, you navigate using only footsteps, allowing for spontaneous play creation as you go. You can engage in classic games like hopscotch and kick-the-can, or even turn tree branches into makeshift jungle gyms. The cityscape invites exploration with a touch of nostalgia, encouraging you to rediscover the joy of wandering through an urban landscape just as it was back then, one step at a time.
In this game, you’ll be navigating two separate shoes, each moving independently using a special bipedal system. The adventure begins in a lively coastal town filled with ordinary citizens who just happen to be empty pairs of shoes, engaging in various activities. You’re free to explore the town and familiarize yourself with its unique districts and colorful residents.
Everybody 1, 2 step
As you wander around Bambas, taking in its skate parks and sandy beaches, you’ll come across a variety of shoes, each showcasing unique character even without any spoken words. These shoes, or as I’d like to call them, ‘Narrative Shoes’, offer glimpses into the lives of their mysterious owners. They often engage in humorous and intricate conversations filled with lore, making you chuckle now and then. There seems to be a narrative thread that binds these local shoes together, which you can uncover by chatting with different characters. At first, these silent interactions are endearing, but the novelty might wear off over time, especially when many of them appear more focused on delivering backstory than enhancing gameplay.
In this game, some activities mainly help build the game’s environment, but others provide objectives like bursting balloons, arranging patterns, delivering pizzas using an electric scooter, or following a specific route. Achieving these objectives usually earns you coins which can be used to buy new shoes for your collection. Some tasks have time limits, while others require meeting certain conditions. You can skip most missions by leaving the mission zone, giving you the option to avoid tasks you’d rather do later.
The game is afoot
Bambas! suggests that for an optimal experience, you should play it with a controller instead of just a keyboard and mouse. The game demands a certain level of coordination to make your on-screen character walk, as the triggers and joysticks are used to lift each foot and move them forward or backward respectively.
Initially, the distinctive control mechanism may seem unfamiliar, but once you sync with it, you’ll be ready for exploring the town. It’s important to note that the controls aren’t instinctive or straightforward, and they maintain a difficult learning curve throughout the game. The unusual control setup persists in feeling awkward regardless of your progress. To make matters worse, your shoes often pass through objects, causing glitches that make movement more challenging. Fortunately, you won’t have to walk everywhere; there are alternatives like scooters and skateboards available for you to discover as additional means of transportation.
If the shoe fits
It took me a brief moment to understand that the mini map at the screen’s bottom is actually a smartwatch, which tracks your steps and distance traveled. You can also keep tabs on finished quests and the money you’ve earned here. The smartwatch also serves as your hub for customizing and expanding your shoe collection, offering numerous designs that can be personalized to match your style. Though the variations in shoes are merely aesthetic, I find some styles more appealing than others not just for their looks, but because they malfunction less when interacting with the game’s environment.
Personally speaking, beyond monitoring my own advancements, this smartwatch offers a selection of radio stations that I can tune into for a personalized soundtrack during my adventures. The stations span from Grafitti Radio with its lively ska-hop and electronic tunes, to Devilish Radio’s quaint folk melodies and steady rock beats at Headbanger FM. The variety is impressive, but each station seems to play a fixed list of songs that restarts when you tune in. So, if there’s a specific track I’m keen on hearing, I might have to wait for it to reappear in the rotation after switching stations. On the bright side, I can mute the music entirely should I wish to explore in silence. Yet, this doesn’t seem to affect the shoe customization menu, which plays the main game soundtrack at full volume, even when the music is paused elsewhere.
Watch your step
In Bambas!, almost every action you perform contributes to a mission you need to accomplish, with numerous tasks that can be done as you explore the world. Common activities like crunching leaves, squashing cans, jumping in puddles, and gathering coins are all part of the game’s regular features.
In Bambas!, when you’re not moving rocks or putting out cigarette butts, you’ll mostly be interacting with characters and objects to accomplish tasks and unlock achievements. Talking to certain characters or entering specific zones can initiate missions that you can finish for coins. For instance, “The Floor is Lava” starts when you step onto a crosswalk. After chatting with another pair of shoes, you might find yourself in a bubble-popping game, invited for an unexpected soccer match, or asked to deliver pizzas using an electric scooter. Alternatively, you could be given an easy quest to finish at your convenience. The tasks’ complexity spans from incredibly simple to quite challenging, with several activities testing both patience and skill.
Instead of abandoning tasks within the mission zone by exiting to cancel the quest, it’s often inconvenient because I might unintentionally stray too far from the activity area during a mission, leading to lost progress and having to restart the mission. This can be particularly annoying when the tasks are already time-consuming and monotonous.
Navigating through Bambas isn’t always straightforward due to the frequent lack of clear views ahead. This can sometimes make it challenging to get your bearings while you traverse this charming seaside destination. A map is available on the display, as well as a compact version on your smartwatch, but I found these options rather cumbersome and not overly intuitive. On numerous occasions, I wished for a straightforward compass in the heads-up display or the ability to tag and navigate towards points of interest, features that would give my wandering a sense of purpose rather than aimlessness.
Tread lightly
As a devoted admirer, I must confess that Bambas!, with its enchanting premise and whimsical environment, holds potential, yet it grapples under the burden of its own design. Occasionally, camera perspectives are hindered by trees or objects, obstructing my view or even causing temporary snags in my progress. Every time I launch the game, I find myself back at the same starting point without the freedom to choose where to resume, which makes rejoining the action frustratingly repetitive. The tasks often fall into the category of fetch quests, offering little depth or variety in terms of interaction. Furthermore, while the characters in their shoes suggest a more interconnected narrative, the story failed to ignite my passion and ultimately faded from memory.
The game, Bambas!, isn’t entirely devoid of appealing aspects. It boasts witty dialogue and an engaging writing style, while the challenge of mastering tricky controls to accomplish basic tasks offers a sense of achievement. The developers aim to broaden the concept of “walking simulators” by incorporating more mechanically-focused elements, potentially opening new avenues for genre advancement.
However, despite the game’s innovative spirit and potential, it doesn’t quite meet its mark. The physics-based foot controls are awkward rather than intuitive, and what starts as a charming open world soon transforms into a series of tedious tasks. Some missions feel like pointless errands, further hindered by visual glitches and inconsistent gameplay.
You collect coins in the game to buy new shoes, but without an engaging gameplay loop or captivating narrative, it’s difficult to find motivation to keep playing. Bambas! possesses style and emotion, but without a clearer direction or more refinement, it finds itself stuck in repetitive loops.
Get ready to play ‘Bambas!’ starting June 27, 2025! It will be available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, as well as Nintendo Switch. We were lucky enough to receive a Steam code from the publisher for this review.
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2025-06-20 22:58