A Long Walk
15 julio 2026
Turns out I missed Imago Season's one-month-versary for a few days! I'll have some more news to share about it at some point this summer, so keep an eye out. Please check out the game on Steam and leave a review if you enjoy it, it helps a lot with the algorithm!
The reason I missed the one month mark is that I decided it was finally time to get away from the computer for a bit and went on a hike along the Camino Lebaniego, a historical trail dating back from at least the XVI century. It isn't a particularly long or hard trail, but I'm not used to multiple-day hikes, so it was quite the experience!
I walked through beautiful forests, kinda busted my knee going down a mountain, crossed paths with lots of animals (cows! robins! mountain goats! someone's domestic ducks!) and met some very nice people. One night we watched the Spain vs Belgium World Cup match in a beautiful pilgrim's hostel. I ate some amazing homemade food. In the end, I was reminded of why I love the countryside so much. Complaining about hating the city is not enough, you actually have to go out and do some real world things.
Coincidentally, I have been doing a lot of reading on overland travel procedures in TTRPGs. Shoutout to Prismatic Wasteland's Hexcrawl Checklist which is a great source of links you can dive into.
I have been thinking of open world videogames where the span between locations feels like padding, just space to mindlessly move through while you follow the compass on your HUD. In real life, navigating a trail is such an active process. Even a well-trodden path like the Camino needs to be signposted every few hundred metres because it's just that easy to get lost.
Walking becomes a game where every fork in the path is a choice. I was told there is a summer variation of the path, will I find the place where it starts? (I did, I followed a river and saw a family of ducks) Can I take a detour to visit this lookout? The clock is ticking, I need to get to the next hostel before dinner and I'm walking too slowly (again, because of my knee lol)
If all this sounds like "Lunar discovers what hiking is" that's because well, yeah, that's it. It was fun to walk further than I had ever done in my life and find out how that feels!
I'm sure there must be games out there that focus on the act of travelling somewhere and how that feels in your body, unlike AAA huge-world-likes. Northern Journey comes to mind, but honestly I haven't played it yet. PEAK as well, of course, but I think I'm looking for something less wacky, more contemplative. There's a lot of time to spend in your mind when you're hiking, unpacking your own thoughts, uninterrupted until... Wait, that's a big rock. Let's be careful when going over it. What was I saying again?
Last week I also started playing Roadwarden which is more of a classic pointcrawl. I enjoy the focus on time and resource management and the little vignettes in between locations, which are the real meat of the game. I haven't got very far yet, but it looks like a dense world that I'll love getting lost in.
Finally, I'm thinking of what would happen if one of these triple A dev-crunchers ignored the empty space1 in favour of the big setpieces, taking them to the extreme. Remove the thousand boring sidequests and write a compelling, reactive story for once. Make every city a dense, detailed vignette. Every landmark a hero asset, in the way only these obscenely expensive productions can reach. Connect them in a world map screen if you wish, but don't show me your million procedurally scattered trees and your Houdini Engine erosion terrain. I don't care unless it's there to say something.
I don't think the resulting game would be better than the stuff we've been getting for the last decade-plus, but it might be different enough to be worth exploring, maybe?
Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with these thoughts. I wanted to write a shorter post this time and I failed miserably once again (and editing is either for cowards or people with free time)
I'll end by asking you again to check out Imago Season! There isn't much walking involved, but there are hexes and landmarks and religious relics, just like in the Camino.
Until next time, happy trails!
1 There is good empty space, of course, but even in my favourite productions like Breath of the Wild I always feel like it is there so you can marvel at the console's raw rendering power, not to say anything or inspire any specific emotion besides "wow look at all that grass".