VGChartz's Paul Broussard: "Simply put, Walden does a good job of being like the book, and a very bad job of being a video game. If you’re absolutely desperate for the opportunity to live like Thoreau did without having to actually doing so, then you might extract some odd sense of enjoyment from this. For everyone else, I can’t recommend it. Read the book if you’re so inclined and save yourself a frustrating experience of tedious quick time events and tiny stamina bars."
From its boring gameplay loop to design decisions implicitly contradicting Thoreau's greater messages, USC Game Innovation Lab has crafted an ill-conceived adaptation.
Same. The Walden/Civil Disobedience duo is a must-read imo.
I think the issue is this college gaming lab were building a wilderness simulation in Unity and then looked for inspiration to 'gamify' it enough to make a sellable product. Naturally, they looked to the public domain first.
Neil writes: "As gamers we're used to seeing new titles arrive in remastered or rehashed form, as developers take much loved classics from yesteryear and bring them right up to date for a modern audience. That normally means going back a decade or two for the source material. Walden, a game on Xbox though goes further - way back to the original Henry David Thoreau book from 1854, before bringing it all into the virtual world."
"Walden, a Game could have been a culmination of my interests as a researcher in the field of art and humanities: it is a narrative video game about a poet activist who critiqued slavery and the newly-developed modern prison system. However, most of my time spent on the digital Walden Pond has oscillated between boredom and sheer frustration." - Adam@EB
