This free Death Stranding parody has towering backpacks, lots of walking

Walking Simulator
(Image credit: Pugscape)

Can't wait until June to stagger around in the snow with a towering backpack on PC? Walking Simulator, a free game on Steam, might hold you over for Death Stranding's PC release—though it's more likely it'll just give you a few minutes of general amusement and/or frustration.

I'm not entirely versed in Death Stranding, but I know it has very tall backpacks and a lot of stumbling around on snowy mountaintops, and so does Walking Simulator. There's also something about earning 'likes' in Death Stranding, too, right? Walking Simulator has likes as well, which function as a sort of reward for completing tasks as well as a currency. You can use earned likes to rent a snowmobile and jetpack, if you last long enough.

Which you probably won't, because basically you're just walking or sprinting through the snow toward a far-off map marker while toting whatever you pick up on your back. And it's buggy, too: after making a long, dull, 1,200 meter jaunt to deliver fuel to a research post, I got stuck in the floor and had to do it all over again.

After making a snowmobile delivery (also long and dull) I had to climb a very tall mountain with the help of a very crummy jetpack, and I was within nine meters of the top before glitching through the world and falling all the way back down.

So, yeah. It's a bit of a joke, and it's more than a bit busted. But it's free and if you're really desperate to do some walking while wearing a backpack the height of a tree, this may be your best option until June 2.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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