A number of traditional big-budget titles don’t demand this kind of moral engagement, which makes sense—asking a player to stop and consider the horrible things they’re doing is antithetical to moving forward” (Clark 2017). Slowness is forefronted in a game of permalife: adrenaline is neither the goal nor the appeal

This is why most walking sims that descend from first-person shooters have been radical reimaginings taking years to produce, not merely removing enemies but crafting whole new environments, often with custom textures, objects, music, and narration: creating not just a new focus of interaction but an entirely different kind of world to support that focus.

Even those multiform stories that offer multiple retellings of the same event often resolve into a single “true” version—the viewpoint of the uninvolved eyewitness or the actual reality the protagonists wind up in after the alternate realities have collapsed.