2026 The Year Everyone Relearned Walking In Games

Updated: October 7, 2026. This piece adds context on the movement design trend described by PC Gamer columnist Samuel Roberts and flags unverified specifics inline.

By Indie Kings | October 7, 2026

Touchstones of thoughtful movement

Samuel Roberts, writing for PC Gamer on October 7, 2026, argues that 2026 is a low-key revolutionary year for player movement in games. His starting point is a personal hall of fame. The 3D games he calls touchstones of thoughtful player movement are a decade or more old: Mirror's Edge, Titanfall 2, Dishonored 2, Doom Eternal, and ARMA 3. He is quick to say the list is not comprehensive, but these are the titles that come to mind when he thinks about in-game movement that feels incredibly considered.

Each of these, Roberts says, set the ceiling high for what could be achieved with their controls if the player was prepared to learn them. Each offered a power fantasy of some kind to be mastered, whether wall-running onto a mech or peeking out across a field to line up a perfect shot. ARMA 3 might look like an odd fit beside those, but Roberts defends its inclusion: its sim-style tactical physicality is memorable to anyone who plays it even briefly, including him.

That older canon matters because it establishes the baseline. For years, the mark of a great movement system was a power fantasy delivered at high speed. Roberts frames the recent crop of games as a deliberate departure from that baseline, not a rejection of it so much as a broadening of what movement can be about. [NEEDS VERIFICATION] Exact release years for the touchstones are not all stated in the column; this article groups them by era rather than precise year to avoid overstating them.

The shift to granular everyday motion

Roberts locates the turning point in recent years, where he says it is increasingly common to find developers capturing granular, basic movements from real life that have no power fantasy element whatsoever. Things that would have sounded so boring as back-of-the-box features during the age of Quake 2 and Half-Life. Walking slowly. Steadily moving up a cliff face. Mantling awkwardly over surfaces. Getting defeated by a slightly high rock and taking the long way around. Falling on your arse if you tumble down a small hill.

He finds a lineage for this in games that rewarded mundane physical care. Balancing the packages you are carrying in Death Stranding, or escaping the mud in Snowrunner, are his examples of the same impulse. 'Boring' games with a simulation aspect are as old as PC gaming itself, but Roberts argues this newer crop tap into something more universal and compelling that strikes a chord with players. Some of these games, he notes, ended up as Game of the Year frontrunners.

This is the core of the column's thesis: the everyday motion is the content now. The small failures, the awkward mantles, the near-falls are features, not jank. That inversion is what makes 2026, in Roberts's telling, low-key revolutionary rather than loudly so.

Baby Steps and the walking problem

For Roberts, 2025's Baby Steps crystallized the shift. The idea that the act of walking without falling into physics hell could be the entire game might not be revolutionary by itself, but the high-end execution was an important distinction. He calls Baby Steps uniquely pure because it breaks down a fundamental and often merely functional part of every other game, putting one foot in front of the other and slowly repeating it, into its constituent parts, then rebuilds it. Every step matters. Every part of every step.

He says he did not finish it, but threw two expletive-filled afternoons at it, and respects the heck out of what it tries to accomplish. It is also a beloved and award-winning game. The irony, he points out, is that Baby Steps is not a power fantasy by most people's criteria, yet it was inspired by a game that clearly is one: not Mirror's Edge itself, but a particularly gruelling custom map for it.

That map is Stratocubulus, a Mirror's Edge mod that forced players to rethink everything about Faith's moveset and experiment with level geometry to solve it. Designer Gabe Cuzillo, speaking at GDC 2026 as captured by Wes, put it this way: "It was the stuff that was ambiguous as to whether or not you could do it, stuff that you could puzzle over and push you into trying new ways of moving." He added, "That was really the experience we're interested in." Roberts reads this as the missing link between the old power fantasy era and the new walking renaissance: the same question, played at walking speed.

The 2026 class of movement games

Roberts does not think these games are deliberately part of a trend, but he flags a 2026 class distinguished because of how it uses movement. Cairn turns climbing a mountain into a series of precise navigation puzzles with a resource management layer. Control Resonant marries a familiar superhero-style moveset to brain-bending switches in gravity. Vholume initially seems like a stripped back version of Mirror's Edge parkour, except it hides incredible depth in its level layouts and mechanics.

In the shooter space, Doom: The Dark Ages' Revelations DLC added the chain spear, giving it some of Eternal's arena acrobatics. Cicadamata offers queasy FOV manipulation and towering triple jumps, making it, in Roberts's words, a singular proposition as a game about navigating a combat arena. Then there is Big Walk, an entire game of trotting across a large map from A to B, where the fantasy element is taking that journey with friends, but the actual walking part is not that easy. Just mantling over a knee-high surface can be challenging.

Image: Big Walk co-op players on a mountain. Credit: PC Gamer, Panic. This is a Big Walk still, not every game named above.

Big Walk is the public face of the argument. A co-op walking game sounds like a joke until the knee-high mantle defeats your party. Roberts treats that gap between premise and effort as the entire point: if walking is the verb, then every small obstacle becomes a puzzle, and every controller input carries weight.

Two theories for why this is happening

Roberts offers two theories, both his own. The first is simple accumulation: this is the natural outcome of how long 3D games have been around now. There truly is a game for everything these days, whether it is a man walking around in a babygrow or the nightmare fuel sitting in the bottom rungs of Steam. In that view, granular movement games are not a counterculture so much as a long tail finally reaching the mainstream.

The second theory is reactive. He argues it is a response to control being taken from players with the rise of big-budget blockbusters in the late 2000s and 2010s. These things ebb and flow, he says: much like how action games have been curving towards hardcore combat inspired by FromSoftware games, players and designers are now drawn to a similar level of stimulation and craft in their character movement, whether that means boring old walking or turning the player into Spider-Man.

Neither theory is presented as proven. Both are framed as the columnist's best explanation for a pattern he has watched from Baby Steps through Big Walk and the 2026 releases. [NEEDS VERIFICATION] The column does not cite sales figures or market data for the theory claims; treat them as opinion, not measured evidence.

The stripped back school of frictionless blockbusters

What Roberts is pushing against is the design school he calls stripped back. Years ago he listened to an episode of Irrational Games' podcast where a developer pointed out that Grand Theft Auto 3 was revolutionary because it condensed a complex sequence of actions into a single button press: opening the door to a car, removing the driver, climbing in, turning the key, and taking the steering wheel became Triangle. Roberts says he is not sure he agrees, noting GTA 1 did it first in 1997, but concedes a designer might think about it that way.

From there, he argues, big-budget multiplatform games pushed PC games towards console norms in interface and play, in the name of offering an identical experience across platforms. For movement, that meant third-person games like Assassin's Creed, where very little input is needed to make your character climb across a series of rooftops. That influence, he says, still extends to Ghost of Tsushima or Wolverine, where movement is trivial because you are only allowed to interact with certain parts of the game world. A jump does not exactly feel like a jump. Likewise Uncharted, a series he loves, sanded all the sharp edges off Tomb Raider's '90s platforming. Friction was stripped back in order to get millions of people to play. It worked.

Roberts thinks that type of design is falling out of fashion. The reason Cairn, Baby Steps, or Big Walk connect now is that they do not trivialise movement this way. That is also why he believes these games could only exist now, with a very long history of 3D movement behind us. There is something subversive, he writes, about designers taking a step back and asking what movement actually is. What do you have to accomplish to put one foot in front of the other? What happens to your body's positioning when you place the weight behind your left arm against a cliff face? Those are more interesting questions to ask than he ever thought they could be. There may be a whole universe of games inside those limitations.

He ends the column with a joke that is labeled as a joke: an incredibly hardcore 15-hour game just about the act of breathing, culminating with the objective to tie your shoelaces while holding in a gut. He says he would find those motions even more relatable than Nate's trials in Baby Steps, and can see the GOTY nominations already. The joke works because it extends his thesis to its logical absurdity: every everyday motion, it turns out, can carry mechanics.

Touchstones by era

Theory evidence

FAQ

Q: What does Samuel Roberts mean by a low-key revolutionary year for movement?
A: He means 2026 is producing many games that build their core loops around small, realistic, everyday motions like walking, climbing, and mantling, rather than high-speed power fantasies. The shift is significant but not loud, hence low-key.

Q: Which games does Roberts name as the older touchstones of thoughtful movement?
A: Mirror's Edge, Titanfall 2, Dishonored 2, Doom Eternal, and ARMA 3. He stresses this is not comprehensive, and defends ARMA 3's inclusion on the strength of its sim-style tactical physicality.

Q: Why does Baby Steps matter so much in the column?
A: Because it breaks walking down into its constituent parts and rebuilds it, making every step and every part of every step matter. Roberts calls it uniquely pure and respects what it accomplishes, even though he did not finish it.

Q: What is Stratocubulus and how does it connect to Baby Steps?
A: Stratocubulus is a gruelling Mirror's Edge custom map mod. Designer Gabe Cuzillo said at GDC 2026 that its ambiguous, puzzly movement inspired Baby Steps's level design: spaces you could puzzle over and try new ways of moving through.

Q: Which 2026 games does Roberts single out and for what?
A: Cairn for mountain-climbing navigation puzzles with resource management, Control Resonant for gravity-switch superhero movement, Vholume for deep stripped-back parkour, Cicadamata for FOV manipulation and triple jumps, Doom: The Dark Ages' Revelations for the chain spear, and Big Walk for co-op walking where even a knee-high mantle is challenging.

Q: Does Roberts give a definitive cause for the trend?
A: No. He offers two theories: the simple accumulation of decades of 3D games means everything gets tried, and a backlash against frictionless, input-light blockbuster movement from the late 2000s and 2010s, including GTA 3's Triangle prompt, Assassin's Creed, Ghost of Tsushima, Wolverine, and Uncharted.

Bottom line

Roberts's argument is that movement has quietly become the main event in 2026. The old ceiling-setters like Mirror's Edge and Doom Eternal proved movement could be a mastered power fantasy. The 2025 to 2026 wave, from Baby Steps through Cairn, Vholume, Control Resonant, Cicadamata, the Revelations DLC, and Big Walk, argues movement can also be the careful, everyday act of getting one foot in front of the other. Whether the cause is 3D gaming's long history or fatigue with stripped-back, frictionless blockbusters, the design question has shifted from "how fast can you move" to "what does it take to move at all." His breathing-and-shoelaces game remains a joke, but the mechanics conversation behind it is entirely serious. Uncertain specifics in this article, including exact touchstone release years, are marked [NEEDS VERIFICATION] rather than asserted.

Sources: Samuel Roberts, "2026 is a low-key revolutionary year for player movement in games," PC Gamer, October 7, 2026, PC Gamer