Video games are works of written code which portray worlds and characters in action and facilitate an aesthetic and interpretive experience. Beyond this similarity to literary works, some video games deploy various design strategies which blend gameplay and literary elements to explicitly foreground a hybrid literary/ludic experience. We identify three such strategies: engaging with literary structures, forms and techniques; deploying text in an aesthetic rather than a functional way; and intertextuality. This paper aims to analyse how these design strategies are deployed in What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017) to support a hybrid readerly/playerly experience. We argue that this type of design is particularly suited for walking simulators because they support interpretive play (Upton, 2015) through slowness, ambiguity (Muscat et al., 2016; Pinchbeck 2012), narrative and aesthetic aspirations (Carbo-Mascarell, 2016). Understanding walking sims as literary games (Ensslin, 2014) can shift the emphasis from their lack of 'traditional' gameplay complexity and focus instead on the opportunities that they afford for hybrid storytelling and for weaving literature and gameplay in innovative and playful ways.

In 2012 The Chinese Room launched Dear Esther, a video game that would go on to shape video game history and define a new genre: the walking simulator. Walking simulators renounce traditional game tropes and foreground walking as an aesthetic and as a dramaturgical practice, which engages the walker/player in critical acts of reading, challenging and/or performing a landscape. In October 2016, Dear Esther was adapted as a site-responsive, promenade performance set on the Scottish island of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth. The resulting performance, Dear Rachel, was then experienced alongside the game under the umbrella name Inchcolm Project. This hybrid event ‐ multimedia (promenade performance, gameplay and musical performance) and mixed-reality (with physical, augmented and virtual components) ‐ required the development and implementation of complex processes of remediation and adaptation. Drawing from a range of theories and practitioner reflection, this article puts forward a design framework ‐ storywalking ‐ which reconciled the two adaptation challenges: responding to the site and to the game.

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