Tbf the whole Walking Sim genre was already on its way out with massive backlash due to the games being the same fucking experience over and over, though granted the costs of making them were small enough to live by the occasional suckers. But the refund policy accelerated it as most of those games don't last even 90 minutes. One of the more famous cases of that time is
That Dragon, Cancer that was like 50 minutes and was refunded so much that the devs cried about it.
That game was shorter than that baby's life span.
One of the bigger reasons Walking Simulators have the negative connotations they do is because making actual good ones takes real talent - while making a bad one takes virtually none. There's a reason that people will generally talk positively about the likes of Stanley Parable, but the graveyards are littered with far shittier games that thought they could coast on a solid premise alone.
I could wax intellectual on the subject for ages, to the point where I could probably do what I did with Extreme Meatpunks Forever and evaluate why a game doesn't work. In fact, that might entertain you guys, so here's a breakdown of why the specific walking sims I covered don't work:
The Graveyard: ....Just does not have enough here. It wants to be profound while being minimalistic, but.... it's threadbare and uninteresting. I would focus on making the goal for the grandma to find her late husband's grave and leave flowers there, and maybe reminisce on memories she had with him. You could have made this concept much deeper while staying on the basic approach, and no amount of pretending it's profound is going to make this thing such; there were ways to make this concept hit way harder.
Sunset: Sunset falls into a few traps, the most obvious of which is a complete lack of conveyance (the game explains literally nothing about the journal mechanic or time limit). But the biggest issue it has by far it shares with fellow walking sim, Everyone's Gone to the Rapture - in that the player is forced into a scenario that's fucking asinine while the actually interesting story is going on just outside your reach in an area the player has no ability to reach or interact with. This is a cardinal sin of game design unless that juxtaposition being played with is the express point. The cleanup activities are repetitive and frustrating, and there's minimal player involvement with the story until the end. The apartment slowly but steadily changing over the days with different events happening would have done a lot to save this game's premise, and had Tale of Tales actually had something to say with its story instead of paying lip service,
Brote might not have been able to predict shit before it happened.
The Path: The Path is one of the only games Tale of Tales made that has vision, owing primarily to it being an environmental narrative game, and while I often make fun of it for being completely self-indulgent tripe, there
is stuff worth appreciating here. While Tale of Tales did a lot of "What do you think it means" shit, it's tacitly clear that the individual vignettes seen when getting off the path are symbols for dark shit happening during adolescence and arriving at grandma's house represents the end of life. It's a very strange game, and I'd argue that of all of Tale of Tales' games, I'd say it probably actually has the most to say. TOT even did full-on livejournals for each of the characters to give you some more insight into them, which is a clever idea, even if implemented badly. The downside is that even with this, everything is ambiguous, nothing is clarified, there's fucking no actual gameplay beyond finding the items, and someone who actually goes looking for answers in this story is going to find basically none. Making the gameplay loop more engaging and giving the player actual things to find (maybe with Tale of Tales committing to some actual fucking storytelling instead of dancing around like the sugar-plum fairy singing "TELL ME WHAT IT MEANS" probably would have helped the game considerably, but it may also have undercut one of the only things that made this fucking acid suppository of a game unique.
