There’s a moment about halfway through Baby Steps where Nate, the game’s waddling protagonist, declines the offer of some lamps to help guide his way in a pitch-black cavern system. His reason? He doesn’t want the guys inside to laugh and call him “Inspector Gadget.” Such is the potent concoction of social disability and learned toxic masculinity that drives his journey, resulting in an outright inability to ask for or even display a need for help. A few seconds later, in a less conspicuous spot, Nate finally accepts a lamp. Which is all the better for me, because navigating these winding passageways with no light would’ve been bloody impossib-aaaand I’ve dropped the lamp down the sodding stairwell. Shit.
Baby Steps is a game about failing, and falling. It’s a game about failing and falling because you have come to exist in a world built for sickos. A unique vision of heaven where you’re either a regular guy with the right tools for a good time, a gatekeeping donkey in a dick-measuring contest, or you’re Nate – an anxious homebody caught between both groups and left to climb a mountain-sized mountain with nothing but a onesie and his bare feet. It’s a freeform, physics-based walking sim with some entertaining character interactions peppered throughout the journey, building to Nate’s – and hopefully your – personal development.
Walking is at the heart of everything in this game, naturally, and your sole method of interaction (bar some surprises I won’t spoil). You move Nate by individually controlling his left and right legs/feet, directing them in real time to perform each individual step. Holding the left or right trigger to lift a foot, and then moving the sticks to guide it before you let it drop, feels surprisingly intuitive, but nailing the fundamental balance and rhythm as you step isn’t easy. Learning to walk takes time, huh?
This method of player-driven walking is the video game difficulty argument distilled down to its most basic and consumable form, levelling the playing field for everyone by destroying the notion of muscle memory. It’s hard to take for granted your own personal ladder to the skill ceiling when it’s a mission just to put feet down on the first rung. There are significant traversal challenges to overcome as you move through the game, but you’ll just as often eat shit just meandering across regular ground.
Despite regularly parodying them, Baby Steps actually manages its own take on a true video game Open World. There’s rarely a ‘correct’ way to approach this daunting climb, either in terms of the course you chart to each major checkpoint, or simply how you decide traverse the obstacles in your path. There are often more direct, more obvious routes, but there’s so much to discover by pushing your luck, and there’s a ton of opportunity to make your own fun and think about challenge in your own way.
And you will think about challenge, because Baby Steps is brutally difficult. Early obstacles will give you the stuff you’d expect – climbing steep steps, hopping across logs in a river – but with each new environmentally distinct section you reach you’ll find new reasons to rage. This soles-like is not only hard, it’s openly antagonistic, gleefully rewarding your hard-won progress with high-risk maneuvers that’ll send you falling or sliding back past everything you’ve achieved. There are bottlenecks here that’ll go down in history, particularly anything involving sand, and I fully expect some folks to simply give up after throwing themselves at a tricky section for hours.
There’s a lot to uncover and digest though, if you can stomach the punishment. After taking around 12 hours to see the credits (and their glorious payoff), there’s still so much on the table should I want to seek it out. Baby Steps’ unrelenting urge to upset its paying customers even extends to secrets, routinely rewarding your extracurricular efforts with trinkets that you can lose forever if Nate falls and happens to drop them. And he will.
If it feels like I’m saying a lot without saying much of anything, it’s simply that so much of this game begs discovering for yourself. Plus, I’ve looked at my notes on the core plot beats and come to realise that you simply wouldn’t believe me. Cuzzillo, Boch and Foddy have crafted an experience with a very particular sense of humour that blends semi-improvised dialogue delivery with a mix of physics slapstick, charming weirdos and big, veiny penises. Mostly though, the joke is on you.
There’s so much here that feels like it started with someone saying “Okay but what if” and ended with extraordinary commitment to the bit. If the anti-AAA movement has proven anything, it’s that there’s totally value in pursuing technical excellence when it serves the art, and the real time onesie-soiling system in Baby Steps is a great example, as is the dynamic soundtrack that mixes hundreds of samples of ambient noises into sick beats to walk to. Aside from some distracting hitches and a couple, hopefully pre-release-exclusive hard crashes, this feels like a richly polished work by a talented team.
Final Thoughts
Baby Steps has its own idea of what it’s about, readily giving you its ruminations on modern open worlds, difficulty and accessibility right on the surface. It’s a little disappointing that the only challenge it spares you from is parsing its fable, but there’s enough to glean beyond. I found it also rings very true to the socially disabled experience. Nate is ill-equipped to navigate a world that everyone around him seems to just ‘get,’ and is just as unready for him as he is for it, making even the simplest tasks near-impossible – especially when a reality of ableism and toxic excellence adds an element of shame to asking for help.
Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher
- Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy
- Devolver Digital
- PS5 / PC
- September 24
