Baby Steps walks a fine line between frustration and accomplishment to provide a walking simulator and climbing experience quite unlike anything else.
Never has a plank of wood held such dramatic tension. You will glimpse it on the path ahead, bridging a gap, and it will cause a moment of heart-stopping hesitation. It might produce such a feeling of fear you’ll backtrack, or look for another way around – it depends how many times you’ve been here before. You need to walk the plank but can you reliably put your feet where you want them to go? That’s the question. Hesitating preserves your hard-won progress and the efforts you’ve put into the climb so far, which hasn’t been easy. Stepping on the plank risks losing it. One small misadjustment and you’ll slip, and fall all the way down, down again.
Baby Steps reviewDeveloper: Bennett Foddy, Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi BochPublisher: Devolver DigitalPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out today on PC (Steam) and PlayStation 5
I fell a lot in Baby Steps. You will fall a lot in Baby Steps. Everyone will fall a lot in Baby Steps. This is a game about falling, and about getting back up again. It’s a game of risky gaps and exorbitant-feeling punishments for failing to cross them. A torturous game of snakes and ladders played out across a landscape in front of you and around you. But it’s not all pain. There’s an unexpected gentleness and tranquility here, and a much more forgiving experience than you might be expecting.
Baby Steps is the new game from frustration-courting guru Bennett Foddy (in collaboration with Ape Out and UFO 50 maker Gabe Cuzzillo, and Dance Central and Ape Out maker Maxi Boch) who made QWOP and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. The former is a finger-tying game about controlling a sprinter’s limbs while running a race, which is incredibly difficult to do. The latter is a climbing game where a climber in a cauldron (don’t ask) levers themselves up and over a mountain using a sledgehammer. It’s also incredibly difficult, and it also involves many infuriating falls back to the bottom of the mountain. Baby Steps is similar. Baby Steps is a mush of them both.
Baby Steps is Death Stranding for Masochists Watch on YouTube
Literally, it’s a walking simulator, where you control the legs of the game’s main character Nate, a couch potato who falls asleep and wakes up in a surreal dream-world. You need to explore said dream world but discover fairly quickly that walking isn’t as easy to do as you thought. It’s manual. Each step involves pulling a controller trigger to lift a leg and then pushing a thumbstick forward to shift the leg and move your weight so you can take a step. Most early attempts end up with you, Nate, face down on the floor, wobbling around like a beached seal. But it soon levels out; walking on a flat surface becomes reliably doable, with only occasional flops, which is an important concession in a game where there’s a lot of walking to do.