Reading:Baby Steps’ designers trolled players by placing stacks of cans at the top of ‘plausible’ climbing challenges they didn’t even bother testing, and players managed to climb them all—except one
Baby Steps’ designers trolled players by placing stacks of cans at the top of ‘plausible’ climbing challenges they didn’t even bother testing, and players managed to climb them all—except one
There is a style of game design built around rigorous playtesting and polish, aiming to smoothly guide the player from one challenge to the next, ensuring they never get hung up for too long or become too frustrated by an obstacle they can’t overcome. And then there’s Baby Steps.
One of the best games of 2025, Baby Steps embodies an element of game design that co-creator Gabe Cuzzillo is drawn to: “Indifference to the player.”
“I felt that singleplayer level design was largely about getting players to go where you wanted them to go, and to know what you want them to know,” he said in a talk about Baby Steps at the 2026 Game Developers Conference. “There’s this dumbing down that occurs in this kind of theme parky version of level design. You’re so concerned with the possibility that players might hurt themselves with your level design that you’re losing something really big. I was really bored with that flavor and that approach.”
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That sentiment eventually fueled the design of Baby Steps, a game of climbing challenges that actively tried to wean players off seeking out its videogamey “collectibles” and making the rewards for them disappointing, or outright nonexistent. When you reach a torturous tower, a character warns you there’s nothing at the top of it, and if you reach the top—which will normally take hours—it turns out to be true. The piles of cans that dot the world are the ultimate expression of this idea. “All you can do is kick them over, and they’re not even very satisfying,” Cuzzillo said.
As the game’s physics-driven climbing mechanics came into focus, Cuzzillo found himself trying to “put his thumb on the scale as little as possible” as a level designer, often simply placing objects in the environment and then seeing if it was possible to climb them. This pushed him to get better and more creative at controlling the protagonist Nate (who he also voiced), climbing things he never originally thought would be possible to scale. After that, he and the game’s other developers just started placing piles of cans on anything that looked remotely possible to climb, taunting players to either ignore them or grapple with the world’s indifference to them.
All of the can stacks ultimately could be reached, Cuzzillo said—except for one. Watching people try everything they could to reach the one unreachable stack initially filled him with anxiety, but Cuzzillo later felt there was “something beautiful” about the way the impossible challenge pushed players to try new things.
“Putting cans on things we haven’t climbed is asking an open question to our players,” Cuzzillo said. “These open questions are the opposite of traditional singleplayer level design, where we’re trying to communicate something we know to the player. This is more like asking the player what they can find that’s new, to communicate back to us. And you know, players surprise you.”
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The climb to the cans, in that one spot, may have proved impossible. But life finds a way.
