Need to know
What is it? There is only one set of footsteps in the sand, because you are on your fuckin’ own, mate.
Expect to pay: $18/£15.30
Developer: Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Reviewed on: Windows 11, Intel Core i9, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060
Multiplayer? No
Link: Official site
I fell while navigating some tricky rocks, rolling downhill like a wet sausage until I was caught by a grassy ledge. The only paths back up involved even tricker rocks, and predictably I fell again, tumbling off the grassy ledge to land next to a mudslide. Fortunately there was a dry path beside the mud, and unfortunately I found a single rock on that path, tripped, hit the mudslide, and slid to the bottom of it.
Walking back up that path I managed to slip into the mud twice more, the second time achieving such slippery velocity I flung myself back to a previous biome, landing in a lake. That motivated me to try a different route entirely, heading back toward a labyrinth of cardboard called Box Hell, at which point I spotted a ladder leaning against the hill I somehow completely missed the first time through this area, and which let me bypass all that mud-and-rock nonsense.
It still took me three goes to get up the ladder, of course.
This is Baby Steps, a parody of open world games, and our collective punishment for using the phrase “walking simulator”. You play Nate, a basement-dwelling loser mysteriously teleported from his couch to the wilderness like the Pevensie children being magicked to Narnia, only instead of plucky youngsters full of Blitz spirit you are a 35-year-old failure full of pizza.
There is a mountain in the wilderness and maybe if Nate climbs it he’ll be able to go home. It’s as reasonable an assumption as any, so off you set, taking your first steps, and almost immediately falling on your dumptruck ass.
Baby Steps recommends you play with a controller like a real yakuza, so I did. Squeezing one trigger lifts your foot, and pushing a stick moves that foot. You’ve got a fine degree of control over where that foot ends up before you put it back down, which will not save you. Nate has all the balance and grace of a moose on ice, and he’s doing this hike barefoot.
He could have got shoes at the start of the climb, but he turned them down. In the first of many delightfully improvised cutscenes, Nate meets a cheerful Australian hiker who offers help and he immediately says no. Nate is a man so awkward he wants every social interaction to end the moment it begins, if not sooner, rejecting every offer of help, including a map I would actually really have appreciated.
Baby Steps takes the idea of games as challenges, of hard modes and iron man runs and proud declarations that yellow paint is ruining videogames, and personifies it as a specific kind of man—the man who will not ask for directions no matter how lost he is. The next time someone dresses their victory over a videogame as some kind of macho triumph, I’ll be thinking of Nate, his onesie turning brown as he falls in the mud over and over.
Because it was there
In addition to the challenge of working your way from one campfire to the next as you ascend through a series of zones, there are optional challenges to hurl your wobbly cheeks at. Hats you can wear are precariously placed on top of trees or broken piles, and so are lost objects to return to nearby firetowers. But every time you tumble there’s a high chance you’ll lose your hat or whatever’s in your hand, and the act of leaning over to pick it back up can sometimes send you tumbling again. I lost a hat when I fell through the roof of a barn and couldn’t find it in all the straw, a moment so dispiriting I gave up on hats entirely and did the rest of the climb bareheaded.
But the moments that are most dispiriting are when you’re completely at a loss as to which of several hardscrabble climbs is even doable. Sometimes there’s only one way up (like the ant tunnels leading out of the sandcastle), but sometimes there are multiple paths of varying difficulty. How many times do you throw yourself at a broken rockface or a cactus bridge or a wet plank before you trundle off to see if there’s an easier way?
More than once I gave up on something that turned out to actually be the easy option because I blundered my first couple of attempts, then wandered around for an hour trying things that were far harder. At one point I knocked down a yellow shovel I could have used as a bridge and spent an age trying other ascents before learning that if I just quit out and went back in again the shovel returned to its original location.
Odds are you’ll find at least one moment in Baby Steps you think crosses the line from “funny satire of videogame design and difficulty discourse” into “actual bullshit someone should be ashamed of.” It’ll probably happen somewhere different for everyone, though the odds of it being one of the many bullshit moments in the sandy zone are high.
Scale Sheer Surface
I’ve heard people say they stopped enjoying Skyrim the moment they realized they could fast-travel. Once they started teleporting from one quest goal to the next all the fun went out of it. I enjoyed Skyrim even with the fast-travel, but I understand their position. Bouncing directly from objective to objective can be draining and joyless in a way that ambling around isn’t.
Baby Steps makes ambling into slapstick comedy, and I laughed a lot while Nate groaned and swore and blubbered. At least, for the first seven or so hours. The seven hours after that started to edge into being draining and joyless in their own way—honestly, sand can fuck right off forever, Anakin was right, just a hateful substance—but by that point the story had hooked me. The snappy dialogue of those cutscenes stays funny when the physics lols have worn out their welcome.
The reward for persevering in Baby Steps isn’t anything as ephemeral as a sense of triumph over adversity or whatever nonsense the masocore people get out of their boring games. No, it’s cutscenes where a character who is probably voiced by Bennett Foddy menaces Nate through sheer overbearing force of personality and Australian-ness.
Normally satire makes it hard to take the thing it’s satirizing seriously, but after almost 15 hours of waddlebitching my way up one mountain I loaded up Borderlands 4 and doing a doublejump-glide into a jetbike felt incredible. Baby Steps is a masterpiece, but I think actually I will just chill in a game with quest markers for a while.
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