Developer Bennett Foddy saw a surge in popularity when QWOP went viral back in 2008. As a 15-year-old at the time, I messed around on the browser game with my friends, laughed at the funny and inappropriately sexual poses we could put the character in, then walked away. Years later, Foddy refined his vision with Getting Over It, which delivered a surprisingly affecting and philosophical message while forcing its players to toil away as a man in a pot with QWOP-like mechanics. Baby Steps is the culmination of everything Foddy has done over the past 17 years, and the results will both frustrate and inspire you.
Baby Steps put you in control of Nate, a 35-year-old manchild who has somehow managed to live his entire life on the couch eating chips and watching Netflix. Without warning, the game suddenly thrusts him into a massive open-world where he must go on a grand hiking journey that he’s hilariously unprepared for, armed with nothing but his bare feet and a gross onesie.
Whereas most games allow you to move your characters freely just by tilting the left stick, Baby Steps makes the mere act of walking a chore. The triggers control Nate’s individual legs, and the pressure with which you press down on them determine the force of each step. Press a little too hard and Nate could faceplant, but go too soft and Nate could topple sideways or backwards because he didn’t have enough grip or stability to anchor himself and lift the other foot.
I’m not kidding when I say it took me literal hours to finally get the hang of walking without falling on my face every three seconds. Even then, the sight of stone steps never failed to instill an unshakable sense of fear in me. I’d have to get the angling just right or risk falling down the steps and losing all my progress. Putting one foot in front of the other takes tremendous effort, and every second I spent in Baby Steps was filled with dread, anxiety, and immense pressure, at least for the first few hours. When you finally get a hang of how walking works, the game gets a little more manageable, but its wonderfully and slyly designed environmental challenges will always keep you on your toes.
As an open-world game, Baby Steps has a ton for you to discover. An early game quest sends you towards a mountaintop campfire, for example, only for you to find a sign stating that someone’s lost an item at the carnival and wants you to bring it back to the campfire once you’ve found it. The signposting is clever, too, as you’d only have to perform a quick sweep across the land to find pinstriped tents in the distance to know that’s the carnival you’re looking for. Without any fast travel, Baby Steps can feel like a chore to play, but I get it. Much like Getting Over It, you’re meant to savor the struggle and pain and be rewarded with a true sense of accomplishment whenever you finally conquer an obstacle. The highs are really high in Baby Steps; it all just comes down to whether you’ve got the grit to see it through.
It helps that the writing and the characters are so funny. Jim, one of the first NPCs you meet, starts off as the helpful tutorial guy who just wants to help Nate get his bearings, but because Nate is such a socially inept shut-in with no idea how to interact with another human being, he keeps brushing Jim off. This eventually ticks Jim off enough that he sort of becomes Baby Steps’ antagonist in the most hilarious way possible. The fact that Nate is always traipsing around and falling over himself in a disgusting unwashed onesie helps to add to the game’s slapstick comedy.
Despite the overall ugliness of the game (deliberate, I’m sure) and its unappealing aesthetic, I eventually found myself rooting for Nate and hoping that he’d be able to take something away from this journey and grow as a person. The trek to redemption and self-improvement was long and awkward, but the view from the top makes it all worth it.
A review code for the game was provided by the publisher. You can check out our review policy here. Reviewed on PC.
