I can’t, in good conscience, review Baby Steps. Developed by Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy (QWOP), Baby Steps is an infuriating, Sisyphean nightmare in video game form. It is a hellacious, painful, frustrating, joyous, insane, addictive, horrible game that I both love and hate in equal measure.
It feels wrong to score a game a 5 because I both love and loathe it. Similarly, scoring it either low or high would feel disingenuous, and so, I’m not scoring it at all. Instead, I’m just going to talk about my experience with it. The dizzying highs, the bottomless lows and the creamy middles.
Baby Steps is a game for masochists and streamers. It’s designed to be infuriating, and you are meant to fail, over and over again. But, you’re also meant to get up and try again and keep getting up, no matter how many times you get knocked down. And this is a good mantra for life, but sometimes, in Baby Steps and in life, you get knocked down one too many times, and you just need to lie in the dirt and think about the decisions that led you here.
Not a Baby Steps Review
In Baby Steps, you “play” as Nate. Nate is an absolute loser. He’s a middle-aged man-child, living in his basement, smoking bongs, binging Netflix and eating Doritos. His life is going nowhere, and then he’s sucked into his TV and transported to a strange new world, with no shoes and a mountain to climb. When I took my first, awkward steps as Nate, I burst out laughing.
The mechanics in Baby Step are objectively hilarious and ridiculous, and as I began to heave Nate’s hamhock legs around, I felt the gnawing beginnings of mild addiction settle in. Learning to walk and stay upright is a constant process in Baby Steps. Even when you think you’ve got it nailed, you will come undone. Hours and hours into playing, when you’re able to climb sheer walls and cross obstacles that previously would have been impossible, you will trip and stumble and fall. And that addicted part of your brain will tell you to get up and keep going. This is how Baby Steps gets you and keeps you playing. If you don’t become mildly addicted to it, you will give up very quickly.
Like some of the walls in Baby Steps, the learning curve is sheer. It doesn’t hold your hand, nor does it offer anything in the way of hints or assistance. Once it’s explained how you play Baby Steps, points out at the open world map and says “Go.” Finding which direction to head is easy enough, as the next point of interest is usually fairly visible in the distance, but getting there is something else entirely.
Beyond making your way across the map and getting where you need to go, Baby Steps includes lots of side content and optional objectives. This usually involves heading off the beaten path to collect a hat or some other item from, usually, the most impossible terrain in the game. Early on, I found a propeller hat atop a broken merry-go-round and a “World’s Best Dad” mug on a carriage. Both of them took, and this is no exaggeration, hours to collect. When I finally had them in my greasy mitts, I was happier than I’ve been since the day my son was born…
That happiness soon gave way to sorrow, fury and a strong desire to fly kick my TV into next week. You see, I wrongly assumed that once I’d collected these objects, they’d be attached to Nate’s person until such time that I brought them where they needed to go. Boy, what an actual moron I was. Because, you see, these items aren’t attached to Nate, not in any meaningful way and when he falls, if he falls with enough force (which is 9 times out of 10) hats will fly off his head and objects in his hand will be flung away.
Having taken such an obscene length of time to collect these items, I wasn’t going to leave them behind, and so, every time I fell, I painstakingly tracked the hat and mug down and picked them up again. Over and over it went, with me collecting the items and dropping them. Thankfully, they usually ended up quite nearby, so it wasn’t a total disaster. Until, I started climbing the mountain.
The terrain in Baby Steps includes a variety of surfaces. Stone, grass, dirt, mud, sand, water and more. Each of these surfaces perform differently under Nate’s feet and so you need to adjust how you walk accordingly. With my mug and hat, I was being ever so cautious. Walking slowly and trying my best not to fall. And I did well for a while, but then I became confident. I started to move more quickly, almost running up the dreaded hill and laughing at my previous failures. Surely I, a man with a hat and a mug can’t lose now…
That’s when disaster struck. Nate fell and he fell hard. My mug was flung in one direction and my hat flopped over in the mud right near the edge. Struggling to stand in the mud, I fell again and my useless body pushed the hat over the edge. I watched it fall down, all the way to the bottom of the mountain and sit, taunting me and my uselessness. The mug, I never managed to find again. So far did it fly away that I had no way of locating it, nor did I want to. And to pour salt in the wound, while I was looking down at the hat, I stumbled and fell into a mud slide that took my all the way down the mountain, but on the opposite side to the hat.
That’s when I rage quit.
There’s only so much indignity and pain one can go through before they throw in the towel and losing that hat and that mug broke me…
…but not entirely. The pull of Baby Steps is strong, and even after that utter humiliation, I went back. Once bitten and twice shy, I avoided anything beyond the main path afterwards, fearing an aneurysm should I fail so spectacularly a second time. Even so, Baby Steps tried to break me again and again, even just trying to get Nate to the end of his journey.
I know I missed out on a lot of narrative context and information, but honestly, I couldn’t give a toss. There was no way I was going to have the mental fortitude to get through the torture that Baby Steps had in store for me if I attempted to see everything it had on offer. So I just forged ahead, shoeless and whimpering.
Baby Steps is a fascinating piece of interactive performance art. I can’t call it a game because games are meant to be fun. Sure, Baby Steps is “fun”, but it’s also the antithesis of it. It’s an exercise in grit and determination as well as some light self-flagellation. Kudos to Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy and also a big “fuck you” to those guys.
Oh, and the Aussie guy who accosts Nate throughout his entire journey. Love him. More of him please.
Baby Steps was (not) reviewed on PS5 using digital code provided by Devolver Digital. Additional code was provided for Steam.
