Nate probably needed a bit of a wake up call, a nudge or a hefty shove to get him out of his parent’s basement, out of his onesie and into some proper clothes, and out into the real world, but Baby Steps teleporting him out to a strange world without giving him shoes or any kind of survival gear is probably a bit much. Heck, he might actually be in need of physical therapy to relearn how to walk.
Coming from the mind behind QWOP and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy – so, it’s Bennett Foddy in collaboration with Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch – you should know what to expect from Baby Steps. It’s a game where the very act of walking is part of the challenge, and where failure will send you slipping and sliding back down like a cruel game of snakes and ladders… but without ladders.
Walking is pretty simple, though. It’s not as utterly basic as in most games, and needing more actual thought than you put into your day-to-day life, but easy enough to figure out. Left trigger lifts your left foot, right trigger lifts your right, and pushing a direction on the analogue stick moves your weight and legs in that direction. That’s all that you need to clumsily stagger through the landscape before you.
You will repeatedly end up falling flat on your face in Baby Steps, whether taking too large a step and simply losing balance, catching a foot on an inconvenient tree root, or failing to find sufficient purchase on a steep, slick incline. Every pratfall sees Nate’s onesie become progressively dirtier with a dynamic soilage system that makes belly flopping into a stream or pool a nice way to clean off. It helps that “swimming” looks as utterly insane as you could imagine.
It didn’t have to be this way. If only Nate had even a single non-awkward bone in his body and was able to accept the help of strangers. There’s something very relatable about that, of social anxiety making it difficult to interact with others. First there’s the groundskeeper Jim, who offers to help Nate to get better equipped for his walk, and who then starts to lightly antagonise while still being about as helpful as possible. Then there’s Mike the Hiker, who extols the virtues of having a map, of a grappling hook and more. Oh, and then there’s the anthropomorphic donkeys who only ever have shirts and tops on. One for the jennies out there, but you can turn on a bit of censorship if donkey dicks is a bit much.
All of these thoroughly awkward interactions have an improvisational style to them, and there’s an enjoyable amount of cringe, for those that like that kind of thing. It’s very of the moment.
I admire the commitment to the bit – both in terms of the narrative style and the gameplay – and there is a satisfaction and enjoyment to be had in overcoming the obstacles and world put in your way, but after a while I just found Baby Steps becoming a massively unenjoyable chore.
There’s a whole world and map that’s been created, filled with oddities and secrets to find, from watchtowers, to strange miniaturised buildings, fairgrounds that have sunk into the mud, but actually exploring it was the last thing I wanted to do after reaching the second campfire. Even the lure of hats was only enough to get me to go out of my way once, no least because fall off when you take too heavy a tumble, and then you obviously need to head back over and pick them up again.
A big part of my waning enthusiasm is down to never managing to truly adapt to the game’s walking. It’s insultingly easy to describe, and I can often get into the flow and rhythm of walking, but then I slip out of tempo, Nate falls flat on his face, and I spend the next five minutes repeatedly falling over until I have a hope of getting it back. It’s even worse after tackling a section that needs precision, where I shift to much more manual inputs, whether hovering each foot over a thin plank before placing it – Nate surprisingly has exceptional balance – or shuffle stepping up a slippery incline. After doing that, I’ve got no hope of being able to walk regularly for a while.
And so I don’t want to explore much, outside of getting a bit lost and failing to see the path ahead – though the section that leads you round in a circle for a few minutes did get a wry smile from me. When I did I found a place to grab a vase that some signs had claimed was stolen, only to smash it on rocks about 30 seconds later, or I tried to climb a swing up onto a tree and ended up plummeting into a pool that took me at least an hour to finally, painfully, drag my way back out of. Thankfully there’s no fall damage.
There’s no undo, there’s no reverting even back to the start of a chapter, there’s nothing to do, but sigh despairingly and figure out the painstaking path back or new route you need to follow. In fairness, the world has been carefully constructed so that you generally shouldn’t fall back too far if you’re following the main path, and that there’s often another route through, back or around to follow.
I know that’s meant to be part of the enjoyment here, that push and pull of failure and success. I see streamers basically zipping up and through the world with easy. What am I doing wrong or different? Are they playing with mouse and keyboard instead of controller? Am I the one that’s out of touch?
Honestly, that’s probably the best way to be able to enjoy this game, whether that’s watching someone play it or sharing it with a friend by passing the pad back and forth.
