Baby Steps review – Stupid, juvenile, compelling art

I want to begin by saying that, before I’d ever played Baby Steps, I essentially wrote it off as “streamer bait,” frustration for frustration’s sake, and nothing that could be a truly fulfilling or thoughtful gaming experience. More than a week later, I now stand entirely corrected. Baby Steps is one of the strangest games I have ever played, with more full-frontal male nudity than I’ve seen in a video game before, with one of the silliest primary game mechanics of any games I’ve ever played. And I genuinely believe it to be one of the better examples of “games as art” (I’m bringing 2010 discourse back) that I’ve ever played.

Baby Steps is an open world exploration game inspired by Death Stranding and QWOP. Developed by Bennett Foddy – best known for QWOP and Getting Over It – along with Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch (who previously worked with Foddy on Ape Out), Baby Steps is proudly the kind of game that a triple-A publisher would never let fly. 

Protagonist Nate is an insecure manchild, physically unfit from years of sitting in his basement, smoking weed, eating pizza, and watching One Piece (he’s me). He turns down advice at every turn, wishing to appear as independent and masculine as possible, but easily caves to social pressure from those that are cooler and more comfortable than him. He’s slightly pathetic, and purposely designed to be as relatable as possible to thousands of gamers the world over. Even his awkward, stuttering dialogue reminds me of conversations I’ve had in the past where the words I wanted just wouldn’t leave my lips. From moment one, the traditional power fantasy of embodying a powerful player character is shattered.

That translates to the first moments of gameplay, too. While video games have become relatively homogenous in terms of control schemes – you go into most games assuming that the left stick will move your character, and the right stick will move your camera, and in any game with a shooting mechanic you know what the triggers will do – in Baby Steps, you can’t even walk normally. Heavily inspired by the aforementioned QWOP, Baby Steps has players lifting their left and right feet individually, moving them in the air along with Nate’s momentum, and placing them down. One by one, each step has to be made manually. Initially, this makes it difficult to progress a few feet.

Like Death Stranding, the various terrain and surfaces that Nate can place his feet on are acted upon by natural forces – like gravity and friction – which mean sometimes you can just stand still, and other times fast, small steps are required to make any progress. The game starts off relatively softly, with muddy hillsides being your biggest threat, but canyons pop up later on.

Over time, this nuisance becomes a fascinating way to interact with the world. Like trying to pre-plan a journey on a map in Death Stranding, or surveying the horizon before gliding toward it in Breath of the Wild, planning is a necessity to get the most out of the world. Getting somewhere doesn’t just require you to hold the accelerator or push the stick forward until you arrive, you must manually place each foot in front of the other, so if there’s a point of interest on the horizon, you’ll split hairs over the effort it’ll take to get there and any potential lost progress.

But Baby Steps asks you questions with its design, poking you as if to say ‘but what is progress?’ If progress is finishing a game, then yes, by all means, head straight up. Learn the subtleties of the movement mechanics well enough, and you can stride right over steep inclines as if they were cobbled steps. But if progress is having an experience, seeing as much as you can in the world, and learning those movement mechanics in more depth, then you should absolutely step away from the beaten path and you’ll find so much more to see and do. Step away from that beaten path more, and you just might master Nate’s wobbly legs and dodgy center of gravity. 

It’s very deliberate. Foddy and his pals have developed a world that is fascinating and absurdist, while making it outrageous to actually explore. It’s the anti-open world game and, more often than not, the journey to get somewhere is far more fraught with tension and intrigue than anything you find at the destination. Unless, that is, what you find is yourself.

Nate is an inherently unlikable character, and that’s why it’s so frustrating that he’s so relatable. Unfortunately, he just like me for real. And it hurts. Life can sometimes be easier when we’re locked away in our basements watching One Piece, it’s way more difficult to go out into the world, climb your way up, just to get knocked back down again and again, whether that’s because of your own arrogance or the unfairness of reality. I have acted unlike myself for the sake of other people, and I have said no – when I really meant yes – out of politeness or foolishness. Nate is all the mistakes we make, and especially we men.

Baby Steps has a lot of references to male genitalia, whether that’s in the form of crude graffiti, or Nate’s constant need to urinate in complete privacy, or how the anthropomorphized donkey men of the world don’t wear anything below the waist. It’s being swung in your – and Nate’s – face constantly, and it’s unrelenting. A bit like the monsters of Silent Hill, these can be seen as manifestations of Nate’s own insecurities, and say much more about him – and possibly ourselves – than we would like. It didn’t occur to me until I saw the save file names of Alpha, Beta, and Sigma – Greek letters, but also BS classifications of masculinity – but when you tie together the loose threads and themes of Baby Steps, there’s a clear authorial intent and purpose.

Baby Steps would never get funded by the likes of EA, Microsoft, or Ubisoft, and that’s precisely why it’s art. It’s subversive, it deconstructs, it paints a picture, and it doesn’t really care whether or not you get it. It’s not made for you to complete – despite a main path that’s relatively simple compared to optional objectives – it’s made for you to savor and consider. It requires pondering over and absorbing, and that’s almost impossible in a long stretch. It is borderline streamer bait, after all, and some of us need to take a step away when they feel the rage building up. That’s healthy! I think. Nevertheless, it made me feel, as good art is supposed to, and it’s guaranteed to make you feel something too.