Baby Steps Hands-On Preview – One Small Step for a Man
Join me as I take my first steps into the world of Baby Steps, a new game developed by Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy, about a middle-aged man learning to walk as he treks through perilous terrains in an attempt to find his way back home.
Sure, walking may sound easy to you. I mean, it’s probably second nature for many of us, but for our protagonist, walking is anything but easy.
Go Touch Grass, They Said. You’ll Be Fine, They Said
Baby Steps is a game about a guy named Nate, who is presumably a middle-aged man still living with his parents. Lying on his living room couch about to watch a new episode of One Piece (yes, the popular anime), Nate finds himself mysteriously transported to an unknown world. He doesn’t know how or even why he was teleported here, though he does know that he must find his way back home, which involves doing something he has seemingly never done before: walking.
It’s a straightforward premise that immediately suggests the story isn’t something to take seriously. It’s written in a more satirical way, as evident by the interactions you’ll have with some of the NPCs littered in the world. It’s pretty funny if you’re a fan of a certain humor, and I found it fitting for the world that developers Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy created here. There are hints of a mystery and a grander story at play, though the focus of Baby Steps certainly wasn’t big on the story, at least in the demo.
No, that focus comes in the form of its gameplay, which is, for the short of it, a walking simulator. But before you write this off as another Death Stranding (a fantastic game by the way), Baby Steps isn’t solely about walking through a valley of gorgeous vistas. That’s part of it, but anyone familiar with developers’ past works (QWOP and Getting Over It) knows this isn’t a simple walking game.
As I mentioned earlier, Nate doesn’t know, or perhaps has barely walked in his life. We can assume that he mooches off his parents while comfortably living on the couch we see during the intro. So when he gets teleported into this strange new world, the first thing that happens to Nate is that he falls down a hill, with his body going into an uncontrollable ragdoll state. It’s pretty comical to see, and when he finally does get back up on his feet, you, the player, are ready to help Nate take his first steps.
The controls are simple: you have your camera, a stick for controlling the direction the characters move, and two trigger buttons, which correspond to the left and right feet. The layout is nothing too complicated, and your goal is to walk and figure out how to get back home. So let’s take a look to see how our first steps go.
Honestly, it’s about what I expected to happen, and I’m pretty confident this, or some other mishap, has happened to everyone else who has played this demo.
This is essentially the real premise of Baby Steps. A game about your struggle to get a man to walk properly. It sounds stupid, and it actually is pretty stupid, but sometimes the most stupid of things end up being the best things. Again, if you’ve played QWOP and/or Getting Over It, you already know exactly what you’re getting yourself into here. If you haven’t, well, QWOP is a free browser game, so there’s no excuse there. But to sum up my experience in one word: Frustrating.
Usually, that’s not a good thing. In any other situation, I would probably be ranting about how terrible a game is for making me feel like that. But that’s Baby Steps’ goal. It wants to break you down, it wants to try and make you so mad at it that you turn it off. Yet, in that frustration, you realize you’re not going to give up; you’re not going to back down just because the game tells you to. You’re gonna do it. You’re going to beat this game. Then you proceed to master and nail down every step, and have a perfect stretch of walk. You feel good, you feel confident, you feel invincible. Oh, what’s this, a tiny little rock? Ha, I eat rocks for breakfast, I’m just gonna step right over you…wait, no, what, no don’t please, no NATE. WHAT ARE YOUR LEGS DOING, NATE? WHY ARE YOU BENDING LIKE THAT! YOU SON OF A BITCH, DON’T YOU DO IT, DON’T YOU DARE DO IT. His legs then bend backwards, almost as if they’re about to snap in half, causing you to stumble and begin rolling down a hill where you first started. God, dammit, Nate, I hate you so much right now, but you know what, I’m going to try this again, and I will get it right this time. Cues the several hours of falling montage.
Now, some of that was exaggerated, because truth be told, it’s not entirely as punishing as, say, Getting Over It. That game can be beaten in less than an hour, yet it took me over 20 hours because I kept falling off the level. Baby Steps seems much more approachable, given its open-world-like design that allows players to approach things however they want. It’s still pretty hard when it wants to be, but players now have a ton of different avenues they can take to get to whatever destination they’re trying to reach. One such example was I wanted to avoid a pile of rocks going up a hill, because I knew I was going to fall from it and have to rewalk up everything again. So I decided to take another path that was on the other side of it. Still just as dangerous as it was, bringing me through a higher inclined slope, but it did give me that option to do that, and try to find easier ways to go about things.
Overall, although my time with Baby Steps was brief, I enjoyed what I played here, even if that enjoyment was often accompanied by plenty of yelling and anger. There’s no telling just how difficult Baby Steps will get, but based on some of the past trailers, I think fans of the games mentioned above will be in for something special here. Baby Steps seems to be the developer’s biggest, most ambitious title yet, as the world itself seems to offer some rather interesting things, but in terms of activities and narratively. I cannot wait to see how the final release ends; luckily, that wait won’t be long, as Baby Steps launches on the PS5 and PC on September 8, 2025.
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