Baby Steps review: "If you craved a tougher hiking challenge than Death Stranding, this is for you – though prepare to get dropped from many great heights"

This Baby Steps game, man. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it, and sometimes I bounce between the two emotions several times within the same 10 minutes. It's unique, it's clever, it's memorable… and if you drew a graph of my enjoyment over time, it would look like an ECG display.

The fundamental mechanic – you move by lifting and directing each leg individually, and shifting your character's weight in the direction you want to go – has been wonderfully implemented. Although Bennett Foddy is a member of the team, the controls bear little resemblance to QWOP, which is purposefully designed for you to fail. Instead, movement is challenging but perfectly fair. I fell into a fairly effective walking rhythm within seconds of first picking up the controller, and eventually, I was able to stomp around for minutes at a time without falling over.

Climb fighter

Also unlike QWOP, there's a meaningful narrative. You play as Nate, a 35 year old man wasting his life away on the couch (in a onesie) eating junk food, watching One Piece, and getting high. When he hears his parents call him for a family meeting that's likely about what he's doing with his life, he pops out of existence, because men would rather enter a surreal world molded by their damaged psyche than go to therapy.

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As Foddy told us in January, Death Stranding was a "huge inspiration" for Baby Steps. Not in terms of supernatural threats and phenomenally subtext-free character names, but in terms of lengthy hiking sections in open environments. In fact, this is in effect one giant hike. You'll waddle, stomp, stumble, and fall through deserts, picturesque mountains, colorful fields, and more. I'm not going to make the same few 'walking simulator' jokes I imagine you'll see elsewhere. Instead, I'll point out that in order to truly understand Baby Steps, you should think of it as a mountaineering game.

Death Stranding comparisons are apt to a point, but this has much more in common with Jusant and, especially, the upcoming Cairn. There's an awful lot of climbing, and everything from rocks a few feet tall to an imposing mountain trek requires keeping your wayward legs under control. Trickier sections, especially, are puzzles to be solved. Is that section of rock wide enough to safely hold your foot? Where would you place your foot next? And after that? And then after that?

The further you go, the more complex things get, putting your feetsies to the test. Moving at what passes for speed in Baby Steps is the only way to climb certain slopes, and often, you'll need to make sure that you're approaching at just the right angle. Some routes are entirely optional – if you keep failing on one path to the next section, there's probably a (slightly) simpler route nearby – but there's no such thing as an easy option.

You will fall, and very often. Slip out of your walking rhythm for just a moment? Fall. Lift your leg a little too low when trying to step over something? Fall. Hit your upper body on a wall mid-stride? Fall. Misjudge the gradient of a slope? Fall. And so on and so forth.

There's so much to love here. The difficulty inherent in even the simplest of traversal provides regular shots of satisfaction when you overcome it, and the world is full of weird and wonderful surprises that reward exploration. The environments and the nature of gameplay come together, too, to subtly tell a story about emotional growth, independence, self-awareness, and empathy. Okay, it's also a game about a man with a booty juicy enough to earn him a slot in Overwatch, but there's depth if you're willing to see it.

Every criticism, though, leads back to the fact that the fun to frustration ratio is completely out of whack. Failure is a thread sewn into the experience to keep it held together, which is fine. What isn't fine, is the fact that gaps between attempts at certain challenges are far, far too long. Some falls will see you lose a lot of progress, and on top of that, if you slide down a slope you'll spend two to 20 seconds watching Nate on his back before you can even begin to get back to where you were. Watching him flop about and moan like this for extended periods is kind of funny the first 1,256 times, but the gag loses its appeal somewhat eventually. If you find Silksong boss runbacks unfair and frustrating, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Call the QWOPs

Check the Steam pages for Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and Baby Steps. The former repeatedly and gleefully advertises itself as a game intended to frustrate and infuriate you. The latter uses the phrases "serene mountains" and "at your own pace". Baby Steps invites a much wider audience into its world, as demonstrated by the strange but extremely accessible control scheme. Hardcore Foddy fans have plenty of options to test themselves, but even the most welcoming path through the game is littered with irregular explosions of extreme frustration. Not difficulty spikes, but absolutely infuriating sections that bear no resemblance to the experience immediately before and after them. There were many times where I was being subjected to Baby Steps rather than playing it.

The camera has a tendency to exacerbate the situation at the worst moments, struggling to give you a good view of your surroundings at certain angles and in certain situations. Unforgivably, this includes some sections where it's important to see where you're placing your feet for precision. Baby Steps could do with a foot cam. Sorry to all the disappointed visitors that SEO summoned here with the phrase 'foot cam'.

I was angered more often than I should have been. I also risked my life for an overripe banana, very slowly and very awkwardly kicked a ball into a net, and awoke to an Australian donkey/human hybrid waving its didgeridoo in my face. It's impossible to hate a game that offers experiences like these.

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