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It's a terrifying thing for Bennett Foddy to hand you a controller. Joined by co-developers Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch of the excellent Ape Out, Foddy tells me at GDC that their new game, Baby Steps, is "a step away" from the rage games that have built his reputation. Games like QWOP, which nobody is actually good at, and especially Getting Over It, the cauldron-lobbing sensation that some people, in a terrifying demonstration of the human spirit, have gotten good at. Channeling the energy of legendary chef Marco Pierre White insisting that he didn't make Gordon Ramsay cry, but rather, Ramsay chose to make himself cry, Foddy says "you can inflict that on yourself playing Baby Steps if you want to. Some people will want to, if they're fans of my work in particular."
So begins the most harrowing appointment I've had in 12 years of games journalism: playing Baby Steps in front of its developers while trying to sustain an interview. This is a "literal walking simulator" – Death Stranding, The Stanley Parable, Firewatch, all the rest, eat your heart out – that puts you in control of a chunky, anxious, onesie-equipped manchild named Nate as he, torn from his mom's basement, navigates an absurdist dreamscape one foot at a time. The more you fall, the dirtier Nate's onesie gets – the better to embellish his considerable ass.
Your triggers control your feet, either in ponderous strides or with careful pressure and analog stick movements finding traction on rocks and dirt and planks. This is about the extent of the game's tutorial, in part because, as Boch says, "if you play a video game with anyone on this team, they're just jamming the skip button as hard as possible." Better to put one foot in front of the other and figure it out by feel. I realize now, listening to the recording of this demo, that I may have accidentally skipped some tutorializing by giving an NPC the cold shoulder, which makes the following even funnier.
Pride
I've played QWOP and Getting Over It, so I didn't jump into this totally unprepared. I took to it pretty quickly, Foddy says, though that praise proved to be rather ominous foreshadowing. Foot up, foot down, find your rhythm, and off you go, plodding along whatever path you've set for yourself and praying it isn't one of the brutal optional ones, or perhaps that you didn't just go in a big pointless circle while the devs watched from the sidelines. Baby Steps began with the idea that a silly movement game could have a massive skill ceiling, and I can feel that for myself. The odds aren't stacked against you, and a real master can make the game look not just easy, but agile and utterly intuitive. The speedruns will be biblical.
This is fundamentally a simple game, and a funny one. It's manchild isekai. It's funny when it tries to be, and also when it doesn't have to try. In rare scripted moments, Nate communicates almost exclusively through stammered lies and desperate excuses spat out by his intense awkwardness. An oddball soundtrack of nature sounds, a boggy barnyard jamboree, maintains a surreal and unpredictable atmosphere. Slapstick and improv and that self-inflicted pain fill out laugh-a-minute pacing that matches the rhythm of gameplay. A player falling for 30 minutes straight, only to look to the left and see a much easier path? "To me, that kind of thing is hilarious," Foddy says.
"This game is a lot of really high-effort jokes," Cuzzillo says. "What if we tried to make a AAA game? That'd be funny. Five years later, it's still pretty funny."
Rhythm is the word. There's true zen under the intimidating shell of Baby Steps. Nate can move at a smooth clip if you've got the hands for it. The team says most people are pretty comfortable with standard walking after about 20 minutes, but by my math, that's you mastering roughly 1% of what this game can do. The world is capable of real serenity, too, when it's not making you the butt of the joke. Drink in the painstakingly crafted, physically simulated environment and have a go at orienteering. Take the steep path just to prove you can. There are no invisible walls. If you can see it, you can go there. Well, you could, but can you? Prove it. And yes, you can Skyrim – it's a verb – up a mountain if you really want.
What are the kinds of things that we could bring to it that no one would ever say yes to at a multinational Ubisoft studio?
Maxi Boch
"We wanted to be able to get to the place where things that are difficult look difficult and should be difficult," Foddy explains. "There'll be a tower where you have to climb up just using your feet to find little cracks and stuff." In these moments Baby Steps is a smidge like Cairn, a mountain climbing sim from the Furi studio, but a bit more hostile and much less serious, yet serious about being unserious, and so committed to the bit that you can't help but get caught up in its energy. Refining this type of game without losing the memorable, emergent screwups is an art all its own.
"Some things are allowed to be janky or ugly or not realistic, and other things we really, really sweat the details of," Foddy says.
"It's just trying to figure out what players are going to experience the most and what's gonna add the most to it, and what do we like doing?" adds Boch. And "there's definitely critique of some AAA tropes that's embedded into this. It's an opportunity to both poke fun and be a direct parody, but also at times try to push on, well, what if AAA games were more like this? What are the kinds of things that we could bring to it that no one would ever say yes to at a multinational Ubisoft studio?"
And the fall
As I grime up Nate's pajamas while negotiating a bridge that threatens to send me back to a previous area – not something I've seen in a Ubisoft game, I'll say – a serious conversation on friction and motivation thankfully carries itself in the background.
"There's this moment that we see our play testers in, and when we're playing it, where we decide that something's possible even though you just failed it eight times in a row," Foddy throws out. "It's a rock or it's a tree, it's minding its own business. It's not telling you, hey, can you get up here? You're deciding at some point, I think I can get up there, and that moment is where the player starts to sort of set the friction for themselves. We've really tried to zero in on that feeling as much as we can."
An intense focus on mastering the character and control scheme brings a litany of tiny goals, I reason, adding that "right now my goal is to get over this fucking rock."
"Yeah, exactly," Foddy responds.
"A lot of that pulls out of taking everything seriously and resisting the gameplay tropes that are normal in this space," Boch says. "We insist on dirt having exactly this much traction and exactly this much slope, and that's how it is and that's how it always will be. We're not creating friction that doesn't exist to then give you some means of conquering that friction. We're presenting friction and leaving it unchanged for you to change in response to it." Here, I agree, some AAA games could take notes. Resistance and insistence feel like the guiding principles of Baby Steps. That, and a very big butt.
The hammer truly drops when I hand the controller to Cuzzillo for him to demonstrate a few points about how the controls evolved over time. Reader, he could have walked on water in real life and I would have been less impressed. I thought I was doing decently. What hubris. With Cuzzillo at the wheel, Nate's feet struck footholds like eels sniping at fish. In my hands the controller was a sledgehammer swung at flies, and I thought myself a god. Cuzzillo held it like a scalpel, deftly maneuvering with minimal energy and infuriating precision. A crumbling shed and cliff face, scaled in an instant. It was amazing. It was embarrassing. And it made me want to play Baby Steps again.
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