For the creators of Baby Steps, one of 2025's best and weirdest games, there's no room or reason to surrender creativity to AI: "The player is in communion with a human designer"

You will not, and did not, play another game like Baby Steps this year. Nate, a deadbeat 35-year-old man, is torn from his basement by the hand of fate and stranded on a purgatorial mountain where he must climb and climb and climb – and, occasionally, encounter extraordinarily well-endowed donkey men. Creators Bennett Foddy, Gabe Cuzzillo, and Maxi Boch challenge you to ascend. One painstaking step at a time, fingers and thumbs working in concert to puppet a man who is two parts ass and three parts anxiety, piloting controls at once surgically accurate and infuriatingly delicate, you climb. What awaits you at the top? A nice hat? Self-actualization? Two hats?

Baby Steps is an act of contemplation cleverly disguised as an exercise in patience. Consequently, it might be interpreted as a rage game – 2017's viral hit Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy has perhaps contributed to this reputation – not as something to be played but rather to be reacted to in a stream or short-form video.

Fortunately, as Foddy and Cuzzillo tell me, a lot of people did get it. Baby Steps will Trojan horse you into existential debate, and behind the rage-bait mirage, that was the whole point. And at "a pivotal time right now in terms of what games are going to look like going forward," as Foddy puts it, it's a strong argument not just for a human touch in games, but for a human to touch everything.

What is a man

The first thing I ask Foddy and Cuzzillo is how they feel after cooling down for a few months. "I think we feel pretty tired," Foddy replies, earning the first of many commiserative laughs from Cuzzillo.

"But I think the thing that, at least for me, I was most scared about, putting it out, was that people wouldn't really engage with the deeper parts of what's going on," Foddy continues. "They would just see it as a game about falling over and kind of a masocore rage game, and not engage with the themes. And that hasn't been the case. People have really been grasping what we were laying down, for the most part, some of them even getting to the kind of fairly deep, harder to uncover themes that are in there. And it's been really gratifying, I think, that people come at it for a silly experience, and then they actually come around to seeing that there's something else in there on top of that."

"There are a lot of comments that are like, 'I thought this was going to be so dumb. But actually!'" Cuzzillo adds.

"I think it Trojan horses you into a lot of things," Foddy agrees. "It Trojan horses you into difficult gameplay in a certain way, hopefully into thinking about why you play video games and what you're getting out of it, and all that good stuff. And then there's a layer of making you consider gendered aspects of how you're playing video games. If people felt Trojan-horsed into that, that's cool. I think that was a lot of the intent."

It may be saying the obvious out loud, but intent feels especially worth dissecting right now, in no small part because a major debate in this pivotal time for games is if "everything starts getting done with AI," as Foddy wonders.

Even ignoring essential copyright and labor implications, my stance on gen AI in games has always been that no matter how convincing generated content might become, it unavoidably loses something because you're sacrificing intent – a full half of art alongside interpretation. Foddy seems to be of a similar mind. Cuzzillo as well; he says he's used gen AI in a "light way" already, asking ChatGPT questions about code even if he hates how "corporate" its "awful" code is. It's more of a search engine at a time where, Foddy says, "Google doesn't work anymore," in part thanks to gen AI.

"I don't want it to write any code for me ... I like doing that part. I'm not going to give that up. But all the stuff that Bennett does, I think we could have it do," Cuzzillo jokes. "I do feel like how we're going to use it is probably going to change a lot. Right now we're using it very little, and we have to sort out how we want to use it, I guess, and what the cultural norms are around that stuff, as they're changing extremely rapidly. And also, what is valuable to do yourself versus what do you not want to do?"

Do it your own damn self

Foddy puts a fine point on it: "We like to touch every part, and we like to feel as though every part has some kind of creative expression in it that comes from us. And there are parts of making games that are not creative at all, things that are like plumbing, be it automated testing or tools work or something like that. There are places it's not creative, but almost everything in making an indie game is creative, and we're here to do the creative work. We're not here to hand that off.

"If we were interested in having anybody else doing that stuff, we would have hired employees, and we didn't do that," he continues. "So I think that if you talk to indie game developers about that, you'd probably get that ethos coming through fairly strongly. But at least for me, it's not like a political thing. We're just trying to figure out what works for us and what doesn't work. It's been a trend toward touching everything and doing everything by hand, rather than away from that and toward more automation, and that's coming from aesthetics more than from politics for us."

With Baby Steps, the team saw over and over again that doing things manually was superior. Going into the game, especially after finishing the stellar musical roguelike Ape Out, they expected to use a lot more procedural generation (which is very different from generative AI) to fill out the big world they wanted for Baby Steps. But over time, Foddy says doing everything, "all the rocks and trees and all the dirt and all of everything," felt better. "It was better if everything was handmade in a slap-dash way than procedurally generated in a really polished way," and he thinks "I probably will carry that into future work for the rest of my life."

Cuzzillo, who ironically has been learning to climb in real life post-launch, likens it to the texture and intimacy of handholds and footholds. "Climbing, in Baby Steps and in life, just as an activity, is about taking these kinds of really small details of how these objects are placed and learning about them deeply and becoming deeply familiar with them, and then learning to love that," he reasons.

"Oh man, this rock is at 50 degrees. And that's interesting, in Baby Steps, because I can place my foot on it and push off it, but I can't hold it there, and so that has certain affordances. And when you start caring about that level of detail, and you start loving a small configuration of footholds, it feels kind of crazy that it would be procedural generation at that point. You're caring about it on a different level."

Foddy notes that "handcraftedness" has been a guiding star for indie games for decades. But there's been a change in kind for him and the team lately that sounds purpose-built for weathering the AI wave. "What we tried to bring out, both in Baby Steps and also in my game, Getting Over It, was to make a bit more explicit that the player is in communion with a human designer, and that there is a discussion going on between those people. I think that we did that really extensively in Baby Steps. I think the author's voice comes [through]."

"Quite literally," Cuzzillo interjects, referring to Baby Steps' improv voice cast of – checks notes – mostly Bennett Foddy, Gabe Cuzzillo, and Maxi Boch.

"Yeah, literally, you can hear us," Foddy continues. "It was why we left, like, breaking in the improvised cutscenes and stuff. But also even just in the level design, I think that there's a lot of 'authors making jokes with the player,' that kind of thing."

"Even how you skip the cutscenes," Cuzzillo points out.

"Yeah, cutscenes don't want to be skipped," Foddy says, tipping his hat to a 28-minute Baby Steps cutscene that only plays if you skip too many normal ones. "That's to remind you that there were people making the cutscenes, you know? So yeah, I think we're trying to make work that highlights that there's a person, and we'd never really want to kind of walk away from that."

One foot forward

Five years of production later, Foddy says it's "incredible that we can get paid to make something like this." The team didn't have "very strong expectations," or even very clear ones, for sales of something as out-there as Baby Steps. Foddy jokes "we'd all like to sell as well as Hollow Knight: Silksong," but the game has done solidly in the team's view and in publisher Devolver Digital's. Looking ahead, Cuzzillo, who owns up to a growing habit of five-year games, speculates "we're gonna try to make a couple small, non-commercial things, probably, once we feel able to work again."

Foddy, like many devs this year, is also eyeing some potential smaller projects. "There's a little bit of that in the water right now," he says. "I think we were looking at Megabonk, it came out the same week as us, it was trending."

"Sold 500 times as many copies," Cuzzillo jokes.

"We were looking at that, and I was talking to [Jan Willem Nijman] from Vlambeer and saying, 'Oh, maybe we should do something that's a little smaller scope like that, you know, that's a little bit quick to get out there,'" Foddy adds. "That looks fun. And he was just like, 'What you're saying is the normal indie developer fantasy of working less hard. It looks like they didn't work hard, but they probably did, and they're probably just as burned out and just as tired as you.' It's kind of a grass-is-greener type thing when you're looking at those short projects."

"Maybe we'll just do some kind of free, small things just to keep the brain active, creative juices flowing," he concludes. "But as soon as things start getting 3D, as soon as they start looking nice, it sort of blows out to five years. So sooner or later, I'm sure that'll happen again."

Wondering how Baby Steps fared in our annual Game of the Year ranking? Be sure to check out our ranking of the best games of 2025.