I've been climbing a hill in Baby Steps, a physics-based open-world Steam Next Fest demo, for 30 minutes. Suddenly, I put a foot wrong, fall from the rickety bridge I'm trying to cross, and spend the next 20 to 30 seconds sliding slowly, inevitably, back into the muddy hole right at the bottom of the slope. And I laugh almost the entire way down.
Baby Steps comes from a team that includes Bennet Foddy, who arguably kickstarted the 'rage games' genre with 2017's Getting Over It. But physics-based suffering was not new to Foddy even then - perhaps his most famous work remains QWOP, a flash game which put players in charge of a track runner, and tasked them with completing their race while individually controlling their characters' limbs. Making it just a few steps was a huge achievement back then, and Foddy's bringing that same energy back with Baby Steps.
Thankfully, it's not long until you come across your first NPC. Watching Nate crash chaotically down from a one-foot drop, the friendly Jim immediately offers to help. Unfortunately, Nate is almost as inept socially as he is physically, and what appears to be a blend of acute embarrassment, deep awkwardness, and bizarrely misplaced pride ensures that he swiftly bats away every new person he meets.
For the hero of a traditional story, that might be understandable, but in the grimy, largely desolate world of Baby Steps, in which Nate is by far the least capable person in the entire environment, it's obviously a mistake. But with no agency over anything other than Nate's leg muscles, you've got no option but to try and walk forward.
Eventually, after many, many falls and much squirming and swearing on Nate's behalf, you'll start to find some kind of rhythm. Granted, pretty much any bump in the road will cause yet another faceplant, but I began to work out the exact pace I needed to hit to keep Nate's right leg following his left, in a motion that looked a little bit like walking forward. Eventually, I even managed to navigate a high ledge, climbing up towards a makeshift camp to rest for a moment. Doing so took around a dozen attempts, and more close control of a characters' foot placement than I've ever experienced before, but I made it.
Emboldened by my new ability to place one foot in front of the other, I boldly set out from my camp. Nate's grunts of effort and yelps of panic no longer phased me - I could walk now. Or at least I could, until I found myself standing before a single plank placed across a shining flume of mud, stretching away up the hill to my right, and downwards to my left. Aiming carefully, I put one foot onto the wood in front of me. The other followed. Nate shuffled clumsily forward, but remained resolute on his makeshift bridge. And then I swung my foot forward too quickly, Nate pitched, and landed on his back in the mud on the left side of the plank.
It took about 30 seconds for me to lose all of the progress I'd spent 30 minutes working towards, as Nate lay on his back, sliding resolutely downwards. Eventually, the flume deposited him in a hole right at the base of the hill I'd been climbing. It's a fate that anyone familiar with the kind of game that Bennet Foddy helped popularize will be painfully familiar with, but I felt none of that pain. Nate's pathetic form had me in fits of laughter, and as I squelched my way free of the hole, I relished the chance to retrace my steps, one foot before the other.
Elsewhere in Next Fest is You've Changed, which turns an innocent game of Spot the Difference evil.
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