Baby Steps

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• Recommended Posted September 26, 2025 on Steam If Kojima would be brave enough, this is what Death Stranding gameplay would be like.
• Recommended Posted October 2, 2025 on Steam story is stupid gameplay is stupid controls are stupid protagonist is stupid cutscenes are massively stupid the game is perfect
• Recommended Posted September 25, 2025 on Steam "In baby steps, there are achievable set of path that are more or less safe and easy and we are constantly tempting off that and inviting you to try something more difficult and something that seems optional and hard, but that you don't have to do " - Bennett Foddy This is a pretty good description of what the game is, a big open world, with a lots of extra challenge around the sides, but nothing forcing you to try these challenges at all beside yourself. Kick all the can, no reward, collect all the fruit, nothing (beside the fruit cutscene). But even worst, there is nothing to even tell you how many fruit/can there are total so you might have missed some and you will never know. There isn't even an achievement to finish the game, or get the "secret" ending. Most of the achievement are for the fire tower quest, and speedrun ish related. For me, i enjoyed the exploration of the map and everything, but was often disappointed by the lacks of reward being given, which to be fair, perfectly fit the first quote that i mentioned which i why you should be aware of that. The control were mostly fine but a bit glitchy at some obstacle with hole like the giant ladder, the camera was also pretty bad when near a wall, but otherwise everything else was fine. If you only go for the main story, it might take you 5-10 hours depending on your skill, if you want to explore everything else despite not getting reward, expect at least 50 hours, and you probably won't even know if you got everything.
• Recommended Posted October 8, 2025 on Steam I don't know how to start this. I'll keep this sort of thing short and simple. Baby Steps is a game by resident hard-game maker Bennett Foddy, as well as Maxi Boch and Gabe Cuzzillo. It is a game where you play as a 30-something "hikikomori" / shut-in named Nate / Nathan after he gets transported to an abberation of Australia, a bunch of mountains and various modern day appliances / life things like pizza boxes, bottles of something and lots of other things. The gameplay itself is simple; left foot, right foot. Walk forward. Pirouette on the spot because Nate's calves are very strong and he has the footgrippage of someone who probably has callouses on their callouses. It's quite serene when you're not falling. The music of the game itself is... strange, experimental and kind of... what's that word again? Diegetic, that's right. I would love to see more people talk about it, maybe a soundtrack released to go alongside with it. I didn't manage to find Hornet anywhere, so that sucks. But on a more serious note? This game made me re-evaluate how I've lived my life. I've been taking steps as of recently to go outside more often, work out more often to try and lose my weight and really try to open up to people, real life people, about things. It's all because of the hidden story that this game tells with Nate. Nate himself is a sad, sometimes comedic character that is all too reminsicent of people like myself. Granted, I've already gone to a lot of therapy, probably way more than Nate ever went to. And I find myself empathizing with him, knowing that although all of the situations that he finds himself in are comedic, he ends up coming off more often as someone who's severely... abused. Some people might not see it the way I see it but his life is one of... abject suffering, disappointment and suffering. His father is a cruel bastard who ended up crippling his self-esteem and his developemental capabilities in many ways, his mother is someone who tried her best to support him in the face of his abusive father and his sister is someone who wasn't held to such a high standard like he was, supposedly. The supporting characters, Jim, Mike, Moose, Ethan, what have you, they could all be described pretty easily. Jim and Ethan are probably the "main" antagonists? Mike is more of a supporting character and Moose could be considered the secondary protagonist of the story. They all fit their roles pretty well, despite all of the dialogue in this game allegedly being improvised. I say allegedly because no amount of improvisation could load this game up with as much symbolism and genuinely "depressing-if-you-think-about-it" stuff. This game feels like the digital version of a sad clown. On the surface, a kind of schittpost-y game about a living failure, no Bloodborne, that gets most of its comedy from the dialogue and the many ways that Nate can fold, fall and give himself CTE but underneath is a genuinely philosophical, depressing story about parental abuse, peer pressure, self-esteem, anxiety, depression, self-harm and moving on. I recommend Baby Steps because of this. ... though, if i were you, i would download the quicksave mod. why? because some of the stuff you climb is genuinely, like... why. looking at you, manbreaker. In the end? Nate Jr. And The Baby Stepping is a masterful distillation of what it feels like to take control of your life. Please play Baby Steps. Hooroo.
• Recommended Posted September 27, 2025 on Steam I'll preface this review by saying that I think Baby Steps is a great game, though it's definitely not for everyone. From reading through other reviews, it seems that people who prefer more directed, linear experiences or people that find losing progress to be frustrating in an undesirable way are unlikely to enjoy this game. If either of those applies to you, I wouldn’t recommend the game. I want to caveat that by saying Baby Steps only slightly fits the feel of a "ragebait" game, with smaller setbacks more akin to Elden Ring than Getting Over it. While there are brutally difficult sections in Baby Steps with long punishments for failure, they're all optional; if you stick to progressing upwards, then the game is surprisingly accessible. With that out of the way, I want to talk about some of the mechanical feel of the game and what makes it so satisfying to play. Like many games focused on difficult movement, the controls are strange and unintuitive at first. Instead of opting for a bizarre, gimmicky form of locomotion (a la the hammer-wielding man in a pot), the developers chose the simplest, most intuitive movement possible: walking. We all know to walk as if we were born knowing, yet the control scheme forces us to re-learn it from scratch. The magic lies in the gradually growing overlap between your theoretical knowledge of walking and your in-game skill at it. It is an extremely satisfying process to so clearly feel that improvement. With each 30-60 minutes invested you notice that steps that would've put you on your ass you now pass almost thoughtlessly. The method of moving you're (re)learning is satisfying, but what elevates it further is the freedom you're given and the childlike way you naturally begin exploring the world. You start by looking only near to yourself, setting subconcious goals to move a few steps further down the path. Soon you’re spotting landmarks further afield, and plotting a route there like a hiker picking the safest path, but also like a child choosing to walk along every log, rock, curb, or bollard on the way. Often you'll scan for points of interest and will see an interesting boulder or what [i] feels [/i] like a route up a hill, then you'll set off to climb it for no reason other than some instinctual draw to walk there. I have loved almost rediscovering the part of myself that used to hop to touch signs, climb over fences instead of walking around them, or slip through doors that were closing - moving is joyous purely because we have the choice of how we move. The world of Baby Steps feels extremely intentionally designed - every step, the size of the rocks, the gaps between the platforms, which locations are visible or obscured - every time I fell on a awkwardly shaped surface or struggled with a particular gap, I knew that it had been intentionally designed to be exactly that way. the movements and challenges were a direct communication between the developers and myself; it felt no different from a friend having made a challenge explicitly for me. If someone you personally knew had made a riddle for you, or told you to beat their time in a racing game, you would feel a strong drive to give it everything you've got because you're certain that the challenge is doable and was designed with yourself in mind. The combination of the freedom I felt when setting my own challenges and goals combined with the intentionality of the level design gave way to an amazing feeling that I scarcely find from gaming: I felt as if my journey was fully unique to me. It was a journey that only my perspective would have chosen, and only my will would have struggled against; I owned my failures and celebrated my successes. After about a dozen hours, however, that feeling began to shift. To explain why, I need to talk about the game’s characters and story. If you haven’t finished Baby Steps or you feel there is even a slight possibility you will play it in the future, then please DO NOT read any further into this review. Reading further will diminish the experience. [spoiler]Let me start with the decision of Nate being the protagonist, and how he’s presented. Bennett Foddy described how the character of Nate was designed as so: “We started with the idea of a character who was just more nerdy and unprepared, then we gradually turned that dial up and up and up until he’s the most unprepared character we could imagine. That’s how we get to this failson in a onesie.” Nate isn't just unprepared though. At first glance, he's designed to be deeply unappealing. he's stereotypically unattractive, ungroomed, unflatteringly dressed (partly to resemble a baby), socially inept, deeply anxious, and profoundly insecure. Our introduction to him reinforces this negative impression: he's a 35 year-old living with his parents, rotting in his messy room, causing arguments between his parents, and seemingly too lazy even to eat dinner with them. The characteristics Nate has and the way he's presented exude negativity - he's not someone that you'd want to spend time with, nor look up to, his conversations with others are unpleasant, and he's reminiscent of the stereotypical women hating loser that makes his own shortcomings everyone else's problem. I found myself repulsed by Nate from the get-go and disliked him as if he were a bad person that had personally wronged me. He takes up so much of the screen and I just have to look at him. He doesn't accept help and [i]I[/i] have to deal with the consequences of that. He's a burden that I'm having to put up with similarly to his parents and society. Interestingly, I found that I didn't want to relate to Nate and that any time I did it made me feel upset with myself. I found that the experiences I shared with Nate became the things I hated most about him - Nate's refusal to accept assistance from others, his parents desire for him to be different, or his social anxiety. I found it painful to think about those shared experiences, and I tried to to mentally distance myself from him. But then I noticed something that [i]should[/i] have been obvious: Nate hadn’t done anything wrong. I knew almost nothing about him, yet I condemned him harshly. So I allowed myself to empathise with him. I challenged my kneejerk repulsion towards him and in doing so I started understanding Nate's feelings and vulnerabilities. He's unhappy, deeply insecure, socially anxious, awkward, uncertain, and probably feels like a burden. I know first hand how some of that feels. I also know how awful it is to worry that everyone sees you as the parts of yourself that you're the most insecure about instead of as a person... but that's exactly what I had done to Nate. As I played on, I found myself relating to Nate; not just for his struggles and insecurities, but also for his perseverance. I was sympathetic to his struggles with peer pressuring donkeys, his self-loathing, and even his falls. I started to genuinely like Nate and hoped he could find a happy life somehow. I stopped blaming him for his shortcomings and started rooting for his success. As an aside, the game became so much less frustrating and more satisfying when I shifted from getting angry at Nate and myself for falling, to believing in Nate and wanting him to make it. That earlier sense of “my unique journey” evolved into something richer: our shared journey. Every setback and every victory belonged to both of us. The already significant satisfaction from succeeding became an even more emotionally impactful feeling of happiness and pride for Nate. [/spoiler] (Review continued in comments, in reverse order)
• Recommended Posted September 29, 2025 on Steam I got emotional playing this, and it wasn't just the expected emotions of joy and rage. There are some surprisingly REAL moments in the story that'll stick with me for a while. Gameplaywise, it plays great and is also more forgiving than Getting Over It. The hardest challenges are optional and I did not opt for them, finished the story in just under 10h. One of this year's best games!