Baby Steps Review

Calling Baby Steps an anti-game is not an indictment of its expert ability at infuriating the player with punishing regression of progress. Nor is it a way to shield this absurdist piece of entertainment from legitimate criticism from players who will never acquire a taste for the buffet of bitter pills it jovially wishes us to gobble down.

Yes, Baby Steps is a video game. A videogame. A game. It’s coded and designed. There’s writing and dialog. Polygons and ones and zeroes construct its grungy and dilapidated world full of humanoid donkey dicks and breast milk landslides. A controller or a mouse and keyboard can be used to move a character around and do things. By all accounts, it’s a video game.

But the trio of developers behind Baby Steps–Maxi Boch, Gabe Cuzzillo, and Bennett Foddy–are distinctly aware of the blanket insult they are throwing at the medium. This is an absurdist product. One that actively seeks to not pigeonhole itself. One that spits in the face of expectation. Yet tangentially works to loosely tie itself to the notion of what makes a game ultimately satisfying.

In ways, Baby Steps is both a challenge to review and relatively easy to dissect.

The run-up of trying to crystallize my thoughts on the game led me to think about one of the most infamous album reviews I’ve ever come across. Pitchfork, known for their often acerbic judgement, had a reputation during my college years of being incredibly hipster and unafraid of coming across as “too cool”. In 2006, Pitchfork posted a review of the band Jet’s second album Shine On. The reviewer scored the album 0.0 out of 10. The review featured no text justifying what was essentially a non-score for what would appear to be one of the worst pieces of music in existence. Instead, the review simply featured an embedded YouTube video of a monkey peeing in its own mouth.

For a person who owned Jet’s first album Get Born and enjoyed it well enough at the time, I found the review to be distasteful, shitty. Why “review” it at all? It felt like someone had themselves a good laugh at how clever and cool they were and moved on. But, after almost 20 years, it still stands out in my mind.

Honestly, part of me daydreamed of posting two reviews of Baby Steps. One giving the game a zero, another giving it a ten. From there I thought about making both reviews nearly identical, merely swapping out the tone of my opinion to swing positive or negative in their respective houses. In the “zero” review I would tear asunder the notion that a game should literally cancel out player progression–like that rumor about a Hideo Kojima game that would make the game unplayable if the player died. In the “ten” review I would praise that, much like Dark Souls, Baby Steps is meant to put the player through grueling challenges so they come out the other side feeling accomplished (“It’s the Dark Souls of literal walking simulators” one might type if they were less self-aware).

But let’s be real. This review will get posted on Metacritic and Open Critic. I’m not trying to cause confusion. I’m not about to maroon Digital Chumps dot com for some artistic license. That’s why I’m talking about it here. To let you, the reader, know where my head is at. Can you imagine rolling up to check out reviews of Baby Steps and seeing someone give the game a zero? Personally, I find it hard to dabble anywhere below a game I would give a five. Scathing words can be fun to type but do you really want to invest the time in playing something that is far beyond a failing grade based on the American grading system? I don’t think I do. That being said… maybe it would get a lot more clicks. But would anyone actually read it? And why trash any shred of credibility I have as a person who reviews games?

Much like every movement in Baby Steps, there’s a lot to consider.

It’s not just posting your thoughts and feelings piecemeal. They have to make sense. There has to be a rhythm and flow to the words and sentence structure. It doesn’t have to be poetic, it doesn’t have to be prose. But it has to make sense. You want to know if this game is for you or if it is something you should avoid. Writing two reviews would have been a clever way to either ascribe your personal bias of love or hate towards the things I described. Maybe you’d split the difference, read both, and see what I was getting at.

Here’s the secret, though: there’s often not a wrong way to review a game. As a player for decades and a reviewer for a little over ten years, I’ve acclimated myself to a kind of style, an internalized logic for how I consume and think about and review games. Sometimes it’s just vibes. Often it is carefully deconstructing my thoughts and feelings of a title, lining it up to the industry at large, musing on what it does well, where it comes short, and how all those things swirl into a cohesive product that has varying degrees of success.

Ironically, I don’t necessarily think there is a wrong way to review Baby Steps outside of blatantly lying about your feelings while hating the game. If a person reviewing the game had a rewarding but grueling time and ultimately gave the game a terrible score, I think that would be a dishonest and bad review. If a person was seconds away from breaking their controller and scoffed at every instance of absurdity yet gave the game a perfect score, I think that would be a dishonest and bad review.

There is a safe middle ground for talking about Baby Steps. Maybe a person gives it a 6 or a 7, a decent, average score. They recognize the game’s humor and what it has to offer. There’s creativity there, sure. A lot of freedom. An interesting mechanic. But, ultimately, they can’t stomach that falling off a rock and sliding down a waterfall for 15 or 20 seconds literally destroys any momentum or progression, stripping the wind out of their sails.

That happens countless times in Baby Steps and it sucks. A lot.

So where do you go? Who do you trust? What’s the truth?

Look.

I could cut this review off with a handful of other sentences.

“Trust yourself, dear player/reader. Do you laugh at failure? Persevere in the face of insurmountable odds? Baby Steps is likely for you, offering a playground of razor-sharp challenge and eventual self-satisfaction.”

“Trust yourself, dear player/reader. Do you wince at failure? Reject the notion that insurmountable odds are the best way to hone your skills? Baby Steps likely isn’t for you, offering a gauntlet of challenges often meant to frustrate, leading the player on a path towards self-reflection.”

And like an odd, half-cliffhanger I could hit publish and move on with my life. Perhaps someone would read it and balk at the notion of me offering something beyond a traditional review.

But that’s what I want to do. Perhaps for an anti-game, I must tackle the issue with a kind of anti-review. Not sure.

While I doubt I’m the only games reviewer who fancies themselves to be a decent writer, I often attempt to avoid the concept of “getting” a game. There is an easy trap one can fall in by analyzing an unapproachable or obscure game and relishing in the potential for unspoken high-brow concepts. If you don’t understand the praise heaped on, maybe YOU just don’t get it, get it?

Baby Steps could absolutely fall prey to this school of thought. “You see… it’s a game about overcoming obstacles. Metaphysical. Literal. Physical. We all stumble and fall eventually. But at some point, you get over it. Just like Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It.” And one could wax poetic about this underlying message or that.

Personally, I never really enjoyed farcical deep analysis like this. Lord knows why I got my BA in English. What if Shakespeare didn’t actually mean any of the shit students for hundreds of years have been writing papers on? What if he was just a weirdo who wrote lots of plays?

Want to know a secret?

I kind of hated Baby Steps. Shh, don’t tell anyone.

This game infuriated me. And that’s what it was meant to do by design. And yeah, another aspect of the design is to have the player persist and climb the summit of their failure and stand on top of their accomplishment like a god. Like that time you beat Ornstein and Smough for the first time in Anor Londo even though FromSoftware made you fight two Belfry Gargoyles at the same time if you didn’t kill the first one fast enough.

I stopped playing Baby Steps for a day after the stunted, stupid physics caused me to slip on what felt like nothing, sending me tumbling down a hill, nearly all the way back to where I had previously spent over a half hour trying to get over one singular obstacle. And minutes before a stupid fucking hat I was wearing fell off my head and, I’m pretty sure, clipped through the world geometry and was lost forever. Sure. Yeah. That felt great.

After about 10 hours and 35,000 steps, I reached my personal end of Baby Steps. I acknowledged a lot of the game’s side content but knew I would rip my skin off in strips and feed it to myself if I attempted to accomplish more in a short time frame.

So what am I doing giving the game a 9? It’s okay. I know you’ve likely already seen the score.

Don’t worry. We’ll get there. Step by Baby Steps.

The act of movement in Baby Steps is meant to be a deliberate joke. A full-fledged mechanic that carries the weight of most of the game. Foddy’s infamous QWOP and Getting Over It should be all you need to know. The developers also worked on Ape Out, which I haven’t played but have heard great things about.

Movement is something that is natural in games. Tetris has its pieces move left to right while constantly falling. Mario usually is meant to move right and jump and go down pipes. The Last of Us moves me to tears in its harrowing opening minutes.

In Baby Steps, our protagonist–who I’ll get to eventually–stands straight up but his legs don’t move with a meager press of the left control stick in a direction. But you probably know that already. I can’t imagine you going into a review on Baby Steps blind without having known anything about the game. Right?

Ah you know what, never mind. Let’s talk about Nate now. No, not Nathan Stephens, owner of Digital Chumps. Nate, the “protagonist” of Baby Steps who has glasses and a beard, much like Nathan Stephens, the protagonist of Digital Chumps. Every time Nate screamed and fell down a cliff, I wanted to hear a loud crack as he broke his neck. The third or fourth time he slid down a waterfall or got carried away by a creek, I put my controller down wishing he would drown to death and an ominous prompt would appear saying he died. I’ve never felt that way about Nathan Stephens, who I sometimes call Nate.

No, Nate is meant to be a kind of deplorable character. A worthless guy who is extremely unlikable much like Lester the Unlikely, the useless protagonist of Lester the Unlikely. He doesn’t wear shoes, he’s got a scraggly beard, a whiny voice, a onesie that is constantly marred by dirt and water from his numerous falls.

The game opens with Nate inside his disheveled room as Netflix asks if he’s still watching One Piece or not. BURN. His parents are arguing outside of his room because he’s worthless and of course he lives with his parents. He’s suddenly teleported to a bizarre world where absolutely nothing makes sense.

The characters trapped inside Baby Steps are stupid, weird, unhinged, offbeat, crazy, and pretty amusing for a person with my kind of sense of humor. Yes, I laughed the second an anthropomorphic donkey showed up wearing nothing but a shirt and letting his donkeyhood dangle as Nate tried to avoid eye contact. Of course I loved the progressively antagonistic relationship between Nate and the game’s guide who keeps trying to give you advice until he gives up.

Much like Baby Step‘s mechanical thrust, there’s no solid ground to land on with these characters. Dialog is obviously improvised with voice actors bullshitting around with each other, trailing off, and chuckling in the recording. If we aren’t in on the joke, they are. And it mostly works as long as your mind is open for things just simply not needing to make sense. Why should it? Have you seen this game?

But Baby Steps also tucks away actual character and narrative development behind grueling torment. “Cutscenes” are delivered at checkpoints can be entirely missed or ignored. Nate’s backstory waits for persistent players who wear hats to campfires and are treated to lo-fi 8-bit mini-games that attempt to paint a picture of why this horrid dude is the way that he is and why he’s so socially awkward that he can’t accept help or ask for shoes.

I assume in the near future there will be think pieces on incels and toxic male behavior and this and that in regards to Nate. I don’t really care about that. What Baby Steps does is offer an explanation and reaches out a hand towards the player in the search for depth. For a game like this? It’s a welcome addition that not everyone is going to discover. Plus, I still didn’t really feel that bad for him not being able to walk without my help. I mean sure, we all need someone every now and then, we don’t want to do life alone but come on man, one foot in front of the other.

You’re really here to know more about the walking aren’t you?

Hold down the left trigger to raise Nate’s left leg. Hold down the right trigger to raise Nate’s right leg. When both of Nate’s feet are planted on the ground, pushing on the left stick will cause the top of his body to lean in that direction and not like Michael Jackson. Nope, like a schlubby white dude he will fall over. Depending on the pressure placed on either trigger, Nate’s leg will raise an appropriate amount. Using the left stick will allow that legs to rotate around independently, hopefully searching for solid ground to be placed upon.

After about five minutes I got into the habit of exchanging taps and pulls of the left and right triggers, getting Nate in slightly steady gaits before reaching some obstacle I would have to tackle.

Baby Steps is open-world in the most anti-game way imaginable. Remember that phrase? Minutes into getting past the initial cave where Nate appears, players can beeline a glowing light nearby, doing so triggers a cutscene where a character offers a map to Nate, briefly showing a map on the HUD. Then it’s gone. Now how is he supposed to find an outhouse to take a piss in? Because that’s seemingly Nate’s primary quest objective.

The world here on offer is rife with things to do and is fairly big, yet it’s up to the player’s determination to go where they want, all the while seeking out the primary path of ever-upwards. Pyramids of cans wait to be knocked over. Strange structures can be climbed. Fruits can be plucked from trees.

And absolutely none of this is required to complete Baby Steps. Yup, it’s all optional. The tantalizing challenge is there, should you accept it. Just know that attempts and failures can take minutes, if not hours. Because the primary goal of Baby Steps is to put one foot in front of the other and scale whatever terrain or obstacle that will lead the player to whatever they deem to be an objective.

My hands and legs were tense almost the whole time playing this game, likely elevating my blood pressure to horrid levels. Which apparently has been a problem lately for me with all the stress I’ve been dealing with. Oh well.

But doing something like climbing a ladder by gently placing Nate’s legs up each rung is daunting. Pull a leg up too sharply against a surface and Nate will buck himself backwards. Take a foot off a solid rock and plant it in mud and pray that he doesn’t begin to slip before you can jolt his other leg up. And then stomp to safety.

The simple act of walking is stupidly silly and yes, it can absolutely be frustrating. One of the most defeating things in Baby Steps is accidentally slipping despite being obscenely careful, and then losing the patience to conduct the mere act of walking a steady gait again.

Various materials like sand and mud and stone and dirt and grass and snow are one thing. But then take trains and stone walls and houses and trees and all manner of things to navigate up and over and the player is deliberately placing themselves in hundreds of varying powder kegs throughout their time with Baby Steps.

How do you know which way is correct? How do you know you’re actually making progress? I don’t know, you tell me. I was guessing the whole time, praying I would accidentally scale an impossible cliff that I would unceremoniously fall from.

No! I don’t want to learn a lesson. No! I don’t want to reflect on my failure. I just want to move, damnit.

So often I would happen upon a thing I knew I could do in Baby Steps. And so often I would merely trot in a different direction, not confident that I wouldn’t rip off my skin in strips and feed it to myself upon failure.

Curiosity and patience are absolutely rewarded in Baby Steps and I think it’s those players who will ultimately feel triumphant spending time here. Maybe they won’t enjoy the “diegetic” “music” composed of animal sounds and random noise that insists upon taunting the player upon failure by becoming more prominent after a fall. Maybe they will hate the stupid story. And by god, this game is not very attractive. The world is often muddy and grimy and slovenly.

But at what point do we care? The trio of developers seemingly are in on the bit.

Baby Steps is absurdist. It’s fucking weird and insane and difficult and there will be people who latch onto this game with absolutely no problem like a new babe to the teat. And hey, that wasn’t me. But that’s okay.

Despite my frustration and my anguish, I get it. I get you, Baby Steps.

For me, not everything should be for everyone. A game doesn’t have to make sense or gel with me to be good.

Years ago in my first year of reviewing games I tackled a game called Time And Eternity. A random niche game that I barely remember outside of the fact that it was a Japanese game with RPG mechanics where 2D anime-styled characters would fight in 3D environments. I remember being relatively kind to it because I was trying to align my expectations of the game in comparison to similar titles while considering the kind of people who would be interested in playing it. Despite it being rough around the edges, I knew many people would treasure that unique title and celebrate something that wasn’t mainstream. A team had a vision and they made that game. It’s no doubt faded into relative PlayStation 3 obscurity but as long as it had a devoted audience, I was glad to review a game from their perspective.

Games don’t have to always be a springboard for conversation and analysis and discussion. Sometimes a game just needs to be fun. But if a game like Baby Steps can take hold of you for whatever reason and provide wildly different experiences for so many different players, it’s hard to deny that appeal. Hell, I’m absolutely aware that much like the absurdist approach taken with the game, my meandering, obtuse review won’t be for everyone. But like Baby Steps, I know when to step away, not to belabor a point. But unlike Baby Steps, I’ll walk away from this review satisfied and not touch it again, hoping that it impacts someone. Because despite it slicing across my sanity like a cheese grater, I still want to do some of the sillier things in Baby Steps, maybe because I have an abuse kink, who knows.

Baby Steps is not a game for a broad audience. But it’s not just rage bait trying to frustrate players while providing amusement to passive observers. There are lessons to be learned and accomplishments to be felt. It tiptoes on the knife’s edge of punishment and profundity, victimizing or enthralling, depending on the player. That fine line opens the path for both a brilliant anti-game or a fist through your screen, your mileage simply may vary.