Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
My right foot? My right foot is a champ: Solid and steady, unafraid to make bold, maverick moves. When I push my right foot forward, it’s with the confident knowledge that if there’s a safe harbor out there for it to secure, it’ll do so. My right foot has toes like little granite grappling hooks, and the flexibility of an oily seal, a credit to all footkind. But that left one? Mr. “Whoops I’m slipping?” Mr. “Can’t seem to quite find purchase on what feels like a solid several inches of ledge, and now you’re sliding about a million feet back on your big, floppy ass?” My left foot can go fuck itself.
These kinds of thoughts—a sort of digital somatoparaphrenia—come thanks to the hours I’ve been spending this week with Baby Steps, the new game from Ape Outcreators Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch, and most especially from QWOPand Getting Over It creator Bennett Foddy. Although the core idea, of massively expanding QWOP—essentially a joke game about the difficulty of performing the task of running when broken down into a muscle-by muscle basis—was apparently Cuzzillo’s, the feel and tone of the game are undeniably Foddy: An extended meditation on difficulty, failure, and the fleeting feelings of success, that is somehow far more fun than “extended meditations” have any right to be.
The basic gag of the whole package presents itself with immediate, and hilarious, elegance. When your playable character, a disheveled, frequently confused basement dweller named Nate, finds himself suddenly teleported from a happy One Piece-watching session into the depths of a mysterious cave, the game presents you with the same “Move left stick forward to move” tutorial prompt you’ve probably seen at the start of literally a thousand video games. Follow the instruction, and Nate will accommodatingly lean forward… and then faceplant straight on to the ground. That’s when the game gives you its other major instruction: Hit your right and left triggers to move Nate’s individual feet.
That’s the simple gimmick from which mountains of gameplay are built—and then ascended. Baby Steps drops Nate into a bizarre world of ruined carnivals and pantsless donkey men, who casually hang dong while suggesting he spend a magical wish on getting them a pack of smokes. (Are the Pinocchio parallels intentional, I wonder? This is a game about becoming a real boy, if you squint.) Its occasional cutscenes blend puerile humor with a kind of mumblecore sincerity that can be weirdly affecting at times, and often shockingly funny, as Cuzzillo (as Nate) and Foddy (as basically everybody else) trade non sequiturs and odd little insults. It’s a game about masculinity, and foolishness, and the basic terror of being offered the help that you secretly, desperately need.
But it is, above all else, a game about space: About the work of moving one foot in front of the other, very literally, to traverse the world in front of you. The basic act of walking starts to feel natural pretty quickly: Lift foot, push forward, plant foot; repeat in alternating fashion as needed. (You may remember the process from, uh, walking.) But the further up the mountain you go, the more fiendish and evil the challenges in front of you become: Muddy slopes, broken bridges, narrow balance beams hanging out over huge, sucking voids. The net result is to demand, and foster, a sort of moment-to-moment focus that is some of the most exhilarating gaming I’ve felt in months. (Not to beat a dead, but very pretty, horse, but I have thought and felt more about inches of space in Baby Steps than I have about whole miles of virtual grassland in Ghost Of Yōtei.)
At the same time, Cuzzillo, Boch, and Foddy find fascinating ways to tutorialize Nate’s surprisingly solid climbing skills, filling the world with little features and lures to get the player to think, “Okay, how the fuck do I get up there?” The actual rewards for clearing any of these challenges are minimal—a little cutscene, a new hat, or maybe just the simple pleasure of kicking a pyramid of tin cans off a mountain. But the satisfaction of figuring out that a seemingly insurmountable summit is actually completely manageable are sublime, the “because it was there” factor shooting way off the charts.
If I’m gushing here, it’s only because no game in recent memory has made me feel as strongly as Baby Steps has. And not all of these feelings are nice! There’s nothing quite like having to sheepishly explain to your wife why you just yelled “You motherfuckers!” at a trio of not-present video game designers while sitting along in your living room at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night. (In my defense: I had just found out that the game’s rarely used “pick stuff up” button does not trigger a little cutscene where you get the item in question, but just makes Nate lean over and reach out—potentially sending him ass-over-teakettle down the slope you’d spent the last 20 minutes climbing up.) But for a game that would be easy to dismiss as streamerbait—the sort of game that’s allegedly more fun to watch and laugh at than it is to play—I continue to find the moment-to-moment gameplay of Baby Steps genuinely affecting. Like Death Strandingand its sequel, which it serves as a sort of hyper-focused companion game to, it cares about the often-rote act of moving in a video game in ways that are frequently just as invigorating as they are tedious. Nothing feels incidental; every little rock or patch of grass can be life or death. Everything matters, and that feeling is far more valuable then any huge globs of polish or quality of life features you could apply to this kind of world.
I’ll leave you with an anecdote from my most recent play session, one that probably constitutes a mild spoiler. I’d spent the past two hours getting up to my latest checkpoint, a grueling ascent up a particularly muddy bit of peak that had seen me lose many minutes of progress many, many times. (One of the game’s many inspired choices: Nate is pretty much out of control when he’s sliding, but you can still flail his feet—which almost always causes you to slide even farther as a result of your tantrum than you otherwise would have.) Having landed at a sort of breather zone, between that ordeal and the next one, I saw a little dock jutting out over the empty space I’d just overcome, with a guy sitting on it. Curious, I approached him, and was treated to a cutscene in which this guy told Nate that he’d become transfixed by the void in front of him; mesmerized by how much progress he could lose with a single, horrible step.
For half a moment, I worried the game might try to pull some Dark Souls-esque “kick you into a pit” thing, but that’s not how Baby Steps‘ traps work. Instead, when the cutscene ended, it simply left me standing on the edge, now contemplating those exact same thoughts. I lifted a foot (my right one, my hero foot, my champion) and held it out over the void—fascinated by how much I could lose, while also feeling a quiet confidence that, no matter what, I could ultimately gain it back. The urge confronted, I pulled my foot back, turned Nate around, and got back to business. There’s always more mountain left to climb.
