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.
I’ve been falling down in public a lot lately. Not in the real world—although the oncoming Portland winter, and my own increasingly creaky bones, certainly carry the potential for me to experience a few catastrophically visible instances of eating shit sometime in the very near future. No, I’m talking about Baby Steps, a game I completed last week, with almost all of that playtime happening while streaming. People got to watch me and my beloved failson Nate tumble through 15 hours of fucking up, failing downwards, and occasionally, very briefly, succeeding. Which leads me to a question I’ve been mulling over ever since I piloted Nate toward the game’s surprisingly sweet conclusion a few days ago: Is a video game a good game, if you can only get the most out of it by playing it in front of others?
I’ll start by noting that Baby Steps absolutely is a good game on its own merits—very possibly my favorite game of 2025 to date. By taking a very simple premise (walk a guy in a onesie up a mountain of absurd challenges by moving one individual foot at a time) and then blowing it out into a much wider exploration of anxiety, helplessness, and determination (for both good and ill), creators Bennett Foddy, Gabe Cuzzilo, and Maxi Boch have made a game where I found myself caring more about inches of specific space on particular rocky outcrops than I’ve cared about whole worlds in other titles. Not all of these feelings were positive, mind you—the first time I fell all the way from the top of The Manbreaker, one of the game’s most grueling (and, it gleefully reminds you at every turn, most optional) challenges, I was rendered silent with genuine, core-shaking despair for several minutes straight. Baby Steps hurts you, with both its play and its occasionally bleak storytelling, by very deliberate design. But the depths of the emotions it provokes, and the relentless cleverness of the playgrounds it builds to provoke them, also make it one of the most emotionally rich video games of 2025.
All of these factors were amplified by playing the game from deep within my lil’ panopticon. The uncharitable read on Baby Steps (and Foddy’s other games, most notably 2017’s Getting Over It), is that they’re simplistic streamer rage-bait, games that exist to be hard for no purpose other than to allow streamers to mine viewers by acting like a trained seal, frothing at the mouth at every inevitable setback. In this argument, the performative nature of playing Baby Steps is to its own artistic detriment; its challenges aren’t there to make players (and viewers!) think about why they want to do hard things, or about how hard it is to ask for help, or any of the conceptual depths that Baby Steps trawls; they’re just the digital equivalent of that old, hateful comedy formula, “fatty fall down, make funny.”
(It’s interesting to consider this element in terms of Foddy’s own stated antipathy for people experiencing his games vicariously; Getting Over It contains a bit of monologuing from him about how watching someone else play a grueling video game is “like a baby bird being fed chewed-up food”—a line that gets a callback in Baby Steps itself—and actively demands you not share its final reward if you’re playing on stream. Has that stance softened over a decade, in the same way that Baby Steps itself has softened some of the harsher gameplay edges of Getting Over It or QWOP? I’d like to hope so.)
Because none of these more esoteric concerns change the fact that playing Baby Steps in front of people has been some of the warmest that gaming has made me feel in a very long time. When I fell, viewers “oofed” in sympathy; when I managed to overcome something truly grueling, we all cheered together. And in a world that very deliberately refuses to tell you where to go—making an extended, game-long joke out of Nate’s refusal to just look at a goddamn map—having angels and devils on my shoulder, goading me toward some obscure secret or optional challenge, was a godsend. For a strictly single-player experience, Baby Steps captures much of what makes multiplayer gaming such a powerfully communal sensation.
Most of all though, Baby Steps is a game about jokes, and jokes are always better when shared. Some of that comedy comes in via the game’s writing and improv, as Cuzzilo and Foddy mumblecore their way through cutscenes about how fucking irritating a guy who never actually asks for the help he so desperately needs can be. Some of it arrives in play, like when you see a zipline hanging just far enough out over a cavernous abyss to know that you’re absolutely, no-fucking-question going to fall to your non-death while trying to grab it. And some of it is simply the consequence of a game like this, where you’re sometimes going to fall in the dumbest, saddest, most frustrating ways, and all you can do in those moments is laugh. All of these moments would be funny on their own, but the very real emotion wrapped up in the act of turning to another human being and saying “Holy shit, did you just see that?” enhances the game’s humor at every turn.
The fact is, I had a better time playing Baby Steps with people than I would have had playing it alone. And that’s a feature to my mind, not a bug. It speaks to how strongly the game can make you feel, regardless of whether you’re the one with the controller in your sweaty, sweaty hands, and how masterfully it both builds, and releases, the tension it traffics in. In a game about rooting for someone not entirely sympathetic, about encouraging yourself, and others, to do something that might be kind of inherently dumb and pointless, having other people pushing me onward only enhanced the game’s message. Baby Steps is a good game, regardless of how you play it—thoughtfully crafted, endlessly clever, and far more emotionally dense than any accusations of “streamer bait” might suggest. But it might only become a great game when it lets you take that next step, and really fall on your ass in public.
