It only took roughly five seconds for Baby Steps’ utter weirdness to win my heart, as I’m someone who thrives on the unexpected, distinctive, and downright strange. With Bennett Foddy (who is also one of the developers here), this spiritual follow-up to the agonizing cult classics QWOP and Getting Over It is a similarly frustrating physics-based walking simulator that asks you to control the most awkward human ever made as you force yourself through progressively difficult obstacles. The outcome is among the most hilariously frustrating experiences I have ever had the pleasure of going through.
Despite its most frustrating parts, I found it difficult to remain angry at this wonderfully odd voyage because of its continuously funny writing, heartwarming tale, and clever branching paths that allow you to choose your own amount of agony as you explore the dreamy environment.
The story presented here is, to put it mildly, quirky, like pretty much everything in Baby Steps. You take on the role of Nate, a neckbearded man of 35 who has sleepwalked his whole life before unexpectedly finding himself on a hiking expedition for which he is ludicrously unprepared.
. He goes toe-to-toe with formidable environmental hazards while wearing a filthy, stretched-out onesie that looks like he hasn’t taken it off in years. He then mysteriously refuses to accept help from anyone as he fumbles around without even shoes on his feet (presumably because he avoids social interaction almost as much as he avoids cardio). However, even though he is one of the most instantly unlikeable characters ever, I found that this sad sack slowly won me over as his clumsiness gives way to a lonely and miserable softie that I couldn’t help but support.
The quirky people you encounter along the journey are strangely captivating. They are all spoken by the same few individuals, who I believe are giving highly improvised speech that rambles through each scenario and is quite effective. Jim, for instance, never failed to make me laugh with each unwanted presence. Jim wants to be Nate’s onboarding guide, but is consistently rejected until he essentially turns into a bitter enemy of sorts. In the first hour alone, I laughed out loud enough to irritate my neighbors twice, and I was oddly captivated by the absurdist plot and obscene cast.
Granted, a significant portion of that is due to Baby Steps’ extreme inappropriateness, which certainly plays to my twisted sense of humor and need for absurdity. Even though its jokes aren’t always funny, I still like it since it’s so different from the typical Hero’s Journey stories I’ve seen a thousand times. Instead, it favors wild and unusual concepts that had me guessing at every turn.
It’s far more difficult than it seems to keep moving forward.
Naturally, since it’s a very realistic walking simulator, you spend much of the time alone attempting to move your feet forward, which is much more difficult than it seems. This is because Baby Steps requires you to operate each leg separately rather than pressing a single button to advance, which frequently leaves you face down in the dirt like a four-year-old trying to fix a broken set of stilts. If you don’t think this is difficult, think again: it took me several hours to be able to walk on even slightly uneven ground without eating three courses of rocks.
Nate’s clumsy movements have a lot of complexity that becomes apparent the more you practice them. This is the counterintuitive beauty of Baby Steps, though, as what initially feels like insurmountable ass-backwards controls eventually become second nature. For instance, the pressure you use to pull each trigger controls how high you raise the matching foot, and lifting one makes Nate press much harder against whatever’s underneath the other. Depending on the circumstance, this could either cause you to slip or prevent a spill.
I was carved out of goddamned wood by the conclusion of my 20-hour journey, climbing sheer walls with the grace and agility of a mountain goat trained in the age-old art of ninjitsu, and accomplishing things that only a few hours before would have seemed completely unthinkable.
I felt like I was made of goddamned wood by the end of my twenty-hour journey.
Even as I got closer to the conclusion, there were still many occasions when I fell to the ground while simply moving around on typical terrain, and even performing simple tasks still felt quite difficult. However, I also came to have a great deal of respect for the system that I was given because it is so complex and full of tricks that I felt like my own abilities were the only thing limiting what I could do. This drew me into an unavoidable quest for mastery that kept me up late at night, hating my creators as I fell to the ground for the fiftyth time in a row. I am a hypercompetitive person.
I was almost constantly learning something new about Nate’s stupid physique as I thrashed through complex challenges, and most of the time, the frustrations I experienced while attempting to move my ungainly avatar around mountain ranges and dark caverns seemed incredibly harsh but fair. However, there were other moments when I didn’t feel like I had much control over my own achievement. Some of the most rage-inducing moments in my quest were when Nate would occasionally get snagged on something or move in a strange, unexpected way that would cause me to lose 20 minutes of progress while I was hopelessly falling down a huge obstacle course that I had just negotiated.
To be clear, these were extremely infrequent occurrences, and the majority of my failures were simply the result of my needing to get good. However, when you’re already getting sand kicked into your open eyes while everything is going according to plan, it hurts much more to feel like you have no control over your own success even 1% of the time. Although Baby Steps can be extremely frustrating to play and has challenges so difficult that I frequently wonder if I would rather just fall down a hill myself, it also purposefully leaves the great majority of these obstacles entirely optional and nearly always thoughtfully placed in view as you hike steadily upward.
This meant that even though I frequently experienced excruciating pain from repeated unsuccessful attempts to, say, ascend to the summit of a crumbling temple in the jungle, I could not really become angry because I knew that I had willingly put myself through that suffering. Instead, I could simply continue on the main path, where the difficulty was far more tolerable. In fact, it’s a great framework since it gave me the freedom to take on more challenging tasks when I felt up to it and to move on if I felt that bashing my head against the current challenge wasn’t helping me improve my skills (although I was nearly always too obstinate to do so).
Throughout my run, the varied settings never ceased to inspire new thoughts.
Additionally, it keeps things interesting because every part of your hike up the enormous mountain is accompanied by a new, distinctive-looking location, such as a desert that is sandy and makes movement even more difficult due to shifting ground beneath your feet or a mine that has been abandoned and has splintered wood and dark tunnels that are extremely difficult to navigate. Throughout my run, the varied landscapes kept coming up with new ideas. For example, there was a section where I had to learn how to ride a water turbine gingerly, and another where I had to learn how to balance and move intentionally due to icy frozen lakes.
It’s important to note that nothing in this, including the characters you encounter or the levels themselves, is really appealing. The majority of the time, Baby Steps is just plain awful, and for a game where you only have to walk very slowly, it has a very high pop-in rate. The lo-fi, similar trees, and blurry faces, however, kind of fit with its overall grotesque vibe, given how insane everything else is.
Verdict
A socially awkward blob in a dirty onesie with such weak motor skills that he ragdolls to the ground on the tiniest of uneven surfaces is the subject of one of my favorite games of 2025, which I didn’t expect. With enticing hiking difficulties that made me scream, as well as a startlingly unusual plot and characters that were like family by the end, Baby Steps is a delightfully weird physics game that challenges you.
Although it focuses on purposefully cumbersome controls, it has a surprising depth that piqued my interest. As I attempted to overcome its most difficult obstacles, I became completely engrossed in the game. I highly recommend Baby Steps if you want a good laugh, find things extremely challenging, or simply despise yourself.
