Baby Steps

I put this one off for a week because the premise sounded like a joke with no punchline. A man in a onesie walks up a mountain. Each trigger lifts one foot. The analog stick places it. That is genuinely everything. And then I fell off a cliff I'd spent fifteen minutes climbing, landed in the dark at the bottom, and immediately started climbing again. That's when I knew this game had me. Baby Steps comes from Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy, the trio behind Ape Out and Getting Over It, so the DNA is unmistakable. If you bounced hard off Foddy's previous work, know upfront that this shares the same essential philosophy: your progress is entirely a function of how well you've internalized the controls, and the game will punish inattention with genuinely crushing setbacks. Sand and mud resist momentum differently than rocks and grass. Broken bridge planks demand the kind of precise foot placement that will make your palms sweat. One misread step on a steep incline can send Nate cartwheeling hundreds of metres down the mountain. The game is not subtle about this. What surprised me is how much is wrapped around that friction. Nate is a 35-year-old basement-dweller in a soiled onesie, desperately needing to find a toilet, and the world he gets teleported into is genuinely, consistently funny. Jim, the mountain guide who keeps offering Nate a map that Nate keeps refusing due to social anxiety. Mike, the bafflingly well-equipped fellow hiker. A tribe of half-naked anthropomorphic donkeys who want cigarettes. The comedy writing has a specific offhand quality, like improvised dialogue that somehow lands every time, and it carries the experience through stretches that would otherwise feel purely punishing. Hidden hats scattered in hard-to-reach places unlock extra narrative moments at campfire checkpoints, which is a small detail that rewards curiosity without demanding it. The dynamic soundtrack deserves special mention. It builds out of ambient environmental sounds rather than a composed score: animal calls, wind, the percussive rhythm of footsteps finding their footing. It has this quality of the mountain listening back at you, which sounds mystical but is just accurate. The onesie soilage system, which tracks Nate's sweat and mud accumulation in real time and washes clean in rivers, is either a deeply silly detail or a quietly expressive one. Possibly both. The honest caveat: this is not for everyone, and the game does not pretend otherwise. If losing ten to twenty minutes of progress to a single slip sounds like a reason to quit rather than a reason to focus, this will exhaust you fast. A handful of bugs and occasional crashes were reported across both PC and console. The most demanding challenges are optional, which softens the edge somewhat, but the core loop remains one of the more unforgiving in recent indie memory. Reviewers were divided, ranging from a 9 from IGN to a 4 from DualShockers, which is about as honest a spread as you'll find.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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