Baby Steps

Learning to walk, on purpose, badly

Baby Steps' premise is almost aggressively simple: you play Nate, a directionless, unemployed man who discovers his singular hidden talent is putting one foot in front of the other, and you spend the entire game manually placing each of those footsteps up a mist-shrouded, mountain-sized mountain. Fully-simulated physics govern balance and momentum at every step, meaning a small misjudgement can send you sliding, tumbling or falling back down ground you'd spent real time earning. That's the whole game, by design, from Bennett Foddy — the developer behind the notorious Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy — working alongside Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch.

A very familiar kind of love-hate

The reception follows a pattern anyone familiar with Foddy's earlier work will recognise instantly. Reviewers describe genuine, visceral frustration — one reports the game "raising my blood pressure, hurting my hands," accusing the developers of designing failure states specifically engineered to strike right after a long stretch of hard-won progress. Another states plainly: "I hate this game. I hate the developers for making it. If you like this game, I hate you too. I hate myself for wasting time trying to play it," before still marking the review as a recommendation, with the deadpan coda "game is working as intended." That's not an isolated joke — it's the dominant emotional register of the entire positive side of the corpus, treating the frustration itself as the actual product rather than an unfortunate side effect of otherwise-good design. One reviewer sums up the appeal about as concisely as possible: "story is stupid gameplay is stupid controls are stupid protagonist is stupid cutscenes are massively stupid the game is perfect."

The complaints that aren't part of the joke

Set apart from that intentional frustration are a smaller number of complaints reviewers treat as genuine flaws rather than features. The soundtrack draws unusually pointed criticism — one reviewer who otherwise found the game funny and enjoyable specifically blames the music for tipping their overall verdict negative, comparing it unfavourably to a small child let loose with editing software. Reported stuttering and performance inconsistency matter more here than in most games, given how entirely the core mechanic depends on precise, predictable footing; several reviewers specifically describe technical hitches causing falls that had nothing to do with genuine misjudgement on their part. A related structural complaint concerns recovery pacing: more than one reviewer describes long, uneventful walks back to a previous position after a fall, with nothing new to see or do along the way, turning what should be tense backtracking into simple tedium.

A more skeptical reading, raised by several reviewers, questions who the game is really built for. More than one argues Baby Steps is "made for streamers to get mad over" rather than for personal, private enjoyment, framing its appeal as spectator content first and a satisfying solo experience second. That's a fair critique of the broader "rage game" subgenre Foddy helped define, and it's worth weighing honestly rather than assuming everyone drawn in by clips of someone else's frustration will enjoy generating their own.

More than a climb

Beneath the punishing traversal, the game's own feature list leans hard into its self-aware, absurdist tone: a "fully dynamic onesie soilage system" tracks the state of Nate's jumpsuit as he stumbles through mud and worse, a dynamic soundtrack built from hundreds of separate musical stings reacts to the terrain and your progress, and non-collectible hats sit somewhere between a joke and a genuine reward for exploring off the beaten path. Reviewers who engage with the wider world beyond the central climb describe genuine affection for the local fauna and environmental storytelling scattered through the mist, treating the mountain less as a single obstacle course and more as a place worth actually looking at between falls — a tonal balance that helps explain why so many reviewers can describe active hatred for the mechanics while still recommending the overall experience.

Optional difficulty, by design

One detail worth drawing out from the corpus is that Baby Steps doesn't force every player through its hardest sections. At least one detailed reviewer specifically credits the level design for offering genuinely safer, easier paths up the mountain alongside harder, more direct routes that reward the attempt with better views, hats or shortcuts rather than punishing failure to attempt them at all. Bennett Foddy has described this design intent directly: a set of achievable, relatively safe paths that the game constantly tempts players away from toward something harder and more optional. That's a meaningfully different structure from a game that simply gates progress behind mandatory difficulty spikes, and it gives Baby Steps more in common with an open, exploratory mountain than a linear gauntlet, even though the reputation the game has earned focuses almost entirely on the latter.

The verdict

Baby Steps succeeds at being exactly what it sets out to be: a meticulously designed, deliberately maddening physics game that turns walking itself into the entire challenge, wrapped in a self-aware, absurdist comedy that a large share of reviewers say earns its place alongside Foddy's earlier cult classic. The soundtrack and performance complaints are real and worth knowing about, and the "built for content, not players" critique deserves genuine consideration rather than dismissal. But for players who already know they enjoy this specific, uncomfortable genre — or are curious enough to find out — this is a confident, singular experience unlike almost anything else currently on Steam.