I've been a pretty consistent fan of Bennett Foddy's work. I love Getting Over It to the point where I got a Gold Pot by accident, just by casually playing over and over again. I've even had the pleasure to hang out with Foddy, giving a talk with him on troll games in a time so long ago it feels like The Old Internet(It was called fucking ROFLCON). There, also I had the pleasure of also meeting and talking games with Maxi Boch, one of the other co-creators of Baby Steps. Some of the conversations we had over 10 years ago make a lot more sense now... So yeah, I'm already bias toward liking this game. So that Gabe Cuzzillo guy must be pretty great then by association. His voice acting certainly was.

This is, as far as tone and themes go, a Foddy game, feeling like the next logical step after Getting Over It. I don't know how much of this was directly him(This game has a lot of his voice but this is clearly presented as being primary by three people and they all deserve the credit), but clearly everyone involved knew what the target style was. Baby Steps is perhaps the easiest to control game he's worked on. You merely have to press a shoulder button and position your foot for each and every step. Nate, the baby-like player character, at least tries to stay upright. But a game being "easier" to control doesn't mean it will, as a whole, be easier. This just gives them more design room. A lot more room. The world the size of Babysteps is absurd, and impossible to transverse in any other Foddy title. While you start out awkward, like a baby, your steps become faster and more confident as you progress. Eventually, simply through player skill, you can almost walk like a normal person. Sometimes. On flat terrain. Going straight.

This fits into a lot of common themes in Foddy's work. Where people think about mean spirited frustration and "unfair" control schemes, Foddy is equally interested in sports and human physicality. How absurd the things we do as humans are! How do we capture the weight of these things, while in something as risk free and streamlined as a videogame? A core feeling that comes up in Baby Steps is "What does it mean to hike?"

This is a feeling most videogames struggle to capture(Death Stranding being the other one for sure that comes to mind). Games are naturally built for us to reach the content. You weave through worlds, slowly seeing everything you need to see. Maybe you find something hidden now and again, but rarely do you look at something interesting in the horizon and decide "... That's too far away to bother."

A hike is defined not just by the hike itself, but what isn't hiked. You can't go to a national park and spend a day seeing everything. There must be an opportunity cost, both to your muscles and your time. Baby Steps HAS that strain. You have to actually decide what is and isn't worth it, because fine-combing through the world would be an exhausting, tedious task. You end up making difficult choices on difficult routes vs going the long way. Baby Steps is genuinely big, but what makes it feel impossibly massive is that movement has a genuine cost of human effort. Your literally every step is a button press.

Climbing is also a re-occurring theme.. GIRP and Getting Over It are both games about climbing, where transversal is done purely through the hands -- or... tools held by the hands. Baby Steps only lets you control your feet, yet somehow this is the best climbing game of the three. It feels like solving a bouldering puzzle. What's your order of operations? How do you make sure your feet don't get too crossed up? How do you contort yourself to reach your next ledge? The way you figure out routes, and find a tiny little ledges to barely grip onto... Hell, just the bodily awareness you need... all those feel so authentically like climbing. The things you climb, and method you do so are certainly ridiculous, but there is a truth to the process. It is, in gameplay, a game about outdoorsmanship.

Controls like this make me think of Session (A game actually mentioned in the credit's of this game). Limb awareness is one of those things we abstract away in games, but games that embrace more... literal controls add a human element back to the things we're pretending to be doing.

Some difficulty discourse came up again recently. A metaphor I've used for some games is that sometimes a game is like a mountain. A mountain doesn't care how you climb it, or if you complete it. It doesn't even care that you exist. You bring yourself to this object, an object you and the rest of the world share(TBF actual mountains get modified and sometimes ruined, both by climbers, and sometimes just nature itself, so it's not ALWAYS consistent), and you compare your experiences. There is a pleasure knowing it was the same mountain. People who hate this analogy will argue "well mountains have harder and easier routes", but that doesn't look like a difficulty select screen. It looks like this game(And honestly like Dark Souls, which has been doing this for years but people still argue it needs an easy mode even though people will be HAPPY to carry you through the game like a Sherpa). The world is so generously designed like a playground. It even lets you outright skip -- with some humiliation -- one of the hardest climbs in the game. If a route feels too hard, an easier one is likely near by. I spent hours climbing an imitation gym rock wall, when stairs were less than a few minutes away. There is reprieve to be found all throughout the difficulty of this game, yet the mountain remains the same. Instead of hurting the shared experience, it makes it more exciting. Wait, you saw WHAT? You did that HOW? There is room for player expression in how they approach the world and what optional things they value. The game can be forgiving, and approachable, and be a challenging, shared experience.

A lot of these routes reward you with nothing. Some of them give you a funny little cutscene, like Nate disgustingly eating a fruit, from the point-of-view of said fruit, in a traumatizing GoPro-like perspective. The Voice Acting is incredible. Foddy and Gabe punch about their weight, leveraging what is likely some personal chemistry to generate a comedic performance people usually pay big money for. Part of me isn't surprised -- Foddy is just a funny person -- but being funny and acting are two different things and somehow two game devs manage to do both. The performances isn't just for laughs. It's not Getting Over It style beat poetry or comedic asides. An actual story is being told here, covering a rich spread of themes, from failed masculinity, to social awkwardness, to just growing up, even when it seems far past the time when you already should have done so.

It is vulnerable and uncomfortable, especially for me. While I am a far cry from Nate, I am more Nate than I'm not. I may have more confidence in my loserdom, more social grace, more pride in how I live, but... God some of this feels so eerily familiar. The anxiety is real. That sense of being out of place, not knowing anyone, and feeling like the least cool person in the room. After giving that talk with Foddy, I followed him around Boston between all the parties, basically saying "I have no idea what to do at these things, I need an adult!" Flashbacks of Nate at parties shows a similar type of vulnerability. I was much younger then, but not young enough to avoid feeling like my uncertainty was defensible. I got better at that sort of thing in the years after. I still hate industry parties at bars(That night I ended up hanging out with the smokers outside. Sup Megadrivers), but compared to a lot of my fellow game devs, I'm downright social. Still, it's strange playing a game like this and going "... I was like this in front of you," when thinking about one of the people who made the game.

Not that I read into this too much. Like I said, that disposition is dreadfully common among game devs. For all I know, Foddy had his phase too. There is too much first hand experience in this, that you know it has to come from one of the three main team members. Still, it's one of those things that makes me stop and go "ow".

The type of man Baby Steps describes is a very real one. It's not just about being a loser -- losers can be fucking cool -- but about being arrested in all ways. Nate is beaten down by life. He's both coddled and resentful of it. He doesn't want to accept help because it just confirms what he feels -- that he's useless. He can't be truthful, and intimate with others, because he is ashamed of what he is. He'd rather lie than ask for something, even if the lie is paper thin. Even the people -- or well, full on cock-out donkeys -- that treat him like a friend... His walls have been up for too long. He won't let guys like Moose in. His only safe source of anything resembling social intimacy literally comes from watching One Piece.

The dong dangling donkeys may feel random, but they capture the weird energy of being around young, fun people who are normal. Why are they not ashamed? Why can they let their cocks out? Nate is too afraid to even pee behind a bush. He's internalized shame too deeply to participate. As you unlock hidden cutscenes -- some of which exist in the form of simple and often beautiful two-tone pixel art games -- you see his dreams and where his insecurities come from. You see that he had goals and ambitions, but at this point they're only destined to be discard into the dump.

I think, for those of us who were raised and socialized as male(Even if we didn't want it and reject that label now), who grew up in this world... It's hard not to relate to at least parts of Nate. While the totality of his being might feel distant, I think most of us have seen a Nate, a human defeated so thoroughly by social, economic, and gender expectations. They do not have the hierarchy of needs necessary to let their inner light grow. Like an entire human-being entering social hibernation, hoping for better, warmer times that will never come. Even if it did, they would be too malnourished to thrive. Instead, Nate marches on, ever deeper into the cold, driven only by a need to show he can do something. The cold peaks of the world he is now in are less intimidating than talking about himself.

There are too many metaphoric layers and too much hidden story for me to say anything more definitive like that. I can't tell you exactly what's going on or what happened to Nate, but the narrative reality is less important than the thematic one. The game wants you to do something. Get out of your comfort zone and do anything, even if it is small and trivial. Even if it's just taking baby steps(I know this is a really corny way to end but like ITS THEMATICALLY NAMED THAT WAY FOR A REASON CUT ME SOME SLACK).