Baby Steps

2025-10-12
Me and Nathan, who now holds the crown for "Fattest Ass In Games", have been through so much together but now my spirit is broken. After 8 hours together they took my son away from me. My little chickadee son. I found him in a dilapidated barn, a new baby chick, just a wee puff of yellow fuzz. He was all alone and I was all alone and he decided to come with me. On this mountain of impossible geography, on this mountain of weirdos, on this mountain of despair, he was my one true connection, my one constant.

And it wasn't easy. There were countless times where I got to the top of a particularly difficult climb only to look for my son and have my heart sink realizing he must have gotten stuck along the way. So I'd start my way back down, sometimes catastrophically falling along the way, wiping out 10 minutes of progress. All to keep him with me. I don't begrudge him it. Lord knows I need him more than he needs me. I won't let that little candle of emotional support go out in this all-consuming darkness of solitude and strife.

Only it has gone out. I was near the end. I was so happy, me and him had seen so much of this world. I fought so hard to bring him along every step of the way. At one point there was a section with planks and beams with gaps I had to cross, carefully placing one foot after the other. It took me a couple of tries but I got it. My elation at success was short lived as I realized my little chickadee was nowhere to be seen. See, his method of locomotion is different from mine. Where I slowly, carefully move one limb and then the other, he spastically hops and hovers. My son, the spaz. My sweet boy. It turns out this doesn't really work in an area full of these sorts of gaps. That first time I was relieved to find out to progress I had to descend anyway and was able to meet back up with my orphaned boy.

But near the end of the journey there's a gorge cut by a river we had to cross that is all gaps. A criss-crossing network of half-rotted railroad tracks spreads across it. He never stood a chance. Carefully, methodically I positioned myself and waited for him to catch up, over and over. But after a certain point, high up--so high up--he didn't make the jump and plummeted to the raging river below. In that expanse of grays and browns his brilliant yellow diminished to a spec and then was gone. The worst part is I could have gone back. Oh lord forgive me, I could have gone back. But I was so close to the end. I had given up so much to be here. So I kept going. The only thing that mattered to me dropped into that river and I kept going. I've started to think that maybe something did happen in that cave. And maybe I am dead. I feel like I deserve it. But I keep climbing.

And that's the thing about Baby Steps, it's so singularly focused in its objective and yet the path to get there will be completely different for each person. It's an open world chock full of surprises and goodies, all frivolous and pointless and yet equally delightful. At the start I spent 10 or 20 minutes trying to climb a small hill. Falling over, and over, and over. And when I finally got there my reward was an apple. Instead of leveling up some stat or unlocking an achievement, a cutscene plays of Nathan eating the apple. It is weird, a little unsettling, and very funny. That's it. Another challenge might reward you with a crown. Which you get to wear. That's it. In fact that crown ended up becoming a burden. Similar to my chickadee son (RIP) , any time I fell down the crown would fall off and I’d have to go pick it up and put it back on. I must have spent 30 minutes trying to get my crown down from a ledge in a particularly obnoxious location. Was there absolutely any practical reason to do so? No. Did I still do it and successfully recover it? You're god damned right I did.

My favorite part of this frivolity is how it's so clearly spitting in the face of traditional open world design. Early on you meet a fellow hiker on the mountain, a chipper Australian bloke who seems much better prepared and adapted to the challenge than our bumbling failson, Nathan. He even has a map! Now at this point you have no map in the game and when we hear this guy has a map we think, properly trained by mainstream game design as we are : "Finally, now I get the map and can know where I'm going and where all the stuff is!" And the hiker even shows us the map. For all of 2 seconds--and it's the actual, real map, replete with the correct geography and major landmarks--and then he takes it away. It's all a big joke. "Oh you thought it was one of those games? Silly goose!" Fucking brilliant shit.

Baby Steps is not about looking at a map and checking off tasks to do. It's a game where the minutest unit of progress, a single step, is fraught with peril. It's about falling on your face trying to take a single step. And then learning to walk. And then falling on your face trying to climb. And then learning to climb. And so on until I was hauling ass up a section more complicated than the one that took me 10 or 20 minutes at the start of the game. But even then, every step is measured and weighed because each step can lead to Nathan's enormous ass sliding all the way down the same path you just painstakingly picked apart for the last half hour.

This challenge, this peril, means the open world is morphed into a complex three-dimensional cost-benefit analysis. Do I take the shortcut with the scrabbly rocks or do I take the route that is far more flat but looks like it'll be three times as long...if it even allows me to go up at all. Even the equivalent of "side quests" in your open world--the fruits, the hats, the climbing challenges--have risk. "Oh look, another fruit. Ok they want me to climb up that rock and then...hold on is that a fucking swing? How the fuck do I climb a swing." And, reader, I put one foot on the swing, fucked up Nathan's balance, and that sweaty ginger went all the way down in the fucking pond. Conservatively twenty minutes lost. And I couldn't be happier because I ended up in a new area with a new dumb cutscene about a toilet.

And while I get the "No pain, no gain" ethos, at times it can feel like pain for pain's sake a la how I felt about Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy. Case in point the entire sandy desert zone, and especially that fucking cave can absolutely eat my ass. Hell, it can eat the ass of the entire population of South Dakota. There's fun in slowly, methodically picking footholds as you climb a specific rock face. It is not fun to have to do all the right footholds and quickly because you're on a sand. In the dark. I mean it's just fucking monotonous. It's all sand: the ceiling, the walls, the floor. It felt like a form of psychological torture. And coming out the end I'm not like "Oh fuck yeah I'm so hardcore, I'm better at the game now." It just felt like I passed a kidney stone. I'm not a hero, I'm just happy it's over and I’m not addicted to fentanyl.

And yet that section was merely a blip on an absolutely wonderful journey. The mechanical bliss of starting as a guy who can't stand to a guy who clambers up impossible geometry is excellent. The improv-y, Flight of the Chonchords-y sadness and comedy of the story and voice acting is absolutely phenomenal. Nathan's personal journey which I'm just skipping over completely to not spoil anything is so, so good and was a total surprise on a game that seemed so focused on Doing rather than Feeling. Above all else, I'll always cherish the time I had with my little chickadee son. Even if I did leave him for dead on that fucking mountain.