Baby Steps Review: The agony and the ecstasy

Failure Simulator 2K25.

If the name Bennett Foddy stirs a reaction in you, be it excitement, rage or fear, you’ll already know if Baby Steps is your kind of game. Foddy is the master of melding jank physics and overwrought control systems into the kinds of challenging (nee frustrating) experiences that provide an unmatched level of satisfaction once mastered, most notably with QWOP and Getting Over It. Baby Steps is the final form of the “Foddy Game”; an open world exploration of just how far you can take a mechanic of putting one foot in front of the other, co-developed with Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch, best known for the sublime and stylish Ape Out.

You are Nate, an unemployed, onesie clad loser of a man, dropped into a world of magical realism with bare feet and no control over his upper body. The left trigger lifts your left foot, the right trigger your right, and you start placing those feet one in front of the other to hike your way over the most treacherous, diabolical mountain these twisted minds could devise.

You’ll stumble, bumble, balance, and tumble your way up and down this hellscape with a level of dogged determination only a portly man with no shoes, an allergy to accepting assistance and a desperate need for a bathroom can summon. You don’t get upgrades, items, or unlocks, you just master the limits of your wobbly legs and the surfaces they stumble along.

Baby Steps‘ open world is divided into biomes, each presenting unique frustrations to navigate such as rail tracks, mudslides, or sand. Horrible, horrible sand. You start each day with a gleam in your eye and the next camp a distant blip on the mountainside, with several paths available to traverse of which you’ll take one, fall off of it spectacularly, then stumble onto the next alternative. Going off the beaten track will reward you with particularly challenging climbing scenarios to obtain hats, forbidden fruit, or simple self satisfaction. Sometimes you’ll just stumble into an awkward interaction with other characters who just want to sell you some shoes or bum a smoke.

It is an impressive feat that the challenge in Baby Steps is purely contained to overcoming the environment, and not the game itself. The physics are wonky but metronomically consistent — I don’t remember a single moment where glitches or unexpected physics behaviours caused me frustration, and Nate always managed to find solid ground under his feet when standing after his many, many falls. The design is cunning and cruel but not deceptive; if a path looks like it can be traversed, there is a way through it. Sure, it might require pinpoint foot placements and movements, and failure might send you all the way to the bottom of the mountain, but you won’t be tricked into attempting the impossible or have the rug pulled from under you (Nate is unsteady enough without that, thank you very much).

This consistency makes the few moments of surprise well earned. You won’t have progress cheaply stolen from you by unexpected breaking planks or falling rocks, and the couple of times you are surprised are hilarious enough that I was quick to forgive, such as when I was lured into a bottle-kicking spree by a line of tantalisingly placed empties, culminating in a perfectly formed pyramid of green glass standing not-at-all precariously on a rock at cliff’s edge. Crucially only one physics surprise was on the main path, with ‘yellow shovel’ on the short list for the “most devious boss of 2025” award. We’ll start a support group.

It is a tremendous achievement of development to create and tune such a consistent set of physics in such a diverse range of scenarios and environments, limiting frustration to the challenge of the design rather than the mechanics of movement. That level of excellence is met by the level design; creating a world this size crafted with tiny moments of challenge, with a firm line distinguishing the possible from the not, is a commendable feat. Literally every rock and branch is placed with purpose, from the minor undulations in an otherwise smooth path, just to make sure you are paying attention, to the deviously crafted, perfectly measured challenges to snatch the forbidden fruit.

Baby Steps is as absurd and hilarious as it is challenging, driven by a cast of kooky characters and Nate’s ability to talk himself in circles attempting to end any social interaction as fast as he possibly can. Everybody plays this ludicrous, shoeless buffoon with a straight bat, adding to the farce of it all. It is very Australian as well, not in a tired stereotypical “g’day mate how about shrimp on the barbie” way but with a knockabout sense of, “she’ll be right mate” and complete acceptance of the extraordinary as mundane. It isn’t afraid to get a touch meta at times, teasing you with maps and grappling hooks that Nate is too proud to accept, but it is all fairly clever, no beating you over the head or nudge nudge, wink wink here.

While Baby Steps starts by laughing at the misfortunes of this bumbling oath floundering up a mountain, it does take some more serious turns. These moments of brevity punctuate the absurdity rather than replace it, but there is a lot more going on under the surface than you may give credit to. Many of the deepest story beats are hidden behind challenges, where you must first rescue a hat from a precarious position then shepherd it to the next camp, where it reveals hints of why Nate is the way he is via surreal 8-bit dream sequences.

There is a lot of storytelling weight carried by these missable moments, and whether Baby Steps is a heartfelt tale of a self-loathing man struggling through life, or one of painfully navigating a man-child through awkward encounters with well hung and very naked donkey-men, will depend on how many of these side trips you take (and whether you choose to disable the equine genitalia, an option gracefully offered when you start your adventure).

In spite of its high level of dong content, Baby Steps can be a beautiful adventure. Dynamic weather and time of day follows your progress, with the shadows of the sunset sweeping over the landscape as you near the next camp each night. Darkness falls and you navigate one section by moonlight, while rain and fog punctuate your journey through the swamps and forest, though mercifully the rain has no impact on grip conditions. The lovely and occasionally fantastical scenery takes an ever so slight edge off of the punishing job of traversing it, and a sparse, dynamic soundtrack composed with nature sounds has a habit of kicking in right as a tense climb reaches its most perilous moment.

Baby Steps is undoubtedly brilliant, but to recommend a game that is guaranteed to make you turn various shades of red in anger and frustration is a tricky proposition. The suffering is the point of Baby Steps, for better and for worse. I drew a deep sense of satisfaction at finally conquering some challenges, and it was inspiring to reflect on the perseverance required to see this one through to the end. Yet the sheer amount of effort required to retrace steps and attempt a particularly tough movement, only to fail and have to face it all again, sent me to bed with steam shooting from my ears more than once. While a good night’s sleep, some deep breathing or a much more relaxing real world walk would usually do the trick to calm me for another shot, I can’t guarantee that, if not being driven by the need to complete this for review, that I wouldn’t have succumbed to watching a playthrough on stream and enjoyed someone else’s suffering rather than experiencing my own.

But that is the other point of Baby Steps; to establish and reflect on your own relationship with difficulty, struggle and frustration. Nate is presented to us as a loser of the first order, but here he is refusing to quit, persevering and persisting in the face of failure after failure. How can I walk away when this guy, who would sooner walk up a mountain in bare feet than accept help, whose use of his arms is limited to putting on hats, won’t give up?

I trudged up and tumbled down one tower for two hours at one point, eventually walking away resigned to defeat. It gnawed at me, and as soon as I rolled credits I started a new game just to make my way there and spend two more hours failing. My heart sank every time I finally nailed a difficult movement only to be presented with another ridiculous challenge further along the path, with yet another multi-storey drop and full traversal awaiting each new failure. The longer I spent, the more I knew I wasn’t going to be able to leave until it was conquered. The screenshot from the top of that tower is now my desktop background. If I could show that level of resolve in everything I do in life, who knows where I would be right now.

At times I nearly howled with frustration as my mainline progress was blocked by a seemingly insurmountable challenge, or the next chokepoint of progress punished failure with a long drift down a river and a high risk climb just to get another shot (seriously, that mine cart and rail bridge can rot in hell). That I persisted and climbed that tower, shimmied past that mine cart, navigated those sandy, spiral staircases and conquered this adventure does give me a sense of pride, but why did it take a plump, awkward man in a onesie to inspire a dogged determination I have rarely shown in my many decades of life?

Can a game unlock something within you and inspire that resolve? Will I now face challenges in life and think “what would Nate do”? Deeper reflection on all of this is the point, but like Nate’s journey up the mountain it might lead you to some uncomfortable places.

Aside from the awkward self reflections and many, many progress-burning tumbles, Baby Steps will frustrate in some other ways. For a game of exploration with so many individual challenges and missable moments, some post-game checkpoints would be appreciated. Each journey has a single save slot, so you can’t go back to particular areas to see what you missed without either backtracking on your current save or starting a new game. There is no quicksaving or loading, no gaming the system. I begrudgingly respect the dedication to the format shown by the developers here; everything has to be earned, no shortcuts, no checkpoints, no fast travel, but the effort required to get back to some areas probably means I’ll be exploring them through a streamer or YouTuber’s eyes rather than bumbling my way through that damn sand castle again.

It could also do a better job of using achievements to reward some of the more devious challenges. I’ve never deserved the dopamine hit of an achievement ding more than when I reached the top of that tower, but nothing was forthcoming, nor when I tasted the sweet, forbidden fruits after many, many falls. Again, their absence is probably the point; intrinsic versus extrinsic reward and all, but achievements are used to reward some other particularly brutal challenges in game, so why not more of them? Some intentional disregard for quality of life and extrinsic reward is hardly a dealbreaker, but in an experience I otherwise loved, their absence is noted.

And love Baby Steps I did. There are few ways this game could better achieve its aims; in what it is trying to be Baby Steps approaches perfection. Whether what it is trying to be is for you, well that depends on if you feel that a rapturous level of self satisfaction is worth braving a storm of intense frustration and inconsolable rage. For those with the resolve (or stubbornness, or self loathing, or masochism), you won’t find a better test of all of them than Baby Steps. If you have the resilience of a damp tissue and capacity for frustration of a tired toddler, keep on walking by.

Baby Steps is available now on Windows PC via Steam, and PS5.

Baby Steps was reviewed using a promotional code on Windows PC via Steam, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.

Baby Steps 24 September 2025 PC PS5   Buy on Windows PC: Steam Buy on PlayStation: PlayStation Store