Many times it seems like everything has already been invented. How is it possible to innovate when we already live in the future? This seems especially true in video games, a medium where it feels like everything has already been done. All mechanics are standardized, conforming to genres and control mappings that are familiar to any player who has spent a little time with them. But even so, when we delve into the indie scene, there is always something that surprises us. For example, a game that Sony has dedicated a lot of love to in its events for the past couple of years.
Baby Steps was released discreetly last week, but not without making some noise. Having appeared in several PlayStation State of Play events, it caught attention for the uniqueness of its premise: we embody a man who, after spending hours watching One Piece lying on the sofa in his parents’ basement, finds himself teleported to the universe of a video game. But after so many hours lying down, he doesn’t even know how to walk. And he is too proud to admit it.
Walking is more mechanically complex than it seems
With that premise, Bennett Foddy, Gabe Cuzzillo, and Maxi Boch, creators of the little boy, make a brilliant game of exploration and self-discovery based on a single premise: what if walking were extremely complicated? And not in a Death Stranding way, which was hard but satisfying. Really complicated.
To make our protagonist, Nate, walk, we have to press the triggers and tilt the left stick of our controller. Each trigger controls one of the legs, and the stick controls the rest of the body. This means that if we press the left trigger, the left leg will lift. If, in addition to pressing the left trigger, we move the left stick, it will move the left leg forward, backward, or sideways. In this way, we will have to try to control Nate’s movements, from his clumsy trot to more precise movements, to achieve his goal. First, to find a bathroom to take a leak, and then, a more ambitious one: to reach the top of the mountain in front of him.
Of course, the game doesn’t make it easy for us. Although at first it’s normal to fall, we quickly get used to walking with a certain fluidity. But what would be trivial in any other game is a real challenge in Baby Steps. Going up a slope, not to mention climbing stairs, crossing a plank, or passing through a particularly narrow path is a particularly difficult challenge. If there is any kind of obstacle or we have to do something more complex, like climbing a wall, it can become almost impossible.
To improve in life, you have to take one step at a time
But that is part of the charm. Baby Steps is aware at all times of the challenge it poses and never punishes us, or not without offering us a bit of comedy in what it does. In that sense, it reminds us of the most hilarious moments of Dark Souls: it may throw a giant stone ball at our face, but isn’t there something comical about it, as if it came straight out of Humor Amarillo? And Baby Steps does the same.
Sometimes we fall off a cliff, or we step wrong and get swept downriver, losing all the progress we had made, but it never feels entirely frustrating. Partly because it’s comical how Nate moves and seems unfazed by all his misfortunes. Partly because of its open-world design. Whenever we fail, we arrive at a new place, an area we hadn’t seen before, or a new way to advance to where we had been before, showing us that failure as such does not exist in Baby Steps: only the possibility of discovering something new and, perhaps, even the opportunity for an even greater triumph.
This relates to the themes developed in the game. Nate is a person with ambitions and desires, but too scared to pursue them, who opens up frustratingly slowly throughout the game. And all the game mechanics relate to that narrative. How, in order to advance in life, it is necessary to take risks and make mistakes. That there is never anything from which we cannot return, because we are never going to do anything that is not a path that someone has walked before.
Baby Steps is, in many ways, the first true walking simulator. Because it truly focuses all its purpose on walking. And if you are interested in what we have shared about it, you can find it available for PC as well as for PlayStation 5.
