By Lucas White

Copyright shacknews

As I pushed my way through Baby Steps over 11 or so of god’s own hours, I asked myself a few questions. What does it mean to feel accomplished in a game? What value is there in pushing beyond one’s own perceived limits for the sake of finishing something? Can one continuous joke still be funny eight hours later? Does the presence of a metaphor elevate a story? I’ve sat down to write this review but I don’t think I have answers to everything here yet. Such is the outcome of staring far too long at a game about a jiggling neckbeard pushing his way up a mountain like a brainrot-infused adaptation of Sisyphus.

Are you still watching “One Piece?” No, not really

Baby Steps is about Nate, a “failson” whose days comprise vegging out on a couch in his parents’ basement smoking weed, binging anime, and wearing adult-sized onesies that barely contain his human potato shape. We meet him asleep in the middle of a One Piece marathon, his parents fruitlessly calling for a family meeting from upstairs. Suddenly Nate wakes up somewhere else, an outdoor wilderness that challenges him to move forward towards the unknown. So he tries to, and falls flat on his face. Only then does Baby Steps suggest picking your feet up first.

This is one of those. One of the names getting top billing in Baby Steps is Bennett Foddy, the guy behind Getting Over It and QWOP. It’s physical comedy in a way only a video game can deliver: frustration, awkwardness, and bemusement from a function you can do in real life without conscious brain activity. The entirety of Baby Steps is fighting against the controls and environment to just, simply, walk. Nate being a sadsack loser enhances the bit due to his unfortunate aesthetic and the absurdity of his jiggling ass wrapped up in a grey onesie that often gets covered in sweat, mud, sand, snow, and whatever else throughout the journey.

If you’ve played Getting Over It, you can guess what to expect in terms of the challenge. It’s a fight against physics to reach a goal, with the consequences of messing up growing and growing the further you get. Although, with the much larger scale to baby Steps’ world, there are checkpoints and milestones that help alleviate the pressure. You don’t go all the way to the beginning every time you mess up, but that doesn’t mean you won’t feel like you’re burning the limited time you have on this planet when you slide down a muddy hill for the umpteenth time. It’s more of a peaks and valleys kind of situation, which is for the best considering how long this game is.

How long is too long?

We were given an estimated 8 to 10 hour runtime, and I went a bit over 11 as I mentioned earlier. Part of that was my getting stuck on the “final boss” for a whopping three hours (at least), which was an interesting cross-section of misery, stubbornness, and something resembling integrity. I don’t mind being made fun of for suggesting a game’s difficulty is poorly tuned, but I at least won’t give up before I get there. I will stress the final puzzle was miserable, partially because the way it was designed pushed against how the controls and physics work on a base level to the point where I could practically see the bursting seams.

That’s where my questions from earlier come in. Not only is there a lot of messing up and starting over (which is funny considering this is happening at the same time Silksong folks are debating about runbacks), but there’s a lot of dead air in Baby Steps. For as much time is spent with wacky humor doing its utmost to make Nate and the player uncomfortable (the genitalia warning at the beginning is not to be taken lightly), there’s much more time burned simply walking from one point of interest to the next. And if you get lost, you may walk a massive circle or two around an empty space before finally lucking out and ending up in the right direction. During these times, I can’t say I was able to fall back on Baby Steps’ silly premise to keep me amused. Wave a “that’s the point” flag at me all you want, but stretching one joke out across a minimum of eight hours means that joke better be a stroke of genius.

I won, but at what cost?

It doesn’t help that, after making my way past challenge after challenge, I never felt that magical sense of “accomplishment” fans of Soulslikes or whatever tend to nod at. If I got through something in what felt like a reasonable amount of time I was able to appreciate the bit more, but struggling to climb up the inside of a crashed train for three hours left me feeling hollow after succeeding. I was glad it was over, but instead of yelling some variant of “let’s go,” I simply thought “well that sucked and I’ll never get that time back; oh well.” Neither funny nor satisfying, and my reward was a punchline of an ending that gave a little weight to a budding metaphor suggesting what Baby Steps was really about before being distracted by piss. Man, does this game think piss is hilarious.

I think it’s okay to look at something clearly trying to be smart and achieve a specific goal, look it in the eyes, and say it failed. Baby Steps can be funny and joyfully weird at many times, but it also comes with a sense of self-indulgence and arrogance that gets in its own way. There’s a story in here about leaving the nest and learning to be an adult both capable of existing without your parents carrying you and asking for help from others when you need it. I see that and note its presence, but I’m not going to give an allegory flowers just because it’s there. That’s only half the work.

What we have at the end of the day is a strange, silly game that is a little too sure of itself to stick its landing effectively. It stretches itself too thin to be consistently funny and its story is clumsily told despite its put-on air of poignance. It has its moments though, and for as grumpy as I was by the end I still look back at its early hours with some fondness. Watching a dumpy nerd slide down a muddy hill is pretty funny the first few times; it just doesn’t stay funny as long as Baby Steps wants it to.

Baby Steps is available on September 23, 2025 for the PlayStation 5 and PC. A PC code was provided by the publisher for review.