‘He’s awkward, inebriated, and entirely unready’: Baby Steps, a game centered around taking a tumble.
The development team of Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy returns with a tale of a failure living in a basement, attempting to avoid falling on his face.
Game developers Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy have been friends for more than ten years, having connected at NYU’s Game Centre, and they have a successful indie game to their credit. Ape Out had you crashing through corridors filled with thugs as a rampaging gorilla to the rhythm of a jazz procedural soundtrack. Their upcoming game, Baby Steps, is also quite unique. In a truly literal sense of a walking simulator, you will clumsily guide Nate, a basement-dwelling, onesie-clad individual covered in cake, to ascend a foggy mountain. And frequently, you’ll trip and land on your face.
“Players operate the triggers on a controller to raise and place each foot, while utilizing the left stick to maneuver the elevated foot through the air, manually guiding each of Nate’s steps,” Cuzzillo explains. With this literalist control system, akin to Foddy’s previous titles such as QWOP and Getting Over It, the team aims for players to find a rhythm during their hike, absorbing the diverse scenery and allowing their thoughts to drift. Cuzzillo stated, “The entrancing state you can enter while walking is a significant aspect of what attracts me to hiking.” “We’re attempting to capture some of that here.”
Baby Steps seeks to combine deep surrealism with lightheartedness. A “fully dynamic onesie soilage system” acts as a visual record of the player’s errors while navigating the tough terrain, gathering mud and grime. It also features one of the more unexpected main characters in video game history. “Nate finds himself in a challenging situation at the start of the story: he feels the weight of his parents’ expectations to leave home and find work, he is anxious, and he struggles to confront the world,” explains Cuzzillo. “He desires nothing more than to go back to the security and warmth of his parent’s home, hoping that no one will realize he feels lost, awkward, inept, under the influence, and entirely unready.”
In this Isekai story, Nate is transported to an enigmatic, somewhat desolate realm with little immediate comprehension of his direction. Here is where the auditory environment of Baby Steps enters. “It represents a form of emerging musique concrète, arising from the repetitive rhythmic activation of environmental sounds linked to the players’ movement,” Cuzzillo clarifies. The distinct sonic components that form the soundscape are positioned throughout the game world, with each sound radiating from its exact spot, enticing players’ curiosity and suggesting that there could be something special or engaging to discover if they track an intriguing sound back to its origin.
The trailer, which is both amusing and perplexing, reveals that Baby Steps includes a variety of intriguing characters. After dislodging a pile of rocks with a careless step, Nate is scolded by an enigmatic Australian concealed in the nearby shrubs. The surprising, humorous dialogue results from the spontaneous voice acting of the developers, who continued to re-record scenes until they discovered the dialogue captivating enough to retain.
This world is strange, and Cuzzillo is hesitant to share too many details about it. “When players complete the game, they will likely form some theories about what’s happening,” he states. “Our aim is to provide players with something to ponder as they progress.” Refer to it as narrative trail mix.
