Review

I regret to inform everyone that Baby Steps is a great game. And I really enjoy it.

For those unfamiliar with what arena we are in, this game was made by Gabe Cuzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy. I was unfamiliar with the first two, but I'm quite familiar with the devastation Foddy leaves in his wake. (of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy fame). Much of the lens I see the game through is with that work in mind. The first thing to understand is that Baby Steps is not remotely as hateful as Getting Over It. This walking simulator gives you many opportunities for heartbreaking progress loss. But the structure of the game means that you're not in a situation where you can tumble back to the beginning of the game. The game is actually rather heartfelt. It wants you to succeed. There is genuine emotion here. Which might not be immediately evident upon first playing it.

One of my favorite parts of the game are the cutscenes. They are genuinely hilarious. There have been multiple laugh out loud smiling ear to ear moments. The humor is so juvenile in a very adult way. I would compare to a Bojack or a maybe a little bit of Good Place. If you skip all the cutscenes (we could NOT be friends), you earn the reward of a 30+ minute cutscene of the two main devs/voices just sort of rambling about nothing. That they're disappointed the player skipped the cutscenes, the work they put into them. What they want to eat for lunch. It's very clever. And all of the characters in the game are basically voiced by two people and totally improvised. It channels a lot of Tim Robinson I Think You Should Leave energy.

In terms of the actual game, it's very fun. The skill ceiling is quite high. I can recall when I first started playing totally unable to walk more than a single step at a time. And now I am flying all over scaling sheer cliffs and desert dunes. It's satisfying to learn how to just move and exist in this world. And everything you're doing is for its own sake. If you are totally ignoring everything optional, it doesn't take all that long to get up each section of the mountain to the next sort of hub area. But the world is littered with optional little challenges just sitting there waiting to be done. The game does not care if you do these and it will rarely acknowledge you. It even mocks the bad-brainedness of caring about achievements by purposefully setting up rather difficult fetch quests where you have to find an item and lug it across the world and you will get nothing of value. Nate saying something like "Wow, I feel really trophy right now." It's good. The game is done for its own sake. Playing it is fun, and it knows that.

I don't really think about "game of the year" because the majority of the time I'm not playing anything new, but this one really needs to be considered and I am not fucking around here.