Baby Steps

The genre it best fits in is one that one of the makers of the game, Bennett Foddy, has almost co-invented: the rage game or tilt game genre, games like tilt frog made to test players sanity, especially in the context of streaming and video content where the rage and despair of the player serve as an additional entertainment layer for viewers. Foddy is a luminary in the field, with classics like QWOP in 2008 and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy in 2017. Together with Associate Arts Professor at NYU Game Center Maxi Boch and Foiled developer Gabe Cuzzillo, Foddy has (quite literally) taken the next step in the quest to make the most infuriating game on the planet. But Baby Steps is much more than that, and that is by far the biggest accomplishment of the game.

The challenge the game poses to players is very mechanical, in the form of setting the two individual feet of protagonist Nate down one after one. This leads to a lot of humorous sections quite naturally through failure and unexpected reactions to design. But the humour of Baby Steps goes further. It perculates every layer of the game’s design, including the narrative. Dialogue’s in Baby Steps are hilarious, written as if every character were a comedian, swinging between the upbeat enthusiasm of almost every NPC and Nate’s ever self-deprecating weirdness. 

Few people will see the end of Baby Steps, because the difficulty spikes of the games are sharp. Is this bad design? Absolutely not. Because giving up before the challenges of Baby Steps is not an end of Baby Steps. Going to YouTube and watching a VOD of a streamer playing Baby Steps is part of the intended experience. Foddy’s games don’t care if you are the player or the viewer – and that gives them an artistic quality few video game products can compete with.