Developed by a three-man indie team of Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy, Baby Steps is available on PC and PS5. It’s part of the rage game genre, with an absurd walking simulator set up where you must guide a character methodically across an impossible terrain.
You guide his feet and must climb up a mountain, but one error and you might be back down at the start to do it all over again. It’s a game about patience and perseverance, yet will enrage anyone with neither.
The Existential HELL of Baby Steps
Back when we reviewed Team Cherry’s often tedious Silksong (2025), we noted its difficulty veered so far off normal Metroidvania track it was borderline a rage game. And it suffers badly for it.
Baby Steps is a rage game and executes its game mechanics brilliantly. But we must instantly note this type of game is only going to appeal to a specific type of person.
Indie dev Bennett Foddy is involved and his legendary philosophical-fest Getting Over It (2017). It was designed to be annoying, unfair, and to offer an absurd/unrealistic challenge.
The concept tied in with Albert Camus’ famous essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). As in, you’re forced to endlessly repeat something (i.e. work) despite the obvious absurdity and pointlessness of doing so.
This is where Baby Steps continues the idea, this with much more advanced graphics and a longer game length. At first glance, it’s ridiculous concept of guiding couch potato Nate (35) up a mountain. He walks weird, he’s tough to control, and that adds to the frustrations of the game.
Why would anyone want to play something like this? Exactly, well the rage game genre isn’t overpopulated with titles. Pontypants’ excellent A Difficult Game About Climbing (2024) is one of the few examples.
In some respects it’s a kind of community event in gaming.
Video games are very sociable these days, in digital form, and many Twitch streamers will be having fun making idiots of themselves on Baby Steps. You trip, you fall, you look stupid, and you try again. For viewers, it’s good fun watching this (the eternal struggle, one step at a time) and rooting for the player.
To play the game is what you’d expect it to be. Difficult. It’s a walking simulator, one where walking is hard work. Your progress is very hit and miss, slight mistakes can result in horrifying falls and the loss of an hour of game progress, and the main character is in a kind of baby onesie for the whole thing.
Baby Steps is an ordeal. As we’ve covered already, it’s supposed to be.
If you’re the type of gamer who revels in this kind of thing, of steeling your nerve and putting in 10, 20, maybe even 30 hours to finally defeat the thing out of sheer bloody-minded grit and stubbornness… then this may well be for you. For everyone else, stick to whatever pleases you.
As for the gaming press, Baby Steps launched in September 2025 and met with largely positive reviews. IGN gave it 9/10, PC Gamer 85/100, and Push Square 8/10. Others were less enthusiastic, with Game Informer flinging 6/10 at it.
The main thing is if you go in expecting a normal game. This is not that, it’s ridiculous, moronic, and even farcical. And yet that urge to keep on making those steps forward is very real indeed.
Baby Steps: The Whole Goddamn Experience
If you want to experience the full thing, YouTuber NeoGamer went through 15 hours of suffering so you don’t have to! Quite the ordeal, then, but have a gander if you wish to indulge in suffering.
