Bottom Line: Baby Steps weaponizes the most basic human motor skill and turns it into the funniest, most quietly profound game of 2025. It will infuriate you. It will humiliate you. Buy it anyway.
The Loop: Suffering as Craft
The core loop of Baby Steps is deceptively simple: look at terrain, plan a route, execute steps, fall, scream, repeat. What elevates it is that the skill curve is real. In hour one, you are a marionette operated by a drunk. By hour ten, you're reading slopes, feathering your weight transfers, and stringing together confident strides across scree that would have ended you earlier. The game never gets easier — you get better, and it can tell the difference. That distinction is the entire Foddy design philosophy, and it's executed here with more generosity than Getting Over It ever offered.
The mountain itself does enormous heavy lifting. Because the landscape is open rather than a fixed gauntlet, failure rarely means total reset. A fall usually deposits you somewhere lower and demoralizing, but the route back up is yours to choose, and alternate paths often reveal themselves mid-tumble. This is the crucial evolution from the developers' earlier work: frustration is still the fuel, but exploration is the exhaust valve. When one ascent breaks you, you can wander sideways, find a hat, stumble into one of the game's strange deadpan characters, and come back with your ego partially reassembled.
Comedy as a Physics Property
Most games write their jokes. Baby Steps simulates them. The physics system is tuned to a precise comedic frequency — Nate doesn't ragdoll like an action-game corpse, he crumples like a man who has disappointed everyone, including gravity. The mild nudity, the drug references, the strong language: all of it services a specific tone, a kind of mumblecore Sisyphus. The narrative about an unemployed thirty-something learning to literally stand on his own is not subtle, but it's delivered with enough awkward restraint that it lands as melancholy rather than sermon.
Where It Grinds
Honesty check: this game's pace is divisive by design, and the design occasionally overplays its hand. Some late-game surfaces — wet rock, certain scrambles — cross the line from "demanding mastery" into "auditing your patience for its own amusement." A single bad step erasing forty minutes of progress is thrilling exactly once per session; the third time, it's a controller-gripping negotiation with your own willpower. The single-player-only, roughly-13-achievement package also means that once the mountain is summited, there's little structural reason to return beyond self-imposed challenges and speedrun ambitions. The game knows what it is and refuses to soften. Respect that — but know what you're signing up for.
The onboarding deserves specific praise, though. The opening hour teaches the leg mechanics through terrain rather than tutorial text, escalating from flat mud to inclines with the confidence of designers who trust their systems. There's no difficulty selector, no assist mode, no mercy — which will rightfully exclude some players, and the game is at peace with that.