Baby Steps, a being-bad-at-walking simulator by developers behind games like QWOP, Ape Out, and Getting Over It, got a demo during yesterday’s PC Gaming Show. It’s a slice of the beginning of the game that tasks you to go from Point A to Point B, and it would have made me tear my hair out if I still had hair.
Baby Steps stars a schlub named Nate, who is suddenly whisked from his basement couch into some kind of mysterious wasteland. The game’s Steam description calls him “an unemployed failson with nothing going for him;” he whines and worries as you guide him on his new adventure, and he’s surprisingly incurious about where he’s ended up and the people he meets there. Those people are energetic and welcoming, but Nate just wants to leave.
To do so, you have to steer him up a mountain, moving one foot at a time with your controller triggers. I didn’t find this motion too hard to come to grips with, but it required my continued attention to avoid sending him sprawling. One of my most memorable moments with the demo came when, well up the slope and feeling a bit self-congratulatory, I fell, tipping off the side of the stairs I was climbing and into a muddy ditch. I then slid the entire length of that ditch, unable to do anything but kick my legs feebly until I ended up all the way back at the bottom. I got turned around when exiting and ended up… somewhere, with what seemed like a million steps between me and my goal.
There’s no shortcuts to the end of the demo; it’s just going to take you manually controlling every single step to get where you want to go. I got distracted by a side activity that required bringing something up the mountain; I was curious how this was meant to be done given that Nate doesn’t seem able to do much with his arms, but it ended up never mattering. I spent a solid half an hour trying to carefully steer him to the top of a rock, inching his toes along a thin ledge and inevitably tumbling back to the ground. When I finally decided to give up and come back later, I could see my goal–a fire at the top of the mountain–so far in the distance, across a swamp of grass and ruined carnival equipment, and as badly as I just wanted to get there, there was nothing for it but to plod along, flailing and tripping and falling.
It requires a lot of patience, which was sometimes more than I possessed. I spent several of my college years as a very serious Zen Buddhist, where I attempted to get very good at just being where I’m at, but these days I am very bad at that. I thought of that effort a lot as I played Baby Steps. It’s hard to do anything besides pay attention to Nate’s feet, with the game’s shifting soundtrack to occasionally distract you. If I wanted to take in my surroundings or orient myself, I’d usually have to stop walking completely; changing direction required carefully moving Nate’s legs to spin around. The demo asks for just the right amount of attention, not necessarily concentration or precision, but a kind of presence that I castigated myself for struggling to bring it because I’d start trying to play it like a different game, or my brain would start ruminating on something else. But then Nate would fall and bring my focus back like I used to do in meditation, and it would feel like a little restart. I’d be determined to do better this time, and even get into a pretty good groove, before my focus or patience would drift and I’d fall again.
This is surely all some kind of metaphor for Nate’s life situation; at the beginning of the game, you hear people who seem like his parents worrying about how he’s spending, or wasting, his time. From what I played, the game doesn’t use his appearance as a punchline, which I was relieved about and hope is true of the full game. That said, I didn’t quite click with the game’s humor; everyone Nate meets is frantic and whiny in that sort of “Aw jeez” Rick & Morty way that isn’t really my thing, but it never became too much for me in the demo. Mostly, I was just alone with Nate and his feet, getting better and then worse again, moving one unsteady step at a time through the world. It was by turns weird fun and annoying as shit, but always in a way that made me want to keep playing.
Baby Steps comes out September 8.
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