3.5/5 ★ – DanteSnowcone's review of Baby Steps.

Baby Steps feels like going to a national park just to bang your head against a tree. There is a true beauty to the construction of this game that is utterly lost on me as I stubbornly climb and fall and climb and fall for hours, only to be rewarded with a silly little cutscene every now and then, and maybe a fun hat. What really got me through the frustration is the fact that this is the most I’ve laughed through a game in years. The beauty of Baby Steps is that you have a combination of two types of humor. The obvious one is the slapstick comedy of Nate falling down mountains, slipping in mud, and clapping his voluptuous butt cheeks together whenever he ragdolls around. You can’t go fifty feet in any direction without snickering at the physicality of it all. The other humor is in the writing, which really tickled me. Listening to Nate bumble through conversations with the grace of a baboon is hilarious, especially because everyone else generally wants to help him until he metaphorically farts on their kindness. Nate’s journey is always the main drive of the game, but I sought out cutscenes whenever I could to hear more of his cringeworthy attempts at conversation. Nate is perhaps the most unlikable protagonist I’ve ever experienced: he’s antisocial, he won’t accept anyone’s help, he lies constantly to cover up his insecurities, and he is unable to string a coherent thought together unless it’s about food. And yet I still managed to feel sorry for him and appreciate the growth he undergoes through the game — however minor it may be. But maybe it was Stockholm syndrome, because playing this game often felt like torture. I am persistent to a fault when it comes to hard games; when faced with a challenge I will try, try again until I beat it. That was a detriment in this game, which offers a surprisingly giant world with many paths forward. If one doesn’t work, you can usually go find another path. But I, a fool, would try the same dumb challenging path until my hands hurt just because I didn’t want to admit that the game beat me. Yes, I beat the game, and yes, I climbed Manbreaker, but at the cost of my own sanity. This is especially unfortunate because the game is designed with exploration in mind. The world is vibrant and full of surprises, which are very easy to miss if you don’t have the patience or the skill to go off the beaten path. I saw many things that I was interested in exploring, but not interested enough to negate all my forward momentum. I get that the challenge is all in the movement, but to me that disincentivized the exploration they clearly wanted you to engage in. I did several little “sidequests” in the first few hours, but I quickly reached a point where it became all about finishing. I ended up just looking up things I missed on YouTube. There are very few people that I can recommend this to. This definitely feels inspired by the prominence of streaming culture, and I bet there are a lot of people having a blast watching both casual runs and speedruns. But as a player, I don’t think I ever wanna trudge through that again lol Time Played: 18 hours Played on PS5