Baby Steps is set to be a literal take on the 'walking simulator' genre, being a title that will force players to grapple with a set of unconventional physics. With the game right on the horizon, the team behind Baby Steps spoke to The Best War Games about bringing the concept to life.
Baby Steps' game design will be familiar to those acquainted with rage games, although it's more meditative than rage-inducing. The title will see players explore a foggy, mountainous environment via a unique set of physics, with the world built around the feel of someone learning to walk for the first time. The Best War Games sat down with the development trio behind Baby Steps (Bennett Foddy, Maxi Boch, and Gabe Cuzzillo) to discuss how the title got off the ground and what its development journey has looked like. The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The Devs Behind Baby Steps Talk Development, Prototypes, and Working With Devolver
Baby Steps' Inception
The Best War Games: Can you take us back to the first day the project was greenlit? What was the original vision, and how much has that shifted throughout development?
Cuzzillo: It wasn’t so much greenlit as we eventually decided that this prototype was the one that was going to be the next real project. I remember Bennett saying, “I think this might be the one” like two months into prototyping it. But it was already becoming really fun, and we were really enjoying just walking up the little test slope. I don’t think the vision of the game has changed drastically since those initial prototypes, it feels more like it’s been added to. A lot has been built up around it.
The Best War Games: Can you talk about your pre-production/prototyping phases? What did Baby Steps look like then?
Foddy: Gabe’s first gameplay prototype was a couple of boxes for feet, glowing spheres for a butt, and lines for legs, and that was basically everything. The second prototype had an off-the-rack helicopter pilot traversing a very small piece of mountain, maybe 4 meters by 20. But we had Nate on an overly large foggy, rainy mountain by prototype 3.
The Best War Games: How would you describe the first few months/years of Baby Steps’ development? What about the last year?
Foddy: The first year was mostly ‘adding,’ the last year was mostly ‘subtracting,’ at least for my part in it. At some point, our story had about 45 characters in it!
The Best War Games: What was the moment you “found the fun” for Baby Steps?
Foddy: I think the fun was there in the first prototype Gabe made in 2019, even though it didn’t have any of the ragdoll physics, and it was just sticks and boxes. I think that’s probably pretty unusual for a 3D game, since so much usually has to be functioning as intended before it starts to click.
The Best War Games: How did you land on its current visual/audio design?
Foddy: The visual design had a few different inspirations, but I had a particular kind of emotion in mind that I wanted at least for the start of the game, and in late 2019, right about the time we were playing Gabe’s first prototype for Baby Steps, I came across an artwork by Tyler Rhodes that was part of the exploration he was doing on Artbreeder at the time that really captured the feeling. He had a series of these images of mysterious candles rising from misty landscapes, evoking sound-stage sets for old movies with bad bluescreen effects, or maybe Max Ernst’s series of surrealist sponge paintings. That would give our world the sense of Nate being a ‘fish out of water’ that I wanted to accompany the gameplay.
Boch: I started beatmaking in the shower when I was recovering from Ape Out development and got really into what that sounded like. I had already incorporated water sounds into Ape Out’s music, and as the Baby Steps gameplay came together, it became clear that music arising from natural elements would be a great fit for a game about a stoner failson's psychedelic hike.
The Goal of Baby Steps' Design
The Best War Games: What were the driving goals or game pillars throughout development?
Boch: We've known from the start that systems bloat is not this game, and an aesthetic that our team often finds tiresome.
Foddy: When you’re making an open-world game, there’s a huge temptation to add mechanics to help flesh out the space. You see that in nearly every big-budget game—gathering and crafting, resource management, map unlocks, quest chains, countable collectables, fast-travel portals, traversal or skill upgrades, and on and on. We had a very clear sense that we believed the core gameplay was deep enough and enjoyable enough that we wouldn’t need to do any of that, and I think a huge amount of the game’s overall design flows from a strict refusal to pile up systems.
The Best War Games: Part of Baby Steps’ marketing surrounds the title being a ‘literal’ walking simulator. Is Baby Steps intentionally a subversion/satire of the walking simulator genre?
Foddy: I think of it more as a subversion of AAA open-world games like Assassin’s Creed, which also, after all, involve a huge amount of walking around the landscape.
The Best War Games: The term “walking sim” has been applied elsewhere, but games like Getting Over It and Baby Steps could technically qualify more than the ones usually labeled as that. What’s your take on this term, and do you think there’ll be a rise in games in this more unique genre?
Foddy: “Walking sim” is a term which is used by designers who are interested in making games that are mostly about exploring and observing, reclaiming a derisive term that some players have for those games. They aren’t literally simulating walking, like we are! I personally am a huge fan of walking sims and have played a ton of them, from well-known things like Dear Esther or Gone Home to more niche titles like Fugue in Void or Far Future Tourism. What we have in common is that we don’t want to abide by normal genre tropes.
The Best War Games: Games like this are generally popular with streamers. Did you build anything into Baby Steps and/or its presentation that specifically ties into this angle?
Foddy: We tried to make it fun to watch as well as to play! For streamers, that generally means leaning into the physical comedy aspect and giving them enough latitude for creative, exploratory play. There’s also plenty of optional challenge in there for folks who want it.
Boch: My goal as a sound designer is to make watching gameplay and being along for the ride as viscerally impactful as possible. The authoritative experience of this game includes failing, and so by making failure aesthetically enjoyable and the ambient experience pleasurable, streamers and their audiences will both have a blast.
The Best War Games: Baby Steps is published by Devolver Digital. Can you talk more about partnering with them for Baby Steps and why it was a good fit?
Cuzzillo: We just enjoyed working with Devolver on Ape Out and wanted to do it again! They’re the best!
Boch: Despite continuing to publish Serious Sam, Devolver is a great group of folks, and there's no one else we'd rather be working with.
Baby Steps Beyond Launch
Reactions to Baby Steps
The Best War Games: In a prior The Best War Games interview, Shuhei Yoshida cited Baby Steps as his most anticipated indie game of the year. Can you recall any encounters with Yoshida or talk about what it’s like to have such a big name have faith in your game?
Boch: Yoshida's faith is a wonderful sign and a fun full circle for me, as he was one of the biggest backers of FreQuency at SCA and is in a certain way responsible for the fact that I'm a game developer at all. My first love is music, and if Yoshida hadn't backed a music game studio, I wouldn't be here today.
Foddy: I’ve never met Shuhei Yoshida, but the Sony folks have been incredibly supportive of the title through its development. It’s cool that one of the big platforms has been so open to a game that pokes fun at the biggest games on consoles, the open-world blockbusters.
The Best War Games: Have any player reactions, QA tests, etc., stood out to you?
Cuzzillo: One of my favorite reactions has been from my cousin, who played about half the game before he came upon a rock formation he decided to try to climb. It wasn’t something we designed, and it didn’t lead anywhere in particular, but he became hell-bent on trying to get up it. It took him 8 hours of attempts in the end before he did it. Finding skate spots like that in the world is one of my favorite things to do in the game, and I hope more people find themselves drawn to this kind of play.
The Best War Games: What about internally? Do you have any fun behind-the-scenes stories you could share about playing the game?
Foddy: One of the various ways we go about finding bugs or flaws in the level design is to design racecourses within the game world and try to finish fastest, with two computers side-by-side. I really recommend it as a way for friends to play together once they’ve beaten the game: write down a list of tasks or waypoints that might have multiple possible routes, and see who can do it faster. You’d be surprised how often a seemingly insurmountable lead is whittled away as the leader fails a simple climb over and over. I think you could even set up a version of the infamous Barkley Marathons in the game.
The Best War Games: Has the team tried speedrunning the game yet? Dedicated players typically find ways to beat this sort of game faster than devs could anticipate, but if you had to put out an estimate, how much difference do you think there’ll be between the average playtime of the title and the top speedruns?
Foddy: Our attitude to skips is to not go out of our way to stop them, so I expect speedrunners to finish the game in less than 5% of the time of the average player’s first run. There’s enormous room to optimize your route and find tricky skips.
The Best War Games: Are there any plans or ideas in place for post-release content?
Boch: Expect ongoing audio design improvements for Baby Steps for months after the game's release. We've got amazing things in store, and it's going to keep sounding better and better.
Cuzzillo: The only thing I’m thinking about is a developer commentary track. It wouldn’t be the traditional approach though, and I wouldn’t want to spoil it;)
[END]
- Released
- September 23, 2025
- Developer(s)
- Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy
- Publisher(s)
- Devolver Digital
- Number of Players
- Single-player
- Steam Deck Compatibility
- Unknown
WHERE TO PLAY
Play as Nate, an unemployed failson with nothing going for him, until one day he discovers a power he never knew he had… putting one foot in front of the other.
Explore a world shrouded in mist, one step at a time. Hike the serene mountains by placing each footstep yourself, in original physics-based gameplay from the minds behind Ape Out and Getting Over It. Take in the sights, fall in love with the local fauna, and try to find meaning in a wasted life.
Get ready to fall for Nate, in Baby Steps, a literal walking simulator.
KEY FEATURES
• Fully-simulated physics based walking.
• A world that seems to come alive with a dynamic soundtrack built up out of 420 beats and vibes.
• A lengthy trek up a mountain-sized mountain that you can explore at your own pace, or slower.
• Fully dynamic onesie soilage system.
• Non-collectible hats.
