Baby Steps is many things. It's an adventure set on a gorgeous, if mysterious, mountain wreathed in fog. It's a humorous game featuring improvised dialogue from creators Bennett Foddy and Gabe Cuzzillo. It's a quite literal walking simulator in which players need to control each step of protagonist Nate's movement. Baby Steps is the brainchild of Foddy, Cuzzillo, and Maxi Boch, and features a unique and expansive world for players to explore at their own pace.
The Best War Games spoke to Foddy, Cuzzillo, and Boch about the world of Baby Steps. They discussed the process of improvising the game's dialogue, how they developed Baby Steps' unique sense of humor by working together to create dialogue that effectively established Nate's character and the strange world he's found himself in, and real-world mountains - such as Mount Everest - and other locations that contributed to the design of Baby Steps' setting. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Baby Steps Is A Meditative Story About A "Failson"
The Best War Games: You’ve described the game as “meditative” with philosophical undertones. How do the narrative and gameplay mechanics contribute to this?
Foddy: Real-life hikes give you a ton of time to ruminate and wonder about things you’re seeing out on the trail, or things someone said to you before you set out, and Baby Steps is a game of wondering about mysteries as you hike between locations.
Cuzzillo: Some of this comes out of the walking mechanics themselves. After you’ve played the game for a while, walking on a hiking trail becomes something closer to knitting than something you really have to actively be thinking about.
Boch: The gameplay and music cultivate that peacefulness, coaxing you into long periods of flowstate where your hands are playing a sort of rhythm game.
The Best War Games: Can you talk about the core themes surrounding Nate’s character and role as a “failson.” Is he a reflection of real-world burnout and self-discovery?
Foddy: If the gameplay in Baby Steps is resisting the traditional masculine empowerment fantasy in action games, we wanted a character who could embody that idea, so we explored what kinds of things that could mean. The trope of the ‘failson’ is a person who is expected to show certain types of masculine-coded success and is given a lot of material support from his parents in achieving it, but for whatever reason, is not able to live up to that expectation. That seemed like the perfect fit for our gameplay, where someone is living in the world of default action heroes but struggling to do the basics within that world.
The Improvised Humor Of Baby Steps
The Best War Games: Voices are improvised between Gabe and Bennett. How did that improv shape Nate’s personality and the game’s humor?
Foddy: The first idea was to try to really emphasize that Nate was confused about what was happening and not really making sense of things. In the improv sessions, that led to me constantly trying to flummox Gabe with ideas or language that was difficult to understand, and I think that’s part of where the style of humor emerges.
Cuzzillo: Neither of us really knows how to act, and a lot of the humor in the game is playing with that. Some of the jokes are about that, or are more between us as the actors/devs as opposed to the characters. Nate’s personality is something that we got to over the course of a lot of improv sessions. We’ve probably redone the first 30–50 scenes we recorded. I think it took us about that long to find the tone and the character. Nate feels like an aspect of myself that I’m able to emphasize or channel after a couple takes. Some of it is just an extreme awkwardness, but I also think it’s a certain very loose orientation to language. Like, he doesn’t really know how to use words sometimes, or only has a vague grasp of them.
The Best War Games: How did you strike the balance between the ambient, ‘meditative’ setting and the game’s absurd premise and humor?
Foddy: Comedy, especially absurd comedy, is a lot like horror - you can’t keep the scares or the laughs going 100% of the time, you need to give the audience a chance to reset. We tried to let the relaxed nature of the walking be an emotional reset for the jokes.
Boch: The other games that sit in the canon of humorous 3D indie games tend to be a bit relentless in their comedic pacing. This can work really well for a 20-minute television show, but the span of time in gameplay is too much. The humor works because it is a respite from the other experiences.
The Best War Games: The game leans heavily into humor. How did you develop the tone, and were there any particular comedic influences during development?
Foddy: We were particularly inspired by the old TV show Dr. Katz Professional Therapist, which uses a similar vein of tightly-edited improvised conversational humor with rapid camera cuts.
The Best War Games: Similarly, how did you develop delivering that humor?
Foddy: There’s this nice Patricia Highsmith quote that goes: “If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publishers and the readers can and will come later.” The stuff that made the cut from our improv sessions was the stuff that made at least one person laugh, which is why Gabe kept in so many of the cases where I misspoke or flubbed a line.
Cuzzillo: We went through a couple of different modes of delivering the story. At first, we were writing everything and delivering it largely as text that you read in gameplay. We had one recording that was improvised, though, and it felt so much better than the rest of the dialogue. It felt like something I hadn’t really seen a game do before, and it seemed like it would be fun to do, so we started leaning heavily in that direction.
The Real-World Inspiration Behind Baby Steps' Mountain Setting
The Best War Games: Which real-world mountains most closely inspired the mountain in Baby Steps?
Foddy: The first stab at it was modeled after the size and steepness of Everest! We cut it down a little after that, but not by much.
The Best War Games: Similarly, are there any other real-world locations that you directly referenced when creating the world of Baby Steps?
Foddy: We used a lot of real-world reference material, both in photos and from places we actually visited. We found ourselves looking more closely at what makes the placement of your feet interesting on a hike: how dirt gathers on the roots of a tree or how a path is knotted around a large rock rather than running over it. There are foot challenges in Baby Steps that are inspired by the bouldering section on top of Old Rag in Shenandoah National Park, for example.
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- 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
