Baby Steps is funny, but it's also a depressing, confrontational horror game about thwarted modern masculinity

When I started Baby Steps earlier this week I thought it would end up being the funniest game ever made. Every time the bulbous antihero fell over I would laugh. I would cackle as the onesie-ed, erstwhile binge watcher slid haplessly down muddy slopes in the least dignified way possible. Sometimes I would just stand still and rotate the analog stick so that he'd do that weird whooshing wormy dance that looks so pathetic. It's fun to make Nate do dumb things and laugh at him. And get a load of his stupid walk. What an absolute loser!

If you can imagine, it gets much darker than this. Baby Steps is the bleakest game I've ever played.

Before being transported to a bizarre mountainous landscape full of illogical obstacles and donkey men with laddish Australian accents, Nate is a 35-year-old man living in his parents' basement. We all know what that implies. He watches One Piece, smokes bongs, and orders pizza a lot. He probably posts on Reddit. I bet he's playing Spider-Man 2 or Gotham Knights or some bullshit like that. Almost certainly he's a virgin. Whenever he encounters assertive, confident donkey men he's immediately cowered by them. He doesn't want to offend them and he doesn't want their help. He just wants to get away.

Baby Steps' stoner humour treads some extremely dark territory—extreme green out territory. It starts as slapstick Beckett before swerving wildly into Houellebecq-ian territory (the poet laureate of not getting any). If it annoys you that I'm comparing Baby Steps to books instead of other games, don't worry, it annoys me too: there aren't really any obvious parallels in games. I guess Baby Steps functionally resembles Death Stranding, but Death Stranding compares unfavourably to what has been achieved with this newer game.

Kojima's incoherent, self-important gesturing at "themes" is pretty dumb compared to what Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch and Bennett Foddy have made here. Rather than throw a bunch of half-cocked ideas into the big blockbuster videogame blender, Foddy and co remain laser-focused on evoking a certain kind of modern male indignity via a medium that's meant to be fun and feel good.

I'm not asked to sympathise with Nate, but the mercilessness of our shared plights (me, the player of a stupidly hard game; he, an official failure by the measure of a harsh, hyper-competitive modern world) brings us together. But despite how it looks, and despite how it sounds, Baby Steps manages to be fun, nay, addictive.

Baby Steps is a paean to failure, futility and wasted life. Sure, you can beat it, but beating it means nothing. It's possible to collect objects and carry them to certain NPCs to get Steam achievements, but these tasks are usually so onerous and straightforwardly un-fun that only those with an exquisite loathing for their own time will tackle them. Yesterday I watched for, oh, about five hours, as a Twitch streamer climbed a diabolically complex tower, only to find nothing up there (he had been warned).

Baby Steps is an unrelenting thing, completely committed to its impudently miserable vision, and I love that about it. But at a certain point, around halfway through, the game's dark comedy melts away, leaving something morbid and harassing. Spoilers for a very late game encounter follow.

After a dozen-or-so hours spent "waddlebitching" (thanks Jody) around this very ugly open world, Nate eventually finds a big cave where all the big-dicked donkey bros are hanging out. Inside this cave is a cauldron where he can make a wish. Nate has promised the donkey bros that he'll wish for cigarettes, but he wishes for something else instead. We expect his wish to be "take me home"—back to his basement, One Piece and pizzas—but instead he wishes he was dead.

That sense of a lurking darkness at the heart of this frivolous game is rendered totally unambiguous in this moment. It's not delivered in a sentimental way, it's not given some heightened emphasis. There are no burgeoning strings, the camera does not dwell on Nate's pained, newly-sympathetic face. He just says it and then goes back to his waddlebitching. But it nevertheless hits with the force of a brick shithouse pushed from the edge of a cliff.

Sometimes you get the sense that Foddy and co are laughing at you for playing this game. Why aren't you out there, making your own videogame? Or making your fortune? Why are you eating those crisps lathered in saturated fats, when liberally peppered steamed broccoli would help you shed that gut? Why don't you get a job?

Well, I don't think the creators of Baby Steps are that cruel—though maybe they are—but they're dab hands at capturing that sense of feeling small and trapped in an illogical, increasingly hostile world that bears no resemblance to the future you were promised. I can't think of a better game for 2025.