Nate lifts his left foot when I squeeze the left trigger, and his right foot when I squeeze the right trigger. He swings the lifted foot forward when I push the left stick forward, but if both feet are on the ground when I push the stick he leans forward instead, usually falling over immediately. And probably sliding downhill in his gray onesie, butt in the air.
As a third-person game, Nate's rump is in view for a lot of your time playing Baby Steps. Dudes who need to defend their enjoyment of Tomb Raider sometimes say, "If I'm going to be looking at a butt for hours I'd rather it was a nice one." Nate is not Lara Croft—he's a basement-dweller in his 30s mysteriously teleported to the wilderness in the middle of a One Piece marathon, which is probably the only kind of marathon he's ever participated in. But he's been given a lovingly rendered posterior nonetheless.
...we can have a cutscene done in about a day, and it means that they can be a little bit stupider
Gabe Cuzzillo
It's also hilarious. Baby Steps has made me laugh even as I tumble off a narrow plank and slide downhill, thanks to Nate's swearing and goofy wiggly pratfalling. "We put a lot of work into making him ragdoll in a particular way," Foddy says. "He kind of rolls like a sausage now, instead of just being like the typical ghostly ragdoll in a videogame. You can really get into a situation where it seems like he's coming to rest as he slides down the hill, and then he'll sausage roll over and continue to fall. Yeah, we put a lot of work into making those things funny one way or another."
The other things that made me laugh while playing the Baby Steps demo are the cutscenes. To my surprise, they're voice-acted and motion-captured above and beyond the standard you might expect from an indie game about slapstick physics. Scenes between Nate and the strange folk he meets on his trek flow like a sitcom where actors improvise around a script, like What We Do in the Shadows if instead of being about vampires who are kind of losers it was just about losers. But, as it happens, there's no script at all.
"Fully fully improvised," is how co-developer Gabe Cuzzillo, of Ape Out and Foiled fame, describes it. "Going into it, we have an idea of what the scene is, and then we just record 10 sometimes very different takes of it, then listen back and find one that we think is funny, then animate around that. We have a mocap suit, and we do facial animations using ARKit on the phone. The whole thing is meant to be fast and flowy; let it be a little bit more spontaneous. We have workflow now where we can have a cutscene done in about a day, and it means that they can be a little bit stupider and more off the cuff, because low investment."
All the characters are voiced by the three co-creators, with Cuzzillo as Nate and Foddy as most of the people he meets along the way. It's got the vibe of those old point-and-clicks like Discworld, where Tony Robinson (Baldric from BlackAdder) seemed to voice half the cast. "There's a lot of Bennetts," Foddy says. "Gabe and Maxi both have one character, and I have, I don't know, eight? They all sound the same. Don't get your hopes up."
Foddy's laconic Australian accent makes his interplay with the anxious, lost Nate even funnier, especially when he casually throws in antiquated Aussie slang like hooroo to baffle him. "I didn't realize that was slang forever," says Cuzzillo. "I thought you had just made up a sound."
As well as being funny, the cutscenes work as rewards for all the effort you put in. Whether you slog your way up the mountain or wander off-piste because you saw something interesting off to the side, the friction of the laborious walking controls makes sitting back to watch a comedy sketch feel like something you earned rather than an interruption.
Despite the corner-cutting, they have slowed down Baby Steps' development. "It doesn't make a ton of sense production-wise," Foddy admits, "which is why indie games don't tend to have cutscenes. Indie games tend to have some text that appears and nobody's mouth moves, which was the original plan."
Committing to a third-person camera and relatively realistic graphics—this is the most browncore game I've played since the early 2000s—encouraged them to make Baby Steps more and more like the kind of Ubisoft-adjacent open world games it was parodying. "Working in that zone, you get kind of fidelity-pilled," Foddy says. "You get gradually sucked into, or addicted to, making things look more high fidelity."
We can invest deeply in a soiling system for the onesie, but we can't rattle off every single standard [[link]] open world feature
Maxi Boch
"When I first became friends with Bennett I was working at Harmonix," Boch says, "leading pretty large teams working on games. And I was like, 'Bennett, someday I want to produce a triple-A game that you design.'" Baby Steps is the closest they'll get to that. It's an indie Death Stranding where you are both the man and the baby, and it [[link]] ruthlessly takes the piss out of open world conventions like grappling point highlights and overstuffed maps.
"Just the fact that we're making you do the walking, just the fact that the character is so unprepared, basically everything about it is making choices that are opposite to those big-budget games," Foddy says. "Except in the aesthetics, except where we try to at least suggest the look and feel of, like, an Assassin's Creed game or a Zelda game or something like that. To me, that's a pretty funny joke."
"We can only afford maybe 1/10 of the kinds of polish that they might have," Boch adds. "Your standard game, third-person, is going to have destructible aspects of the terrain, etc, etc, etc. We can invest deeply in a soiling system for the onesie, but we can't rattle off every single standard open world feature, and moreover we don't want to. The intent of the game is to make a send-up, or heighten some of the aspects of these types of triple-A games that we find to be tedious or maybe tired."
See that mountain? You can climb it. But you'll probably trip and then slide down it halfway, with your butt in the air like a proud baboon.
Baby Steps is due out on September 8. You can play its demo on Steam.