Instead of doing anything normal with my life for the past week, I have been on a horrible hiking holiday with the worst man in the world. In Baby Steps, you play as a useless imbecile called Nate who has done basically nothing with his 35 years on this planet except sit in his parents’ basement and watch anime re-runs. One day he is transported, in his adult onesie, to the foot of a surreal mountain decorated with phallic imagery, and you must get him to the top by controlling his feet individually, lifting them carefully with the controller’s triggers and placing them with the analogue stick.
This is ludicrously difficult. Sometimes you’re marching up an easy slope, but you’re often edging over narrow planks, scrambling up dunes with tiny steps, or grasping rocky ledges with his toes. Over and over Nate trips and tumbles, whining piteously as he slides down a muddy slope or bank of sand, his onesie becoming increasingly soiled. Over and over, you get up and try again. Occasionally an Australian guy with crazy eyes or a pantsless donkey man with dangling genitals shows up to gently mock you and offer help that Nate, infuriatingly, refuses to accept.
If your concentration slips for a second, so will he. Three hours into my time with this ridiculous game, having taken an epic tumble from a plank into a river, I stomped Nate dejectedly around a corner to discover the campsite where I had begun my hike that morning. In the meantime I had achieved nothing besides finding a silly propellor hat, which was itself an extra burden as I had to bend down and pick it up whenever I fell over. Rarely has a game made me want to cry, but when I saw that campsite, I very nearly gave up.
Imagine enduring setbacks like this for hours, and then ending up in a warren with a lantern that Nate keeps dropping, leaving you in the pitch dark unless you backtrack to retrieve it. And then, halfway through, there is a down escalator that you must ascend in one try, unless you want to spend long seconds staring at Nate’s upturned rear as he descends slowly to the bottom after a stumble. And then, the way out is a spiralling path of sand ledges, on which Nate’s feet keep losing purchase. I was stuck in there for aeons, with nothing but my thoughts, my increasing frustration and Nate for company. Baby Steps reaches impressive new sadistic heights with every succeeding chapter.
So why keep playing? Apart from sheer bloody-mindedness that I probably need to unpack with a therapist – I will not let this game break me – there are a couple of things going on here. It is exceptionally funny, not just in the obvious slapstick way (it is very, very amusing watching Nate twerk his way down a mudslide) but in its improvised dialogue and absurd delivery. The developers behind this game also voice the characters, and every cutscene you find is a little treat among the travails. An optional challenge in the desert has you trying to get a trophy made of ice up a desert slope before it melts, and as Nate returns repeatedly to the ice-cream cart man with increasing desperation, the developers voicing them also start to lose their grip.
And though this might look like a mean-spirited game about laughing at a pathetic man falling over, it turns out to have more to say. As much as I hated Nate at times, to the point where I almost quit playing just so I didn’t have to look at his flailing arse anymore, I also started to feel for him. He is a true one-man taxonomy of loserdom, but he’s also trying. Despite extreme social anxiety, masculine insecurity and evident self-hatred, he’s putting one foot in front of the other, in the game’s extremely literal metaphor.
If you arrive at the end of a chapter wearing a hat, then you get to play a depressing little 8-bit style minigame about Nate’s former life: his disappointed parents, his overachieving sister, his nonexistent sex life. As the hours passed I got some insight into how Nate ended up in the state he’s in, and though I never related to him directly as some players have, I started to feel almost maternal towards him, unwilling to give up on him despite everything.
This game has also brought out my worst self, cursing vehemently at this pallid man whenever one of his useless feet slips from what I thought was a sure hold. But for all the appallingly dispiriting moments, there are also times when you feel like weeping with gratitude after finally persevering enough to get Nate to the next stage of his journey. Baby Steps is silly, but it isn’t stupid. In 30 years of playing games I’ve not played anything like it. It’s made me think and feel surprisingly deeply for a game about falling over.
To see everything this game has to offer would take a level of masochism to which it is unwise to aspire. After 10 hours or so, I just wanted to get to the end of it. That’s when I came across a massive spiral staircase, extending upwards to the clouds. To the right: a perilous cliffside path that our Australian guide calls the Manbreaker. “You can’t. It’s too hard for you,” he says. “You’re gonna be bashing your head against this thing for the next five years … you’re gonna break down and take these fuckin’ stairs.”
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“I swear I will never take these stairs,” retorts Nate, exasperatingly.
I look at the path. It winds upward out of sight. I can already see several places where I’m guaranteed to slip and fall before I get the footing right. I envision the next several days of my life, throwing myself at this rock face, getting incrementally further every hour. I envision the bemused, concerned faces of my partner and children as they walk into the living room to see me, yet again, playing Baby Steps and getting absolutely nowhere.
Fuck it. I’m taking the stairs.