Baby Steps: The Walking Game That Made Falling Over an Art Form
From the makers of QWOP, Getting Over It and Ape Out comes a mountain you climb one wobbly leg at a time. Baby Steps led the 2026 IGF nominations and won for audio. Here is what makes it so maddening, and so funny.
Most games treat walking as something that happens when you push a stick forward. Baby Steps treats it as the whole game. Each of Nate's legs is controlled separately. Lift one, swing it, place it, shift your weight, and try not to fall face-first down a mountain you have spent an hour climbing.
The game is by Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch and Bennett Foddy, published by Devolver Digital, and it launched on 23 September 2025 for PlayStation 5 and Windows. At the 2026 Independent Games Festival it went in as the most-nominated game, with five nominations including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, and won Excellence in Audio.
A team that specialises in difficult
If the names sound familiar, they should. Foddy is the designer behind notoriously difficult games such as QWOP and Getting Over It, games that turned frustration into a spectator sport. Cuzzillo, Boch and Foddy had already worked together on Ape Out, so Baby Steps is a reunion as much as a debut.
Baby Steps began as Cuzzillo's pitch for a more refined version of QWOP. It grew into a large 3D world, but kept the trio's signatures: movement as the core challenge, ragdoll physics, and the very real chance of losing a lot of progress after one bad step.
Meet Nate
Nate is 35, lives in his parents' basement and wears a onesie. A power surge, triggered as he touches a TV remote, sends him into a strange outdoor world, and the only way forward is up. Along the way he meets a mountain guide named Jim, a hiking enthusiast named Mike, a tribe of talking donkeys and a moose who is building a log cabin near the summit.
There are no waypoints, no fast travel and no map. Glowing campsites hint at the way. The world wraps around on itself, so you can never quite walk off its edge. The team took inspiration from real hikes, including Old Rag Mountain and Angels Landing, and from Death Stranding and the Uncharted series.
Love it or hate it
Baby Steps splits players, and it is meant to. It holds a Metacritic score of 77 on PC and 75 on PS5, and 73% of critics on OpenCritic recommend it. The spread of individual reviews is unusually wide, from 9/10 at IGN, which praised the hidden depth in its deliberately clumsy controls, to 6/10 at Game Informer, which suggested it might be more fun to watch than to play. Polygon called it the funniest game of 2025 and praised its take on masculinity.
Its awards run tell the same story of respect rather than unanimity: nominations at the Golden Joystick Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the Game Developers Choice Awards and the New York Game Awards, and that one IGF win, for a soundtrack and sound design that make every footstep feel like it matters.
Why it matters
In our view, Baby Steps is one of the most original games of the decade, precisely because it refuses to make its central action easy. Most of the hardest challenges are optional, which makes it far more approachable than Getting Over It, but the basic act of walking stays a skill you earn. Every time you stride confidently across a slope you once fell down, it feels like learning to walk for real.
Where to play
Baby Steps is available on Steam for Windows and on PlayStation 5. For the rest of this year's IGF winners, read our Titanium Court story.