In nearly every video game, moving a character simply requires pointing in a direction. Then there is Baby Steps. As in most games by Bennett Foddy, nothing about movement can be taken for granted.
Each step you take requires multiple inputs. You will gradually improve at the controls, but you will never move gracefully as the character Nate: He’s an unemployed, out-of-shape 35-year-old who finds himself mysteriously thrust from his parents’ basement into a vast, unforgiving hiking park, wearing nothing but long underwear. In the game’s mountainous terrain, there are many high places you will fall from, with no choice but to start over from scratch.
Foddy, who co-created Baby Steps, knows what it’s like to start over. He began his career as a moral philosopher at the University of Oxford. But on the side he was making hilarious, preposterous video games that explore what it means to move.
“One of the things that he enjoys is when athletes cry,” said Frank Lantz, who founded New York University’s Game Center and hired Foddy as a professor. “When an athlete is feeling something that intensely, for Bennett that is this weird, bittersweet flavor. And that’s a thing that he wants in his games as well.”
Foddy’s first game to receive widespread attention was QWOP (2008), in which the player uses those four keyboard letters to push forward the legs of an Olympic sprinter: Q and W control the thighs, O and P control the calves, and success is nearly impossible.
About a decade later came the game that made him famous: Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy (2017), which looks like a Samuel Beckett play about an ancient Greek punishment staged in a junkyard. You play as a man stuck in a cauldron whose only means of hoisting himself atop the trash is a hammer. While you climb — or, more often, fall all the way back to where you began — Foddy recites an erudite essay on failure in his soothing Australian accent.
“I only finished it once for real before I released it,” Foddy admitted. But the game was a surprise hit, and now more than a million people have somehow completed it.
“I think all of my work is a rebellion against the concept of reliability,” Foddy said.
In most games, he explained, you can be confident that the goals are achievable and the game is beatable, even if it is very hard. In Foddy’s games, you proceed with no such assurance. He said the intended experience of QWOP was that the player might make it 10 out of 100 meters and then give up.
In most games, the question you are meant to ask when confronted with an obstacle is: How am I meant to surpass this? In Baby Steps, different questions haunt you: Can I? Should I?
Foddy met his collaborators on Baby Steps, which was released this week for the PC and PlayStation 5, while teaching game design at N.Y.U. Maxi Boch, a fellow professor who once designed Rock Band instrument controllers, created the game’s music and sound. (The score sounds like nature itself is mocking you as you hike.) Gabe Cuzzillo, the game’s programmer, was a graduate student whose final student project became Ape Out, an intensely kinetic and visceral game in which you play as a desperate escaped gorilla.
Foddy, 47, grew up in Melbourne and moved the United States in 2007 for a postdoctoral program at Princeton. He is known at N.Y.U. for his dedicated mentorship of students such as Jenny Jiao Hsia, whose game Consume Me — about a young woman’s relationship with disordered eating — also comes out this week. His approach, Lantz said, was “like in a philosophy department, if you were working with an advanced student on solving real problems together.”
Like Foddy’s other best-known games, Baby Steps is centered on deconstructing locomotion. But in other ways it is a big departure. It is his first game with a narrative frame and his first in 3-D.
Baby Steps has 109 cut scenes but no script, with the dialogue entirely improvised. Cuzzillo voices Nate — including all his yelps and curses as he falls — and Foddy voices nearly everyone else. “Most of them are Australian,” he said, “or they have very, very bad accents.”
Badness is one of the ideas the designers of Baby Steps are particularly interested in. Foddy often ambushed Cuzzillo with ridiculous Australian idioms (“I’m full up to pussy’s bow!”) that he knew would derail him, as is fitting for the perpetually befuddled Nate.
“Liveness is really the only thing that we have in our favor,” Foddy said. “I think that a lot of what I love about indie games, what is magical to me, flows directly from the fact that people are wearing more hats than they should be wearing.”
“There’s an aspect of the game that I think of like a performance-art joke,” Cuzzillo said. “Which is, what if three people tried to make a fully open-world AAA game? And it’s really hard.”
“It’s not a joke you should make,” Foddy said.
Some of the design of Baby Steps has taken inspiration from real-life trails that Foddy and Cuzzillo have climbed together — a bit of Old Rag Mountain in Virginia here, some Angels Landing in Utah there. Foddy said they were also ripping off a lot from Uncharted, the highly cinematic action-adventure series.
The contrast between the real outdoors and how it is depicted in big-budget games is always on their minds. Unlike Uncharted, Baby Steps has no checkpoints, reloads, shortcuts, vehicles or any form of fast travel. There is just autosave, which brutally insists that you are wherever you are. Every decision you make is irrevocable. No matter where you go, you must get there step by step.
There are also no maps, although Baby Steps constantly teases you with the possibility. Characters regularly offer maps of the entire hiking area to Nate — a minimap even fleetingly appears in the corner of the screen — but he stubbornly refuses them.
Foddy wants players to think about how having a map would change their experience. “When I’m playing Red Dead Redemption or whatever, 100 percent of the time I’m looking at the map,” he said. “It’s like a little GPS. It tells me exactly where I have to go. I very rarely make my own decisions.”
As a philosopher, Foddy specialized in medical ethics, with most of his work focused on drug addiction. There is not a direct line between that experience and his games, he said, except in the sense of “understanding that pleasure can take unconventional forms.”
“I do think of that when I’m making games that are intentionally frustrating or annoying or boring,” he continued. “I’m trying to do that in a way that people will derive pleasure from. Why do people continue to do things that make them unhappy? I think that’s maybe the great mystery of being a human being.”
As silly and prankish as Baby Steps might sound, it is a game of ideas.
“A lot the game to me is setting you up with situations that might prompt introspection in some way,” Cuzzillo said. “Like the hole.”
At one point deep in the game, Nate encounters a hole in the earth. The game’s guide character warns him, accurately, that the hole is very deep, that it is nearly impossible to climb out of, and that no one will help him if he jumps into it. The hole is entirely avoidable, but the hope is that the choice provokes doubts in the player’s mind.
“Why did I jump in?” Cuzzillo suggested. “Or, I really wish I had jumped in that hole.”
“Yeah, I’ll have to go back and jump in that hole,” Foddy said.
“Why am I the kind of person not to jump in the hole?” Cuzzillo continued. “I could probably have gotten out of the hole.”
All of the most frustrating challenges in Baby Steps, Cuzzillo noted, are things you have to decide to inflict on yourself.
“That’s interesting to me,” Foddy said. “I want to awaken this in people. Their kind of latent love of punishing choices.”
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