As someone who lives for the unexpected, unique, and downright weird, it only took about five seconds for the absolute craziness of Baby Steps to steal my heart. This spiritual successor to pain-inducing cult classics QWOP and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (who is also one of the developers here) is a similarly exasperating physics-based walking simulator that asks you to control the most unwieldy human ever created as you push yourself through increasingly arduous obstacles. The result is one of the most hilariously infuriating journeys it has ever been my pleasure to rage through. With writing that consistently cracked me up, a story with more heart than I expected, and brilliant branching paths that let you choose your own level of anguish as you explore the dreamlike world, I had a hard time staying mad at this wonderfully bizarre odyssey even in its most maddening moments.Like just about everything in Baby Steps, the story told here is eccentric, to say the very least. You play as Nate, a 35-year-old neckbeard who has sleepwalked through his entire life and suddenly finds himself on a hiking trip he’s laughably unprepared for. After inexplicably refusing to accept help from anyone as he fumbles around without so much as shoes on his feet (presumably because he avoids social interaction almost as much as he does cardio), he goes toe-to-toe with formidable environmental hazards all while wearing a dirty, stretched-out onesie that looks like he hasn’t removed it in several years. But despite being one of the most immediately unlikeable characters of all time, I found this sad sack gradually growing on me in a big way, as his awkwardness peels away to reveal an isolated and depressed softie I couldn’t help but root for. The goofy characters you meet along the way are oddly compelling. They are all voiced by the same handful of people delivering what I suspect is highly improvised dialogue that sorta meanders through each cutscene, which works shockingly well. For example, Jim, who tries to serve as Nate’s onboarding guide but is repeatedly rebuffed until he effectively becomes a bitter antagonist of sorts, never failed to amuse me with each unwelcome appearance. I cackled loud enough to annoy my neighbors twice in the first hour alone, and found myself peculiarly drawn to the lewd cast and absurdist story that unfolds. Granted, no small part of that is the fact that Baby Steps is deeply inappropriate at every turn, which definitely appeals to my depraved sense of humor and lust for nonsense. But even when its jokes don’t quite land, it still won me over just by being so unlike all the humdrum Hero’s Journey tales I’ve seen a thousand times, instead favoring outlandish and unconventional ideas that kept me guessing every step of the way.Putting one foot in front of the other is way, way harder than it sounds.Of course, as a quite literal walking simulator, you spend the vast majority of the time on your own just trying to put one foot in front of the other, which is way, way harder than it sounds. That’s because instead of pressing one button to move forward, Baby Steps forces you to control each leg independently, often resulting in you face planting into the dirt like a four-year-old operating a broken pair of stilts. If this doesn’t sound particularly hard to you, guess again: it took me several hours before I could walk on even slightly bumpy terrain without treating my face to a three-course meal of rocks. The counterintuitive magic of Baby Steps, however, is that what start off feeling like insurmountably ass-backwards controls eventually become second nature, and there’s actually a ton of depth baked into Nate’s awkward movements that reveals itself the longer you commit to it. For example, the pressure you apply when pulling each trigger determines the precise height you will raise the corresponding foot, and lifting one causes Nate to press against whatever’s under the other with much greater force – something that can both cause you to slip or save you from a spill depending on the situation. By the end of my 20-hour voyage I was carved out of goddamned wood, scaling sheer walls with the dexterity and grace of a mountain goat trained in the ancient art of ninjitsu and performing feats that would have seemed downright impossible mere hours earlier. By the end of my 20-hour voyage I was carved out of goddamned wood.Don’t get me wrong: there were still plenty of times where I fell to the ground while just walking around on normal terrain, even as I neared the end, and it never stops feeling like a pain in the derriere just to pull off basic movement. But I also ended up developing a deep respect for the system that was given to me, which has so much nuance and so many tricks to learn that I felt like the only limit to what I could pull off was my own skill. For a hypercompetitive person like myself, this pulled me into an inescapable pursuit of mastery that kept me awake long into the night cursing my creators as I tumbled to the ground for the 50th time in a row.Most of the time, the frustrations I felt while trying to move my unwieldy avatar through mountain ranges and dark caves felt extremely harsh but fair, and I was almost always learning something new about Nate’s dumb body as I flailed around through convoluted puzzles. That said, there were also times where I felt not so much in control of my own success. For example, sometimes Nate would get caught on an object or move in some bizarre, unexpected way that would lose me 20 minutes of progress as I tumbled helplessly down a massive obstacle course I had just climbed, and these made for some of the most rage-inducing moments in my adventure. To be clear, these moments were very rare, and my failures were overwhelmingly a case of me just needing to git gud – but when you’re already getting sand kicked into your open eyes while everything is working as expected, feeling like you had no control over your own success even 1% of the time makes it hurt a lot more.Although Baby Steps can be incredibly frustrating to play and has challenges so grueling I regularly considered if I’d prefer to just tumble down a hill myself, it also deliberately makes the vast majority of these hurdles completely optional and almost always placed thoughtfully within view as you make your hike ever upwards. This meant that, although I often felt devastating pain at repeated failed attempts to, for example, climb to the top of a crumbling temple in the jungle, I couldn’t really get too mad in the knowledge that I voluntarily subjected myself to that torment, and could just as easily move on along the main path where the level of difficulty was much more manageable. It’s actually an awesome structure, because it allowed me to take on spicier paths when I was feeling up to it, then move on if I ever felt like I wasn’t improving my skills by beating my head against the current trial (though I was almost always too stubborn to do so). I really appreciated this approach, which lets you pick your own level of suffering and grow at your own pace, and I always felt rewarded for taking the more extreme route by triggering a goofy cutscene or little story bit at the end.The environments run the gamut, and never stopped providing fresh ideas throughout my run.It also helps keep things fresh that each leg of your hike up the giant mountain is accompanied by a new, unique-looking area, from sandy deserts that make it even harder to get around as the ground moves beneath your feet, to a derelict mine with dark tunnels and splintered wood that require extreme precision to navigate. The environments run the gamut, and never stopped providing fresh ideas throughout my run, like one part where I had to learn how to delicately ride a water turbine, or another where slippery frozen lakes forced me to master balance and intentional movement. It’s worth noting that none of this, from the levels themselves to the characters you meet, looks particularly good. In fact, Baby Steps is downright ugly most of the time, and has a surprising amount of pop-in for a game where all you do is walk really slowly. But with how unhinged everything else is, the lofi, identical trees and blurry faces kinda work with its generally gross vibe.