Baby Steps is the latest hilariously difficult game from Bennett Foddy of QWOP and Getting Over It, here working in collaboration with Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch. And it’s not just in your efforts to put one foot in front of the other and make progress that the game finds ludicrous ways to punish you. Players have discovered that, should you dare to skip the cutscenes throughout your ordeal, you’ll be treated to an unskippable 28-minute cutscene. Congratulations to Foddy & co. for innovating bold new ways for video games to fuck with you.
The game loves to do that. Not only does it take the concept of a “walking simulator” to the extreme, making the act of placing one foot in front of the other wonderfully tricky and maddening, but it plays games with its cutscenes, too. Again, literally. Cutscenes taunt you with a mini-game that you must complete if you want to skip ‘em.
And if you’re really so tempted to give the game the proverbial middle finger and skip all of the cutscenes by passing these mini-games, at the end of the game you’ll be confronted with an unskippable 28-minute cutscene featuring two characters talking about how much of a bummer it is that so much work went into these cutscenes and yet, there you are, just skipping them. Wow. I hope you feel bad about yourself.
If you’re not up for making your own way, step by hilariously agonizing step, through Baby Steps, skipping the cutscenes all the while, you can watch the whole thing here:
Anyway, the anthropomorphic donkey is enough to sell me on this game. Just what I need, more 2025 gems to fill up my already dense-ass backlog.
