The hardest parts of open world walking simulator Baby Steps are ‘harder than Getting Over It by quite some distance,’ says Bennett Foddy

For those of you who spent hours trying to run just a few meters in slapstick physics game QWOP or wept in frustration after losing an hour’s progress with one slip in climbing game Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy—brace yourselves.

The new walking simulator Baby Steps, published by Devolver and developed by Foddy, Gabe Cuzzillo, and Maxi Boch (Ape Out), is going to be even more of a challenge when it comes out later this year, at least in some ways.

“I think the hardest parts, which are all optional, are harder than Getting Over It by quite some distance,” Foddy said when I met the devs for a hour-long hands-on session with Baby Steps at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week.

The controls in the open world of Baby Steps are simple—move forward with the left stick and lift and place each foot with the trigger buttons—but the terrain is no joke. You’re climbing your way through the wilderness with a vague goal, maybe to reach a campfire on a distant peak or a watchtower you can barely glimpse through the fog. One slip in the wrong place and you might tumble back down that cliff you just spent an hour struggling to climb.

The good news is, the entirety of Baby Steps isn’t necessarily meant to be all that difficult.

“To see the whole storyline and get to the end of the game is really a lot more achievable for most people,” Foddy said. “That’s been our approach to accessibility versus difficulty, just to let the player constantly be dialing it. You see something that looks hard, you can just walk past it, and you shouldn’t have too many regrets, right? Like, this is not really a game that’s oriented to hundred-percenting it.”

“We’re working on making the core gameplay accessible and easy, like a player who just wants to slam the sticks all the way forward and push the triggers all the way down, you can make your way through the game that way,” Maxi Boch said. “We’ve made a lot of choices to make the character controller accessible in that way. [It’s a] very difficult compromise that Gabe [Cuzzillo] is trying to make between the sort of direct control and the kind of ease and automaticness that you kind of expect for mobility.”

The devs have also worked on making parts of the game easier: they noticed that when playtesters fell and stood back up facing a random direction, they would sometimes get lost: with no map or on-screen compass, it could be hard to tell which direction they were walking in when they fell.

“So we recorded 32 different ‘getting up’ animations so that you can always end up facing the way that you were facing when you fell over, and it’s so it’s never turning you around,” Foddy said. “Suddenly, we found people were not getting lost anymore. They were able to kind of maintain their heading.

“The thing that we’re thinking about a lot with this game is trying to support all the different ways people might have for playing,” Foddy said, like speedrunning, exploring, or coming up with custom challenges like making it through the game without ever falling down once. “There’s all kinds of different things that you can do in this system, and we’re just trying to support creative play in that way.”