Fans of last year’s gloriously painful literal walking sim game Baby Steps have a wild theory about its onesie-clad screw-up of a main character, Nate: they think he’s the son of Uncharted’s Nathan Drake, and they have a shocking amount of evidence to prove it.
Baby Steps follows the story of Nate, a grown man who wakes up barefoot in a onesie in a strange world occupied by donkey people. Unsure how he got there or where he’s even going, you have to make Nate press onward anyway by using the control sticks and shoulder buttons on your controller to painstakingly lift one leg at a time, position it, and set it back down. The very act of walking forward is agony, and you’ll be terrible at it for a good chunk of the game. Then, just when you start to get used to walking, Baby Steps throws mudslides and sand dunes and mountains and ice at you to make things even more difficult.
Baby Steps is fantastic – it’s a meditation on masculinity and the expectations that come packaged with that, as well as an interrogation of what the player considers “character growth”. Nate, to be frank, sucks. He’s a middle-aged coward who mostly sits in his parents’ basement and plays video games, has no redeeming qualities and contributes little to nothing to society. He spends most of Baby Steps stubbornly refusing to accept help from anyone, even favors that would make his journey exponentially easier, such as a map or a pair of shoes or, depending on how you play, a big staircase up a treacherous mountain. He moans and groans, falls down and constantly soils himself, and is generally just the most irritating person possible to embody for 20ish hours of slow, agonizing walking.
Given all that, it’s pretty far-fetched to think he’d be the son of renowned adventurer Nathan Drake, a handsome, intelligent and fit protagonist known for going on a series of global adventures and successfully escaping countless dangerous situations. He and his wife, Elena, canonically have a daughter named Cassie – developer Naughty Dog never gave him a son. What’s more, there’s nothing to suggest that the devs and publisher Sony ever would give their blessings to the Baby Steps team to make any child of theirs a total disaster of a human. It’s asinine.
And yet. Blessing or no, a number of fans think that the Baby Steps devs created Nate with the quiet but explicit intention of being a Drake. Much of these theories were posited way back in October 2025, shortly after the game’s release, but I’ve only recently been made aware of them. In the “lore” channel of the official Baby Steps Discord, multiple players have found connections between the two characters that seem far too pointed to be nothing.
Nate doesn’t speak much about his personal life throughout his journey, but throughout Baby Steps, Nate can acquire various silly hats to wear, some of which provide him with dreams reflecting on his real life if he makes it to camp with them at the end of a day. In one of these dreams, Nate is referred to as “Nate D” and Nate “Dumbass” – he also goes by “Nathan Bake” at one point when he flirts with being a DJ. Through other scenes, particularly optional phone calls with Nate’s dad, we learn that he has a sister named Cassie, and that he’s a “junior” – his dad is also named Nathan. And per the credits, his mom is named Elena. If that’s not enough out the gate as proof, dataminers have found that Nate’s model is just referred to as “Nathan Drake” in the game’s files (as shared by Caleb (monkeylicker) in the official Discord.)
There are more subtle hints too, though once you know about them they feel about as subtle as a humanoid talking donkey with no pants. Compare this piece of official Baby Steps art with the cover art for Uncharted 4 (look at Baby Steps Nate’s hand!), as spotted by Drencrom in the Discord:
Spotted by Kuromi_#1Fan in the Discord, there’s a picture hanging on the wall in the New Game menu of Sir Francis Drake – the alleged ancestor of Nathan Drake. Also spotted by Drencrom, the “World’s Best Dad” achievement image looks an awful lot like an older Nathan Drake. There’s also a scene where Nathan wakes up on the beach that pretty closely mirrors a scene from Uncharted 4.
And there’s this entire optional phone scene if you choose to climb an abandoned train, just like Nathan Drake Sr., where his dad on the phone significantly perks up when Nate mentions the abandoned train.
And finally, less proof and more just a fun little bonus, during the nearly half-hour-long cutscene that plays at the end of Baby Steps if you skip every other cutscene in the game, Gabe Cuzzillo and Bennett Foddy drop their characters and talk about, among other things, Uncharted, making it clear they’re fans.
The preponderance of evidence that the Baby Steps devs made this with the creative intent of this protagonist being Nathan Uncharted Drake’s failson was so overwhelming and so funny that I reached out to devs Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy to see if they had any comment or confirmation, but they declined.
Of course, it’s pretty obvious that neither Sony nor Naughty Dog is going to canonize this – for one, it seems like Nate Jr. is dead or at least isekaied, making his introduction into the Uncharted universe a bit of a moot point. For two, this is all very silly. Perhaps a touch too silly for Uncharted.
But whether you decide to read Baby Steps as a secret fan-made Uncharted 5 or not, it’s very worth playing. We gave it a 9/10 in our review, calling it “an infuriating ordeal of intentionally awkward physics that’s brutal, unbelievably stupid, and downright awesome.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
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