He lifts one leg. Your balance will change. For a dizzying moment, it looks like you might fall. After all, he’s not used to moving so slowly. But that’s the point: to do it methodically, as much as possible, to be present in this usually automated movement. So you shift your weight forward, feel the pressure move from your heels to your toes, and find your center of gravity. Then repeat the process. If these sound like instructions for walking meditation, you’re right. But it’s also the core gameplay of one of 2025’s most acclaimed games.
Deeply funny and surprisingly insightful Baby Stepscreated by Bennett Foddy, Gabe Cuzzillo, and Maxi Boch, each press of the control button raises one leg, and the analog stick allows you to place it and move your character, Nate, one step forward. It may sound simple. But unlike walking meditation, here, one wrong move will send your character tumbling, upside down, down a cliffside you’ve spent countless laborious minutes climbing.
Baby Steps
Developed by Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch and Bennett Foddy
Devolver Digital September 2025 Single Player Walking Simulator
Is this frustrating? In many ways, yes. You will fall Baby Steps– a lot. The mechanics set the player up for failure especially during opening hours, guaranteeing that Nate would repeatedly trip over himself and scream while attempting the simplest move. But the game is never unfair. The controls are so precise that almost every mistake is the result of carelessness. And every failure is a teaching moment that forces the player to be as intentional as possible about the next step or face the consequences.
That helps Baby Steps a slapstick comedy at heart. There are no real tragedies here: your character is never hurt. You can’t die. Yes, Nate’s armor doll body falls like a ragdoll and falls over the branches and rocks. But he always pulls himself together. And that ethos is contagious. It teaches a skill that is unusual in video games: not superpowers, not fighting techniques, but simple acceptance.
Even in the process, a sense of non-judgment is possible Baby Stephis most catastrophic falls. Sure, you might respond with frustration when a mudslide slides off a rickety bridge and sends you back into the almost inescapable mud. You could shout:This is so unfair! Why is this happening to me?” Or you can accept that the fall has happened, that the playful destruction of your situation is really what the game is all about, and that the only thing left to do is explore the path that lies ahead.
It’s a way to flow with the present moment – instead of resisting it Baby Steps teaches: Wherever it falls, you are there.
Wherever you fall, you are there.
In fact, embracing the present moment is built into the basic design of the game: there are no checkpoints Baby Steps. There are no shortcuts. No gearing. Each step permanently saves the game exactly where you are. This means that if you fall and lose twenty minutes of progress up the mountain, there’s no way to go back to where you were before your epic fail. All you can do is accept that your character is where he is—exactly where your choices made him—and start climbing again.
The game constantly urges you towards the lesson from its title: Take it easy, my friend. One step at a time. You are a beginner here. When you present the player with links to the next goal, they almost always end with hit lines. Did you spend ten minutes crawling up slippery steps and piles of sand? Expect to reach the top and be told that the gateway has collapsed and you have to go around. Are you on a river ledge and a bridge that leads directly to the next objective? The way is inevitably blocked by a sleeping bear.
So yes, the joke is on the player, but it’s never cruel. Instead, a lesson delivered with a smile: Surely you know that there are no easy roads in life, right? You have to go through this thing, for a moment, for a breath, for a step, no matter how agonizing. You can even be fully present while it’s happening.
Time and time again, you tend to find the easy way out in the game’s surreal world – to skip the fights and get to the supposedly good stuff: the real goal of getting to the top of the mountain. But the side characters keep reminding me that there can be no shortcuts because there is no real goal. “You know there’s nothing up there, right?” a humanoid donkey says to Nate, pointing to the snowy peak we’ve spent countless painful hours climbing. “It’s just a white triangle.”
It is a cliché to say that life is about the journey, not the destination. But Baby Steps he suggests it’s not even about the journey. It’s about that moment, right now, the steps, the pressure and the movement. And that’s walking meditation in a nutshell. Only here you practice all the way up a snow-covered mountain that at first glance seems higher than Everest.
And just as walking meditation can often be seen as a break between the real work of sitting meditation, Baby Steps it takes a mechanic that gets involved in automatism in both video games and everyday life—putting one foot in front of the other—and asks us to focus on how this little plot, if it works at all, gets into the miracle.
“Walking meditation means learning to walk again with ease” written by Thich Nhat Hanh. “You started walking with unsteady steps when you were about one year old. Now you are learning to walk again while practicing walking meditation. However, after a few weeks of practice, you can walk with firmness, peace and comfort.” In other words, walking meditation literally involves taking baby steps.
Returning to a beginning state like this is often central to how our practice clears mental habits and illusions and focuses on a more expansive experience of the present. And Nate goes through exactly this rebirth during the game. Torn from his previous life as an unemployed gamer, he finds himself in a strange, alternate world where he moves like a baby. In this reborn state, Nate can no longer fall back into the same aversive tendencies he has accumulated throughout his life. You can’t retreat to your parents’ basement, order a pizza, and spend the day playing video games. Stripped of the familiar, all you can do is accept the path ahead and respond appropriately—in this case, with a single move.
Although now a professor of game design at New York University, Bennett Foddy has become a moral philosopher of addiction, and the game continues to address this topic. Nate is portrayed as a video game addict, yes. But he is also addicted to the habits of aversion, which claim that if he only reaches a certain goal, achieves a certain trophy, then he will overcome all the inconveniences, annoyances and even sufferings of the world. The most interesting thing is that we, the players, also seem to be addicted. Why are there? What are you so obsessed with climbing the mountain? Why can’t we just let Nate stop and enjoy the view?
A powerful blend of narrative and design is experienced throughout the game’s runtime. As Nate begins to grapple with his own self-destructive tendencies, the player navigates the world more and more nimbly. The once infuriating movement mechanics melt into a state of flow as we read slight gradation changes, make necessary balance shifts, and reach previously impossible vistas. There is real growth here. Nate isn’t just an eyesore—he has a legitimately hopeful path that includes community, present-moment awareness, and the resilience that comes from laughing at life’s oddities.
Video games are one of the few art forms that can reveal how our minds respond to adversity in a particularly powerful way. And while many mainstream games smooth out the friction design to better fulfill players’ imaginations, Baby Steps it suggests that frustration is not a wrinkle to be ironed out. Instead, the player’s irritation is a way to show them that their choices really matter. Our choices have consequences, not only in terms of where Nate’s feet are, but also in how we think about and define repeated falls.
Video games are one of the few art forms that can reveal how our minds respond to adversity in a particularly powerful way.
In fact, when I started envisioning how to write this essay, I learned the hard way about the consequences of careless living. As my mind wandered, imagining the comparisons I could draw between the practice and the bizarre digital world, my character misplaced his footing, slipped, and fell halfway down a hellish spiral into a pitch-black cave that I spent fifteen minutes at the top of. To add insult to injury, Nate dropped his lamp and it hit the bottom of the chamber. For a few moments I thought I would get my only source of light back, maybe through a scene.
But then I remembered the game I had been playing—meant to teach her the consequences of my actions—and I began my slow descent into the darkness to pick up the lantern and illuminate my way forward, now with one more reminder to pay attention to the single step ahead of me.
