Baby Steps. I haven’t stopped thinking about the “literal walking simulator,” as the devs describe the project, since it was first revealed by publisher Devolver Digital last June. All we’ve seen of Baby Steps between then and now are two additional videos driving home the difficult, physics-based gameplay and humorous story. As such, I can’t help but wonder if Baby Steps is going to make the 2024 launch announced in the initial trailer and still listed on its Steam page today, a window you may have noticed is rapidly closing.
Devolver, sadly, wasn’t willing to provide any insight. After we reached out, a rep told Polygon they have “no updates on Baby Steps at this time.” Scanning the social media profiles of developers Bennett Foddy, Gabe Cuzzillo, and Maxi Boch — all of whom previously collaborated on Ape Out, one of the best games of 2019 — also provides little information on the state of the game. As far as I can tell, the last time anyone working on Baby Steps publicly discussed its release came near the tail end of a promo featuring Foddy and Cuzzillo uploaded by Devolver in December 2023.
Cuzzillo: Baby Steps is coming out next year, we… all hope.
Foddy: 2024, probably.
Cuzzillo: What a treat…
Foddy: …if it happens then.
Cuzzillo: It’s probably… we’ll see.
Foddy: We’ll see!
Cuzzillo: We’re hoping it happens then.
Foddy: Don’t make us tell a lie in this video. That’s not cool.
Cuzzillo: No… yeah.
Foddy: 2025! What a treat!
Cuzzillo: What a treat!
Foddy: 202X!
Cuzzillo: It’s coming out…
Foddy: It’s coming out in 202X.
Cuzzillo: …in one of the years after 2023.
Foddy: Yeah, some year after then.
Cuzzillo: Yeah! It’s coming out in an upcoming year.
Look, game development is hard. We hear it all the time from workers exhausted and exploited within an industry where it’s becoming progressively more difficult to build a long-lasting and fruitful career, and I believe them 100 percent. I only bring up the silence surrounding Baby Steps because the game has so much potential.
Foddy, as you all probably know, is the brains behind physics-based projects like QWOP and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. He has a sharp mind for creating games that are both frustratingly difficult and impossible to put down. Cuzzillo, on the other hand, created in Ape Out a gratifyingly relentless beat-‘em-up driven by Boch’s jazzy, procedural score and Foddy’s minimalist artwork. All three coming together to work on another game, especially one that hews closer to Foddy’s earlier work, is a reality almost too good for this sad, broken world.
Baby Steps either gets quietly delayed, eliciting dejected but understanding sighs from me and a dozen other weirdos waiting to flop around in the mud as a onesie-wearing failson, or shadow drops sometime in the next two months. Either way, I fully expect the game to fix me, which is not at all unhealthy or depressing.
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