The team behind Baby Steps discuss why they made a whiny, unprepared manbaby the protagonist – and how players have grown to love Nate as he struggles up a mountain
“I don’t know why he is in a onesie and has a big ass,” shrugs game developer Gabe Cuzzillo. “Bennett just came in with that at some point.”
“I thought it would be cute,” replies Bennett Foddy, who was formerly Cuzzillo’s professor at New York University’s Game Center and is now his collaborator. “Working on character design and animation brings you over to liking big butts. I could give you an enormous amount of evidence for this.”
Foddy and Cuzzillo are talking about Nate, the impressively pathetic manbaby protagonist of their profound and ridiculous comedy game Baby Steps, developed together with Maxi Boch. When I was preparing to talk to them, I felt like I was about to meet my tormentors: I spent a week last year in the grip of this purposefully, transcendentally frustrating game about going on a horrible hiking holiday with the world’s most incompetent loser.
Baby Steps’ premise seems like a cruel joke at first: watch the hapless man suffer! And you will suffer too! But the more I played it, the more meaning I found in it. As the hours passed and I helped Nate overcome his own uselessness and get himself up the mountain, I came around to him.
