Everything’s open world now, even QWOP.
I fell while navigating some tricky rocks, rolling downhill like a wet sausage until I was caught by a grassy ledge. The only paths back up involved even tricker rocks, and predictably I fell again, tumbling off the grassy ledge to land next to a mudslide. Fortunately there was a dry path beside the mud, and unfortunately I found a single rock on that path, tripped, hit the mudslide, and slid to the bottom of it.
Walking back up that path I managed to slip into the mud twice more, the second time achieving such slippery velocity I flung myself back to a previous biome, landing in a lake. That motivated me to try a different route entirely, heading back toward a labyrinth of cardboard called Box Hell, at which point I spotted a ladder leaning against the hill I somehow completely missed the first time through this area, and which let me bypass all that mud-and-rock nonsense.
It still took me three goes to get up the ladder, of course.
This is Baby Steps, a parody of open world games, and our collective punishment for using the phrase „walking simulator“. You play Nate, a basement-dwelling loser mysteriously teleported from his couch to the wilderness like the Pevensie children being magicked to Narnia, only instead of plucky youngsters full of Blitz spirit you are a 35-year-old failure full of pizza.
There is a mountain in the wilderness and maybe if Nate climbs it he’ll be able to go home. It’s as reasonable an assumption as any, so off you set, taking your first steps, and almost immediately falling on your dumptruck ass.
Baby Steps recommends you play with a controller like a real yakuza, so I did. Squeezing one trigger lifts your foot, and pushing a stick moves that foot. You’ve got a fine degree of control over where that foot ends up before you put it back down, which will not save you. Nate has all the balance and grace of a moose on ice, and he’s doing this hike barefoot.
He could have got shoes at the start of the climb, but he turned them down. In the first of many delightfully improvised cutscenes, Nate meets a cheerful Australian hiker who offers help and he immediately says no.
