Baby Steps was released on September 23, 2025, for PlayStation 5 and Windows. It's not an easy game to describe or play. The walking simulation is played from a third-person perspective where the player assumes control of a man named Nate, who must attempt to reach a distant mountain. The player must manually lift and place Nate's legs as he walks, shifting his weight side to side while maintaining balance. Every step is deliberate, laborious, and frequently disastrous.
What makes this particular challenge interesting is not just the control scheme itself, but how developer Gabe Cuzzillo and his team designed the spaces within which players navigate it. During a talk at GDC, developer Gabe Cuzzillo shared that a custom map called Sparrow Cumulus which challenged players to find a route for themselves was one of the biggest inspirations behind the level design for Baby Steps. That custom map existed within Mirror's Edge, the 2008 parkour game. Cuzzillo found something in that modded environment that the original game's designed levels didn't offer.
Cuzzillo stated: "When I first played this game, I felt like I was waking up all of a sudden. I was going down these long paths full of interesting shimmies and jumps, only to find that they were dead ends, and all of a sudden I was actually looking at and seeing the space in a way that I hadn't in a single player level in a long time." The custom map didn't guide him. It invited him to look more carefully at what was actually there.
But Sparrow Cumulus wasn't the only influence on Baby Steps' design philosophy. Cuzzillo continued: "At around the same time, I saw this video called Timescan 2 which is about these skaters in Tokyo." Within that video was Gou Miyagi, a skateboarder whose approach to the sport captured something similar. Gou Miyagi does a lot of tricks like that, riding up to a set of steps, running up the rail, sliding down on his butt, and landing on the board, and skating off, things of that nature.
What connected these two reference points in Cuzzillo's mind was a shared philosophy about constraint and creativity. "I felt like he was using this constraint of working with what's given, like what's already there, to push himself into finding more creative ways of moving the skateboard. And I feel like there was something in common with that Mirror's Edge map. When I was playing throughout the Cumulus, it felt like it was pushing me into the mindset of Gou Miyagi a little bit."
Both the custom map and Miyagi's skating shared something essential: they prioritised player agency and environmental reading over guidance systems. Neither told you exactly what was possible. Both made you look at the space itself and figure out your own path forward.
Baby Steps is set in an open world with numerous optional locations of interest; the map itself has no limits and wraps around horizontally. It also has no waypoint, fast travel or a map, though glowing campsites guide players to the correct direction. The game refuses the convenient scaffolding that modern open-world design has trained players to expect. Instead, it asks you to do what Cuzzillo did in Sparrow Cumulus; to actually look at the space in front of you.
Kyle Orland from Ars Technica wrote that the game can be "punishing, unforgiving, tedious, and enraging" at times. However, he noted that player progression are entirely defined by their understanding the game's mechanics and controls, and the game created "moments of the most genuinely satisfying sense of achievement I can remember having in modern gaming".
That satisfaction likely comes from the same place as Cuzzillo's moment in Sparrow Cumulus: the realisation that you did something not because the game showed you how, but because you looked at what was there and figured it out yourself. Baby Steps makes walking monstrously difficult. But in making movement so deliberate and space so open, it may have made exploration genuinely meaningful again.