Baby Steps demands that players scale enormous mountains armed not with tools or in-game assists, but simply with a complex control scheme for moving the main character’s legs. In many ways, it’s sort of like what if you mixed the difficulty of a Souls-like with a story about an unemployed dude who really needs to pee.
READ MORE: Review | Baby Steps: ‘Failing Upwards’ (PC)
But if you’re about to jump into the cruel world of Baby Steps, you’ll need your wits about you in order to succeed. That’s why we’ve put together a short list of tips to make your journey that tiniest bit easier.
1. Find Another Way
In Baby Steps, you may often think you’ve find the optimal way to climb up to your next objective and you just try and try again, repeatedly falling and losing progress. The thing to remember is that there’s often another path to where you’re trying to go.
There’s nothing wrong with giving the obstacle you’re facing a few cracks, but if it doesn’t feel right, move on. The world of Baby Steps is enormous and it’s likely that if you explore around a little bit more, you’ll find another pathway that will be considerably less punishing.
2. Pace Yourself
When you first start Baby Steps, the movement feels insane. But with a bit of persistence, you’ll find yourself settling into a nice groove and working out a rhythm that has you moving around easily. So job done, right?
Not quite. Depending on the sort of terrain you’re traversing, you might find that different ways of moving around serve different purposes. Slippery ground might be suited to smaller quicker steps where you maintain your balance. If you find yourself needing a clear a long gap, one methodical lunge forward might be the key to making progress. Adjusting your pace where necessary is fundamental to conquering the challenge.
3. Understand Your Terrain
You don’t have a map. You don’t have waypoints. All you have is a pair of eyes and you’re going to need to use them.
Always be sure to take in your environment and swing your camera around to make sure that you aren’t missing a different, better approach to the obstacle you’re facing. The level design in Baby Steps is thoughtfully designed and there are likely markers to point you in the right direction. Even the way terrain looks will give an indication if you’re barking up the wrong tree. Climbable paths tend to be lighter than darker ones, especially when it comes to cliff faces. Make the most of your environmental clues.
4. Go For A Swim
Want to give your legs a rest? Don’t be afraid to go for a swim.
After avoiding water for early portions of the game, I found that crossing passages of water by just belly flopping in and floating in a direction actually made for a much faster way of getting around.
5. Embrace Your Fall
If you take a tumble in Baby Steps, it can be an extremely frustrating experience. But don’t take that as an opportunity to smash every button on your controller and writhe around in agony.
You can still partially control Nate as he ragdolls down a cliff, but I often found it was best to just take my hands off the controls and let him fall wherever the world takes him. The extra momentum from wriggling around often propelled him further away from my intended target and wasn’t worth the hassle. When Nate stands back up, he tends to reset to a slightly better position anyway.
And for an extra bonus tip, sometimes falling from where you were might take you to somewhere you never would have found otherwise. So just embrace the many, many times you’ll fail in this game.
Everybody’s journey in Baby Steps is going to be different, but hopefully these bits of advice make your experience a slightly smoother one. Check out our full review of the game here and if you’ve played it yourself, why not leave some tips of your own on our social media? We’d love to hear about it!
