“It’s an endearing irony, because it’s also who I am”: The making of the most pathetic character in gaming | games

“I don’t know why he wears a little dress and has a big ass,” shrugs game developer Gabe Cosello. “Bennett came up with this at some point.”

“I thought it would be nice,” answers Bennett Foddy, who was once Cosello’s professor at New York University’s Game Center and is now his assistant. “Working on character design and animation makes you love big asses. And I can give you a ton of proof of that.”

Foddy and Kozello talk about Nate, the pathetic baby hero of their deeply funny comedy game Baby Steps, developed in collaboration with Maxi Busch. As I prepared to talk to them, I felt like I was about to meet my tormentor: I had spent a week last year in the grips of this intentionally depressing game about going on a horrific hiking vacation with the world’s most helpless loser.

The premise of Baby Steps seems like a cruel joke at first: watch a hapless man suffer! and You You will suffer too! But the more I played with it, the more meaning I found in it. As the hours passed and I helped Nate overcome his uselessness and get up the mountain, I turned to him.

“It’s common for people to come to him,” Foudy says. “A lot of people have said they hate it at first — and then they start either learning about it or identifying with other people in their lives. Some people end up sexualizing it. The common thread in all of these things is that people come off one way or the other, and that’s the basic philosophy of the game. You should start the game feeling awkward and awkward and uncomfortable and hostile, and then we try to bring you to find joy in that… and that’s what happens to Nate in the story as well.” never Go outside for a walk.”

Nate is a big, bearded, russet-haired 35-year-old who wears glasses and lives in his parents’ basement. He is socially awkward, shy, whiny, whiny and extremely hates accepting help from anyone. Early in the game, you encounter another hiker who gives you a map of the mountain; A small mini map appears in the corner of the screen for a few seconds before Nate dismisses it and disappears. I giggled at this. Like most Baby Steps, it’s a joke on the comfortable, simplistic gaming experiences we’ve become accustomed to. But it’s also a joke about Nate and the kind of guy he is.

Talking to Cuzzillo bothered me at first because he’s also the voice of Nate; He and Foudy improvised every line in the game. But he also has a deeper connection to the character. “Nate is a manifestation of my personality,” he says. “It’s an aspect of my identity. It’s not an artificial man. I totally have a man who rejects the map inside of me. That’s deep in my identity. If someone tries to help me, I run away screaming. Sometimes that’s a joyful part of who I am, and sometimes it’s not.”

“In video games, you can do that too, where you immediately put it on the hardest setting and turn off the assist,” says Foudy.

Like (almost) all of the game’s characters, Nate was once a stick man who carried a block for a head and tissue boxes for feet. Foudy and Cozzello tested nine or ten prototypes before they came up with the Baby Steps concept, prototypes that Cozzello described as “pretty bad.” “We were looking for something with legs,” adds the straight-faced Foddy.

Foody’s games are full of seemingly pointless suffering. It’s a theme of his work, along with the idea of ​​moving a character’s body awkwardly: in one of his earlier games, Getting Over It, you’re trying to throw a guy in a cauldron up a hill with a sledgehammer. This prototype, in which you individually control the character’s feet to walk around, fits that bill: Within two days, the construction worker has become a helicopter pilot, a placeholder asset outside the store. It would be a few more years before he became Nate, and another six before the game was over.

“The idea is that he’s not ready and he’s not in good shape,” says Cosello. “Having a character who is unprepared gives the player an excuse if they feel inadequate. They can blame them,” Foday explains. “We had the idea of ​​a cute lumberjack carrying a little backpack, based on the idea of ​​one of our friends, who would never need to know he was inspired.”

One of Foddy and Cuzzillo’s friends and colleagues was the source of the name Baby Steps. They both now teach at New York University’s Game Center, where its emeritus president, Frank Lantz, bursts into their office with an idea for a name; At that point, the main character was a giant baby (you could say he still is). There are still plenty of childlike images, from rivers of breast milk to gigantic sandcastle toys to a giant woman picking up Nate and hugging him in a particularly surreal scene.

While they were testing the game with their friends, another side of Nate’s personality began to emerge: his misplaced pride. “This stubborn vein of toxic masculine play starts to emerge, by seeing some of our friends play it a certain way,” Foudy says. One of these friends, Julian Cordero (creator of Despelote), begins looking intently away from the edge of the cliffs after climbing them, inspiring a scene in which Nate’s colleague, Mike, sits on the edge of a platform contemplating throwing himself along the road again.

Baby Steps’ engaging exploration of what masculinity means to a man like Nate is delivered through story and gameplay. You can unlock short, abstract, playable flashbacks about his childhood and the humiliating experiences that shaped him. There are also somewhat less subtle symbols, such as the ubiquitous phallic imagery. The interesting thing about this game’s musings on masculinity is that it doesn’t include women at all: at a time when men’s insecurities over women and feminism are constantly being lumped together by mainstream internet misogynists, this is refreshing. As Foody says, “Men can have masculinity issues on their own.”

There’s one thing Nate loves straight up: fruit. The shiny pieces of fruit hang dramatically in almost inaccessible places, tempting you to waste a good portion of your life trying to reach them. If you do, you’ll get a ridiculous close-up of Nate’s face as he noisily devours it before screaming his name into the wind.

“We needed something to put on top of things,” Cosello explains. Was a selection of increasingly esoteric fruits the obvious choice? That’s a bonus, he explains player It would be contradictory to the philosophy of the game. “[So] What if it’s a reward for Nate? What if it was something he Likes, so you can vicariously watch him get rewarded? “The day we came up with it, we recorded the first five tracks… It’s funnier when you’re trying your hardest to make it happen, and what’s on top is just having this crazy fruity orgasm.”

The inspiration for the stupid camera angle – the wide-angle lens from above the forehead – was train conductor Francis Bourgeois. “The thing that we got into during COVID, when we were doing the initial exploration of this game, is the cultural vein that comes out when people get really bored,” Foday explains. “The idea is that these fruit scenes come when the player feels as disturbed as Nate does when he enjoys the fruit.”

This is the joke that Baby Steps keeps coming back to: You might hate Nate, but also if you’re playing a game like this, somehow you’re going to hate Nate. We are Nate. After several hours on the mountain, in the snow, you reach the end when Nate finds a cabin owned by a donkey man who befriended him during his journey. After a few false starts, he finally knocks on the door and asks to be let in from the cold. You can go for a walk after this ending cutscene, but the game does its best to warn you that there’s no point. There is nothing else there.

Baby Steps’ final joke is that it’s lying to you: There’s a final scene at the top of the mountain. You can look it up if you want, if you’re incorrigibly that kind of person. But for me, the true endgame is that Nate finally learns to ask for help. I was somewhat affected by it.

After Cuzzillo finished his first commercial game, 2019’s Ape Out, he felt conflicted about it. “I wasn’t sure if it was worth it; if, when I was at the top of the mountain, I really wished I had climbed it,” he says. But he feels much better about Baby Steps in the past, and about Nate.

“I understand it more now that I’ve finished it. I feel like I’m re-realizing all the things the game is about… Nate is a microcosm of the entire game, where he’s both pathetic and honest at the same time. He’s neither one nor the other.”