A key element of developer Bennett Foddy's games has always been their humor. From QWOP and VVVVVV to Getting Over It and Ape Out, he has made his name in the industry as a master of comedy. Baby Steps, his upcoming project developed alongside Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch, is no exception. Baby Steps' humor is based primarily on improvised conversations between Foddy and Cuzzillo, leaning into the absurd, embracing flubbed lines and mistakes, and keeping players on their toes with unexpected conversation topics.
"Make At Least One Person Laugh": The Humor Of Baby Steps
Foddy explained that, when developing the humor of Baby Steps, the team drew inspiration from a quote by Patricia Highsmith: "If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publishers and the readers can and will come later." When improvising the dialogue, Cuzzillo and Foddy focused on making each other laugh and left the successful attempts in the game. "That's why Gabe kept in so many of the cases where I misspoke or flubbed a line," Foddy explained.
The decision to include improvised dialogue was made by the team partway through the development of Baby Steps. Initially, they wanted to convey Nate's story entirely through text, but they ultimately found that spoken dialogue elicited more laughs than a text format. "It felt like something I hadn't really seen a game do before," said Cuzzillo of the decision to improvise. "It seemed like it would be fun to do, so we started leaning heavily in that direction."
Improvisation Shaped Both The Game's Humor And Nate's Character
As Foddy and Cuzzillo worked together to improvise dialogue for their "literal walking simulator," they slowly uncovered key character elements of Nate, the "failson" at the center of the game's story. Cuzzillo described the process of learning more about Nate, including discovering similarities between himself and the character, as he recorded dialogue alongside Foddy:
"Nate feels like an aspect of myself that I’m able to emphasize or channel after a couple takes. Some of it is just an extreme awkwardness, but also I think it’s a certain very loose orientation to language. Like, he doesn’t really know how to use words sometimes, or only has a vague grasp of them."
The resulting humor is a mix of absurd and philosophical, something that might be familiar to players who have experienced the developers' previous games, such as Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Foddy revealed that a lot of the game's hilarity came from him "trying to flummox Gabe with ideas or language that [were] difficult to understand," and cited the improv comedy TV show Dr. Katz Professional Therapist as a major inspiration behind Baby Steps' dialogue.
But the humor in Baby Steps isn't just mile-a-minute jokes. "Comedy, especially absurd comedy, is a lot like horror - you can’t keep the scares or the laughs going 100% of the time," explained Foddy. "We tried to let the relaxed nature of the walking be an emotional reset for the jokes." Boch agreed, feeling that Baby Steps' style of humor is very different from that of other indie games. "The other games that sit in the canon of humorous 3D indie games tend to be a bit relentless in their comedic pacing," Boch said. "Baby Steps' humor works because it is a respite from the other experiences."
Players who want to experience the humor of Baby Steps will encounter it everywhere, but particularly when tackling particularly tricky or hidden routes. However, searching out these scenes and conversations is absolutely worth it, as the unique improvised humor will definitely get at least a few laughs out of players.
- Released
- September 23, 2025
- Developer(s)
- Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy
- Publisher(s)
- Devolver Digital
- Number of Players
- Single-player
- Steam Deck Compatibility
- Unknown
