Baby Steps isn’t about humiliation, but the joy of disobedient flesh
Many years ago, my brother and I climbed the moor above our town and, for reasons that elude me, decided to roll to the bottom of it. We hugged each other and threw ourselves off the path into an ocean of heather and bracken. This was, to be clear, a bloody stupid thing to do. That moor is full of potholes, sheep bones, barbed wire and animal turds of all flavours. If there were any justice in the cosmos, I'd have banged my bonce on a boulder and be pushing up daisies. But somehow, we reached the outskirts of the town basically unscathed, and it was glorious.
We went tumbling over ledges and into ditches, sucking in careless lungfuls of spores and laughing like seals. I felt a sense of para-Wordsworthian abandon and intimacy with rocks and stones and trees, that I haven't ever felt since. I caught a trace of that feeling in Baby Steps, the new open world fail 'em up from a team led by Bennett Foddy, in which you move each leg of a body subject to believable physics, and the challenge is therefore to walk more than two paces without keeling over.