I've been climbing a hill in Baby Steps, a physics-based open-world Steam Next Fest demo, for 30 minutes. Suddenly, I put a foot wrong, fall from the rickety bridge I'm trying to cross, and spend the next 20 to 30 seconds sliding slowly, inevitably, back into the muddy hole right at the bottom of the slope. And I laugh almost the entire way down.
Baby Steps comes from a team that includes Bennet Foddy, who arguably kickstarted the 'rage games' genre with 2017's Getting Over It. But physics-based suffering was not new to Foddy even then - perhaps his most famous work remains QWOP, a flash game which put players in charge of a track runner, and tasked them with completing their race while individually controlling their characters' limbs. Making it just a few steps was a huge achievement back then, and Foddy's bringing that same energy back with Baby Steps.
