Hiking (Dis)Pleasure Island: Enjoyment & Critical Gameplay in Baby Steps

The document analyzes the 2025 game Baby Steps as a critical game that uses difficult gameplay to foster critical reflection and model an antifascist approach to game design. It argues that the game, developed by Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy, transcends initial dismissals as a "meme game" to offer a pensive meditation on toxic masculinity and the blurred lines between games and reality.

The analysis focuses on Baby Steps's narrative, where players control Nate, a character embodying gamer stereotypes, who must climb a mountain by manipulating one leg at a time. The game's story unpacks Nate's refusal to accept help, linking it to fears that accepting assistance diminishes his masculinity. This narrative is interwoven with elements from Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, particularly the Pleasure Island chapters, to explore themes of impulse, desire, and their consequences within a critique of game culture, escapist fantasies, and toxic masculinity.

The document highlights that while Baby Steps presents grueling challenges, its developers claim players "make it difficult," offering alternative paths of varying difficulty. The inherent frustration is deemed crucial for the game's social critique, fueling player frustration with Nate's obstinance and prompting players to accept responsibility for their situation. A key moment involves a choice between the difficult "Manbreaker" path and Jim's easier spiral staircase, with the latter rewarding an achievement for joining "the hallowed ranks of the Jiminy's Crickets." These choices create space for critical reflection on social struggles, the contradictory enjoyment of failure, and the consequences of choices.

Drawing on Alfie Bown's call to challenge conservative ideologies in games and Jesper Juul's account of the paradox of failure, the document posits that Baby Steps reconstructs the player's relationship to enjoyment. It suggests that the game aims to reprogram desire against fascist, corporate, and capitalist tendencies by denaturalizing hypermasculine ideals that can produce fascism, much like Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio opposed fascism. The analysis concludes by exploring how enjoyment and failure are mobilized to create critical gameplay that can disrupt far-right ideologies.