Falling over is the thing in Baby Steps. Sure, the goal in Bennett Foddy and co’s walking sim is technically getting from A to B despite your doughy corpus’ best efforts to get in the way, but it’s the constant stumbling and hilarious unintended pratfalls which make these sorts of games really sing. You get plenty of that playing alone, but for those who want to take things to the next level, Baby Steps has a multiplayer mod that’ll let you slap against your mates and gently bump their mushy forms off course.
While this Baby Steps multiplayer mod by Caleb Orchard has only just hit Nexus Mods, it’s already been through several early iterations on GitHub and even gotten the approval of Foddy himself.
With it installed, rather than taking on the life of a failson with misbehaving limbs alone, you and a gang of others can run around in a range of different coloured onesies. Your gang of badly coordinated Teletubbies can collide with each other if you enable that setting and as you can see in the video below, the result is the possibility to send someone skidding down a cliff or flying off a ledge with a single well-timed nudge.
Watch on YouTube
Since recording that video, Orchard looks to have worked out how to ensure cutscenes trigger independently for each player’s instance of the game, as well as ensuring hats and held items don’t only show up for the host.The current version, 1.1.2, has also been through a couple of rounds of bugfixing since its initial 1.0 release last month, meaning it should hopefully be stable and relatively free from the sort of frustrating jank which could impede the intended fun jank.
As of writing, the modder is working on adding the likes of “dynamic suit muddying and wetness”, water/dust particles, and “player sound effects” – which I assume’ll be suitably goofy – to an equation which already seems a brilliant recipe for mischief and the occasional ruined friendship.
If you fancy giving that kind of action a go, you’ll need to grab the MelonLoader framework and follow the handy installation tutorial Orchard’s put together. For more thoughts on Baby Steps, I direct you to Nic, who reckons Irish comic Dara Ó Briain would dig it.
