Comedy is extremely difficult to pull off properly in a video game.
As I explained in my Borderlands 4 review, comedy is closely tied to timing, and video games often put the timing and pace of the experience in the player’s control. While Borderlands 4 couldn’t get that timing down right, Baby Steps does.
If you haven’t heard of it, Baby Steps is a brand-new game from Bennett Foddy, the developer behind other hilarious games that make movement difficult, like QWOP and Getting Over It.
The game’s an open-world adventure where even taking a single step is a challenge, and it’s one of the funniest games I’ve played in a long time.
Both Borderlands 4 and Baby Steps try to make the player laugh. But while Borderlands 4 struggled to get a single chuckle out of me, a minute rarely went by when I didn’t full-belly laugh while I was playing Baby Steps.
What is Baby Steps?
And why is it so funny?
Borderlands 4 is a more self-serious adventure about talking down a tyrant ruling a planet, quipping as much as possible while doing so.
In comparison, Baby Steps is a much more irreverent adventure. In it, players control an anti-social man-child in his 30s who’s whisked away to another world. He has to walk around, interact with others, and eventually find his way home.
There’s just one problem: this man can barely walk. Oftentimes, you don’t have to think about the simple act of moving in a video game.
In Borderlands 4, you just hold the left stick in a direction and start heading that way. In Baby Steps, you have to control each and every step that you make with one of the triggers.
And if you even get slightly off balance or overextend yourself, you will fall over. That’s not much of an issue when you’re just walking a relatively flat part of the mountain.
It’s devastating when you’re precariously inching your way up a slippery slope on a mountain, and falling just once can erase minutes of progress. That might sound frustrating, but more often than not, it ends up being hilarious.
Players are in complete control of the setup on the punchline. I’d see some water trickling down the side of a mountain, spend a few seconds boosting up my self-confidence that I could successfully walk through it, and then yell and laugh in anguish when I miss the first step.
Baby Steps is comprised of hundreds, if not thousands, of those moments, and they are all the result of the player’s actions.
Borderlands 4 doesn’t understand what kind of comedy works well in video games
A well-written joke only gets you so far in an interactive medium
Playing Baby Steps immediately after Borderlands 4 back-to-back made for an insightful double feature, as they both have drastically different approaches to comedy.
Borderlands 4 is more interested in telling the player a joke that the writers are proud of. On a surface level, I just don’t think its comedy writing is that strong. Games like Portal 2, Psychonauts 2, or Thank Goodness You’re Here are much more well-written on that front.
That said, even if Borderlands 4’s writing was a bit better, its attempts at humor are in direct opposition to the gameplay.
It has to sustain its pace of joke-telling over tens of hours of open-world gameplay, completely disconnected from the timing and contents of that humor. I kept hoping that some Borderlands 4 mission would change things up and have me do something funny.
The closest it ever got was one sidequest where I had to fight sentient guns and capture them like Pokémon. Ultimately, that was too little, too late.
Borderlands 4 may be a fantastic looter-shooter, but that genre isn’t necessarily fitting for comedy.
The best comedic games are often tightly crafted experiences that have more control over timing (think the Monkey Island point-and-click adventures) or ones that actively involve the player in making the jokes happen (like Untitled Goose Game).
Credit: Panic
Physics-driven games are particularly well-suited to this, but I’ve historically found games like Goat Simulator to be a little one-note.
Baby Steps feels a bit different, though. It shares the same approach to having the player create funny moments on their own, but continually finds new ways to throw obstacles at them.
Baby Steps also has some well-written comedic cutscenes, which just serve as the cherry on top of it all.
I’m several hours in and still itching to see more. It was doing such a great job at creating setups for me that I wanted to continue creating punchlines. In comparison, I wanted to turn the audio down as I continued to play Borderlands 4 so I could stop hearing its punchlines.
Baby Steps is a fundamentally funnier game than Borderlands 4
I highly recommend you give Bennett Foddy’s latest a shot.
Credit: Devolver Digital
Playing Borderlands 4 is like being in the audience for a subpar stand-up comedian’s show, while playing Baby Steps is more akin to interacting with an improv troupe that’s absolutely killing it on stage.
If all you’re looking for is jokes, both will deliver that for you. That improv show is probably going to be a lot more memorable for you than that stand-up set, though.
Comedy is really hard to pull off correctly in the video game medium, and Borderlands 4 and Baby Steps highlight both ends of the gaming comedy spectrum to show why that’s the case.
They prove that writing can only get you so far in an interactive medium. You need the player’s ingenuity, or lack thereof, to create the punchline.
- Released
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September 23, 2025
- Developer(s)
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Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy
- Publisher(s)
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Devolver Digital
- Number of Players
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Single-player
- Steam Deck Compatibility
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Unknown
- PC Release Date
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September 23, 2025
- PS5 Release Date
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September 23, 2025
