baby steps

It’s time for game developers to bring back the cheat code

baby steps, cheat codes, cheating, code, difficulty, Doom, gaming, konami code, simcity 2000 / Rejus Almole / October 9, 2025

Arcane hidden options can offer accessibility without confusing the “core” game experience.

For gamers of a certain age, gibberish character sequences like idkfa, torg, ABACABB, and UUDDLRLRBA are akin to long-lost magical incantations. They evoke an era where game developers frequently and routinely let players use cheat codes to customize their gameplay experience with everything from infinite health and instant level selection to full debug menus or gigantic anime-style giant-headed avatars. There were even external cheat devices that let players hack console games with cheat codes the developers never intended.

While the cheat code’s heyday is long in the past, the idea of letting players manipulate their gameplay experiences in similar ways is coming back into fashion for some developers. Last month, Square Enix announced that upcoming Switch 2 and Xbox ports of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade would include new “streamlined progression” features. As the name implies, the new options menu will give players the opportunity to blaze through the game with infinite health, magic, and money, quicker leveling, maximum damage attacks, and more.

“Constant Max HP” is a funny way to spell and pronounce “god mode.” Credit: Reddit / Square Enix

While some responded negatively to what they derisively called a “cheat mode,” director Naoki Hamaguchi defended the new options in a recent interview with Automaton. “Personally, I like to try many different games just to keep myself up to date, but I don’t really have the time, so I only get so far,” he said. “I personally believe that, with digital entertainment today, the player should have the choice in how they interact with content. That’s why I pushed for it.”

He’s right. Players are responsible enough to know if, when, and how to use these kinds of options to help streamline their progress through a game. At the same time, I think many games would benefit from hiding these kinds of gameplay-altering options behind the obscurity of old-fashioned cheat codes, rather than tempting built-in menus.

Developer intent

Final Fantasy VII Remake is far from the first modern game to offer players a simple option for friction-free progress. In Mass Effect 3 it’s Narrative Mode. In Nier Automata it’s Auto Mode. In Assassin’s Creed Origins it’s Discovery Mode. In Death Stranding it’s just Very Easy Mode. In a game like Celeste it’s a whole menu of accessibility options that allow for fine-tuning of the game’s precision platforming rules.

In each case, there’s a recognition that some players might want to explore a game’s world—to experience the characters, art, and dialogue that the developers worked so hard to craft—without struggling through mechanical reflex tests or grindy, repetitive challenges. Even players who enjoy the “intended” difficulty most of the time might want to treat the game like a giant sandbox on subsequent playthroughs, or quickly skip to their favorite part when revisiting years later.

As Penny Arcade memorably put it back in 2005: “I play games to enter a trance state and experience other lives, [others] play them to defeat the designer of the game by proxy. That’s a significant distinction.”

But there are some games where this kind of built-in difficulty manipulation would be antithetical to a game’s very nature. In Baby Steps for example, struggling with the game’s controls and suffering when you lose significant progress to an errant step is very much the point.

A “perfect balance” toggle would completely ruin the impact of this *Baby Steps* moment.

A version of Baby Steps where you could plow through to the end with perfect balance or frequent save points would ruin the experience in some crucial ways. Just offering this kind of “Exploration Mode” in the options menu would undercut the message the developers are trying to impart, giving players an easy out in a game where those don’t and shouldn’t exist.

FF7 Remake‘s Hamaguchi acknowledged a similar issue in discussing why he wouldn’t initially offer “streamlined progression” options for the upcoming third game in the remake series. “If we were to add it to the third installment at launch, it would probably spark controversy,” Hamaguchi said. “We’d risk disrupting the experience for fans who have been waiting the longest and deserve to enjoy it the most (through spoilers coming out early and similar).”

This is where I think the added friction of the old-fashioned cheat code can come in handy. While a tempting “easy mode” menu option can weaken the impact of a game’s “intended” design, a hidden cheat code is much more clearly set apart as an unrelated option intended for tinkerers and fun-seekers.

Making “easy mode” harder to find

The difference comes down to context. Back in the day, players usually found cheat codes from a source outside of the game itself, passing around the arcane knowledge through online forums, printed magazines, or schoolyard rumors. That outside sourcing made it clear that, while these codes were obviously part of the game in a sense, they were also somehow separate from the core gameplay experience. Even the term “cheat code” connotes the idea that you’re getting away with something by evading the game’s built-in rules.

If you want to cheat, you should have to look at an eye-searing wall of monospaced text first. Credit: GameFAQs

An ever-present “god mode” toggle or “accessibility” menu, on the other hand, presents those options as contextually valid and at least somewhat intended ways for different players to experience the same base game. And that’s perfectly fine in many cases; as Hamaguchi pointed out, sometimes players will just want to experience the story as quickly as possible. But in games where the difficulty is integral to the developer’s intent, putting that kind of option upfront can confuse the message and confuse the player as to which is the most “correct” way to play.

Toggling an “easy mode” through a menu is like flipping a light switch that the developers left invitingly available in a little-used corner of the house. Tracking down a cheat code, on the other hand, feels more like going to the hardware store and asking for help to install your own light switch. The effect is the same, but the path to get there makes all the difference.

In modern PC gaming, mods often offer that same kind of context change. This fanmade Baby Steps mod offers the ability to fly to any location and save at any time, completely ruining the game as it was designed. But players that go to the trouble of seeking out, downloading, and installing that mod obviously have no one to blame for that bastardization but themselves.

Cheat codes also offer developers additional options for how and when they present new options to players. In UFO 50, for instance, players can discover many of the game’s gameplay-altering Terminal Codes by beating a subgame and watching the credits. Even outside the game, a developer can keep a cheat code’s very existence hidden for months or even years after a game’s launch, ensuring that early adopters experience the game as designed (this happened all the time in the pre-Internet era of game magazines).

Trying to bring back that era of hidden knowledge might seem silly in an age where Internet sleuths are data-mining games before they even come out. But I still think that a revival of the humble video game cheat code can help offer fun and helpful gameplay options for those who want them while protecting the intent of today’s video game designers.

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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Baby Steps is the most gloriously frustrating game I’ve ever struggled through

baby steps, bennet foddy, devolver digital, gaming, hike, hill, mountain, qwop, walking, walking simulator / Rejus Almole / September 23, 2025

A real “walking simulator”

QWOP meets Death Stranding meets Getting Over It to form wonderfully surreal, unique game.

Watch out for that first step, it’s a doozy! Credit: Devolver Digital

There’s an old saying that life is not about how many times you fall down but how many times you get back up. In my roughly 13 hours of walking through the surreal mountain wilderness of Baby Steps, I’d conservatively estimate I easily fell down 1,000 times.

If so, I got up 1,001 times, which is the entire point.

When I say “fell down” here, I’m not being metaphorical. In Baby Steps, the only real antagonist is terrain that threatens to send your pudgy, middle-aged, long-underwear-clad avatar tumbling to the ground (or down a cliff) like a rag doll after the slightest misstep. You pilot this avatar using an intentionally touchy and cumbersome control system where each individual leg is tied a shoulder trigger on your controller.

Unlike the majority of 3D games, where you simply tilt the control stick and watch your character dutifully run, each step here means manually lifting one foot, leaning carefully in the direction you want to go, and then putting that foot down in a spot that maintains your overall balance. It’s like a slightly more forgiving version of the popular ’00s Flash game QWOP (which was also made by Baby Steps co-developer Bennett Foddy), except instead of sprinting on a 2D track, you take your time carefully planning each footfall on a methodical 3D hike.

Keep wiggling that foot until you find a safe place to put it. Credit: Devolver Digital

At first, you’ll stumble like a drunken toddler, mashing the shoulder buttons and tilting the control stick wildly just to inch forward. After a bit of trial and error, though, you’ll work yourself into a gentle rhythm—press the trigger, tilt the controller, let go while recentering the controller, press the other trigger, repeat thousands of times. You never quite break into a run, but you can fall into a zen pattern of marching methodically forward, like a Death Stranding courier who has to actually focus on each and every step.

As you make your halting progress up the mountain, you’ll infrequently stumble on other hikers who seem to lord their comfort and facility with the terrain over you in manic, surreal, and often hilarious cut scenes. I don’t want to even lightly spoil any of the truly gonzo moments in this extremely self-aware meta-narrative, but I will say that I found your character’s grand arc through the game to be surprisingly touching, often in some extremely subtle ways.

Does this game hate me?

Just as you feel like you’re finally getting the hang of basic hiking, Baby Steps starts ramping up the terrain difficulty in a way that can feel downright trolly at time. Gentle paths of packed dirt and rock start to be replaced with narrow planks and rickety wooden bridges spanning terrifying gaps. Gentle undulating hills are replaced with sheer cliff faces that you sidle up and across with the tiniest of toe holds to precariously balance on. Firm surfaces are slowly replaced with slippery mud, sand, snow, and ice that force you to alter your rhythm and tread extremely lightly just to make incremental progress.

Grabbing that fetching hat means risking an *extremely* punishing fall.

And any hard-earned progress can feel incredibly fragile in Baby Steps. Literally one false step can send you sliding down a hill or tumbling down a cliff face in a way that sets you back anywhere from mere minutes to sizable chunks of an hour. There’s no “reset from checkpoint” menu option or save scumming that can limit the damage, either. When you fall in Baby Steps, it can be a very long way down.

This extremely punishing structure won’t be a surprise to anyone who has played Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, where a single mistake can send you all the way back to the beginning of the game. Baby Steps doesn’t go quite that hard, giving players occasional major checkpoints and large, flat plains that prevent you from falling back too far. Still, this is a game that is more than happy to force you to pay for even small mistakes with huge portions of your only truly irreplaceable resource: time.

On more than one occasion during my playthrough, I audibly cursed at my monitor and quit the game in a huff rather than facing the prospect of spending 10 minutes retracing my steps after a particularly damaging fall. Invariably, though, I’d come back a bit later, more determined than ever to learn from my mistakes, which I usually did quickly with the benefits of time and calm nerves on my side.

It’s frequently not entirely clear where you’re supposed to go in *Baby Steps*. Credit: Devolver Digital

Baby Steps is also a game that’s happy to let you wander aimlessly. There’s no in-game map to consult, and any paths and landmarks that could point you in the “intended” way up the mountain are often intentionally confusing or obscured. It can be extremely unclear which parts of the terrain are meant to be impossibly steep and which are merely designed as difficult but plausible shortcuts that simply require pinpoint timing and foot placement. But the terrain is also designed so that almost every near-impossible barrier can be avoided altogether if you’re patient and observant enough to find a way around it.

And if you wander even slightly off the lightly beaten path, you’ll stumble on many intricately designed and completely optional points of interest, from imposing architectural towers to foreboding natural outcroppings to a miniature city made of boxes. There’s no explicit in-game reward for almost all of these random digressions, and your fellow cut-scene hikers will frequently explicitly warn you that there’s no point in climbing some structure or another. Your only reward is the (often marvelous) view from the top—and the satisfaction of saying that you conquered something you didn’t need to.

Are we having fun yet?

So was playing Baby Steps any fun? Honestly, that’s not the first word I’d use to describe the experience.

To be sure, there’s a lot of humor built into the intentionally punishing designs of some sections, so much so that I often had to laugh even as I fell down yet another slippery hill that erased a huge chunk of my progress. And the promise of more wild cut scenes serves as a pretty fun and compelling carrot to get you through some of the game’s toughest sections.

I’ve earned this moment of zen. Credit: Devolver Digital

More than “fun,” though, I’d say my time with the Baby Steps felt meaningful in a way few games do. Amid all the trolly humor and intentionally obtuse design decisions is a game whose very structure forces you to consider the value of perseverance and commitment.

This is a game that stands proudly against a lot of modern game design trends. It won’t loudly and explicitly point you to the next checkpoint with a huge on-screen arrow. You can’t inexorably grind out stat points in Baby Steps until your character is powerful enough to beat the toughest boss easily. You can’t restart a Baby Steps run and hope for a lucky randomized seed that will get you past a difficult in-game wall.

Baby Steps doesn’t hand you anything. Your abilities and inventory are the same at the game’s start as they are at the end. Any progress you make is defined solely by your mastery of the obtuse movement system and your slowly increasing knowledge of how to safely traverse ever more treacherous terrain.

It’s a structure that can feel punishing, unforgiving, tedious, and enraging in turns. But it’s also a structure that leads to moments of the most genuinely satisfying sense of achievement I can remember having in modern gaming.

It’s about a miles-long journey starting with a single, halting step. It’s about putting one foot in front of the other until you can’t anymore. It’s about climbing the mountain because it’s there. It’s about falling down 1,000 times and getting up 1,001 times.

What else is there in the end?

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