Is a Hiking Game That Trolls'Slightly Problematic' Men The walking simulator, launching September 23 on PlayStation and Steam, stars a jobless 35-year-old "privileged, white male" whose pride stops him from getting help. Game developer Bennett Foddy was watching a Greek myth unfold in front of him. A playtester for his latest project,, was struggling to navigate the game's lead--Nate, a 35-year-old "failson" in a stained onesie--up a slippery hill. Each time, the terrain proved to be too much, and Nate skidded uselessly down it. Foddy has a reputation for making onerous games that take a little bit of masochism to master.

Game developers Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch and Bennett Foddy have been friends for over a decade, having met through NYU's Game Centre, and they already have one successful indie game under their belt. Ape Out had you smashing through halls full of goons as a rampaging gorilla to the tune of a procedural jazz soundtrack. Their next game, Baby Steps, is equally unconventional. A walking simulator in a very literal sense, you'll awkwardly steer Nate, a caked-up, onesie-wearing basement dweller, to the top of a misty mountain. "On a controller, players use the triggers to lift and plant each foot while using the left stick to move the lifted foot around in the air, manually taking each of Nate's steps," Cuzzillo says.

In the summer of 2017, the gamer Beck Abney sat in his room playing Mario Kart 64. What happened next has been described as one of the greatest achievements in gaming history. Many doubted it could even be done at all. He was trying to perform one of gaming's hardest glitches: the Weathertenko, a trick that if done correctly can finish a full lap of the stage Choco Mountain in just a handful of seconds. To do it once requires immense skill, but Abney wanted to do three in a row, a feat never before achieved in recorded history.

Not long ago, I stepped into a lift on the 18th floor of a tall building in New York City. A young woman inside the lift was looking down at the top of her toddler's head with embarrassment as he looked at me and grinned. When I turned to push the ground-floor button, I saw that every button had already been pushed. Kids love pushing buttons, but they only push every button when the buttons light up. From a young age, humans are driven to learn, and learning involves getting as much feedback as possible from the immediate environment. The toddler who shared my elevator was grinning because feedback – in the form of lights or sounds or any change in the state of the world – is pleasurable. In 2012, an ad agency in Belgium produced an outdoor campaign for a TV channel that quickly went viral. The campaign's producers placed a big red button on a pedestal in a quaint square in a sleepy town in Flanders. A big arrow hung above the button with a simple instruction: Push to add drama. You can see the glint in each person's eye as he or she approaches the button – the same glint that came just before the toddler in my elevator raked his tiny hand across the panel of buttons.