Friendly Steps: the genre is saturated, and yet this one had an idea the others missed

There is one thing I can say without risk: you have had enough of these games.

Stupid games to play together, where you fall over, shout and insult each other affectionately, arrive at a rate of one a week. We have covered plenty this year, from the two-player stroll of Big Walk to the four-player rocket of Approximately Up, by way of three monkeys defusing a bomb. The genre has become an entire supermarket aisle.

So the only question that matters, for Friendly Steps as for the rest, is what it brings that its predecessors did not.

The answer is short: it stacks two constraints instead of one.

Constraint one: your legs

The premise is getting home after a night out. You are drunk, the city is large, and the game will not let you walk.

You control each leg separately. One key for the left, one for the right, and everything else, balance, momentum, trajectory, follows from the rhythm you set. The game suggests stumbling forward and, if necessary, crawling.

This is not brand new, awkward locomotion has already carried whole games and destroyed whole living rooms. But it still works for a mechanical reason: it turns an action nobody notices, walking, into a skill you have to learn. You do not laugh at the fall, you laugh at how slowly you watched it coming.

Constraint two: the rope

Here is the addition that changes the arithmetic.

There are up to four of you, and you are tied together by a rope. The studio puts it with the right amount of irony: the rope seemed like a fun idea, like conquering a summit, and it would be a shame if one of you fell off a bridge and took the whole squad down.

That is where the game separates from the rest of the aisle. An awkward-walking game played solo is a test of dexterity. An awkward-walking game where three other people are pulling you backwards is a coordination problem under simulated alcohol, and the result is not the sum of the two, it is considerably worse.

In practice, the smallest slope, the smallest staircase, the smallest kerb becomes a negotiation. You have to decide together when to move, in what order to clear an obstacle, and above all who sacrifices their balance to steady the others.

A city, not a corridor

The third argument is quieter, and it may be the one that decides how long this lasts.

The route home crosses hills, staircases, bridges, parks, building sites, playgrounds, and a fine collection of questionable shortcuts. There are side quests, items to pick up, hidden paths, and characters you meet at hours when nobody respectable is out.

In other words, this is not a challenge room, it is an itinerary with variations. Two groups do not go home the same way.

During testing the studio added two levels outside the urban frame: a highly vertical tornado map where one bad stumble sends you back to the starting line, and a frankly hallucinatory level with a melting floor and neon beer bottles flying at you. It is an open admission of what the game wants to be: a chain of absurd situations, not a simulation of the walk home.

There is also a speedrun mode for anyone wanting to optimise the route, which is the best way to keep a game like this alive beyond the first evening.

What caps it

Let us be clear-eyed about the ceiling, because it is real and it applies to the whole aisle.

This kind of game only lives on the people beside you. Solo exists, it is perfectly playable, and it holds no interest whatsoever next to an evening with four. That is not a flaw in the game, it is the nature of the product, but you should know it before paying.

Drunk comedy has a shelf life. On the first evening everything is funny. By the third, the city needs to still hold surprises, or the rope becomes a chore. That is precisely where the side content, the quests and the shortcuts will decide things, and it is the one thing I cannot yet measure over time.

And comparison with the giants is cruel. The studio announced more than one hundred and eleven thousand wishlists at the end of June. That is a nice figure for a small team, provided you remember a wishlist is not a purchase, still less a community playing together three months later.

The details that show care

A few points reassured me about the seriousness of the work, in spite of the subject.

The game runs online, over local network, and solo. There is built-in voice chat, full controller support, achievements and leaderboards. Customisation lets you walk home dressed as a firefighter, a police officer, a punk, an office worker or a streamer, which is a joke I will not dwell on.

Hardware-wise it is very approachable: a GTX 750 Ti and 8 GB of memory will do, which matters for a game you install on the friend with the old PC.

And the studio opened its skin contest to ideas sent in by testers, which says a good deal about the feedback loop it keeps with its community.

What I make of it

Friendly Steps reinvents nothing and does not pretend otherwise. It takes a ridiculous way of walking, adds a rope, drops that into a city full of stupid obstacles, and lets four players sort themselves out.

That small addition is enough, because it shifts the subject. You are no longer playing against your own legs, you are playing against everybody else's, and that is infinitely funnier with four.

Still, in an aisle this crowded, the question is never whether the game is fun on the first evening. They all are. The question is whether you will come back next month, and honestly, that will hinge on the quality of your friends more than the quality of the game.

Short one drunk to complete the squad? We keep a good supply on the InsertCoins Discord.