The Best Babies In Gaming

A big part of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding is taking care of babies, as protagonist Sam Porter Bridges needs to cart around the little buggers in special pods to connect the worlds of the living and the dead – what that actually means is still anybody’s guess. But this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen infants in the world of video games – anything but! Come with us on a visit to the digital maternity ward as we pick the best babies in gaming.

Baby Head

In the 1990s, Capcom was known as the company that made the absolute best side-scrolling beat-em-ups, starting with Final Fight and just getting cooler and wilder from there. One of the most absurd was 1991’s Captain Commando, starring the company’s de facto superhero mascot and a trio of his pals. One of the playable characters in that game was the deeply weird Baby Head, an infant of spectacular intelligence that built himself a mechanized battlesuit that can drill through foes and shoot rockets from its knees. That’s no ordinary pacifier, either – it’s a translation device that lets the little guy speak three million languages.

The Child

Catherine is a game rife with symbolism, as protagonist Vincent is pulled into dreams where his subconscious attempts to wrestle with his relationship life. In the game’s fourth chapter, his girlfriend Katherine tells him that she thinks she might be pregnant, and this results in a tense boss encounter with a massive baby chasing our man up one of the towers of cubes that he finds himself surmounting night after night. Later in the game, the Child appears again with some horrific modifications, having gained a chainsaw for one arm and a Gatling gun in its mouth.

Baby Mario

When first introduced in Yoshi’s Island for the Super NES, Baby Mario is just… Mario, as a baby, having been dropped by the stork on his way to being delivered to his parents in the Mushroom Kingdom. Over the next few decades, though, he started showing up in the modern day, whether to compete with his adult form in Mario Kart races or to co-star in DS role-playing classic Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time. It’s fair to characterize Baby Mario as his own entity, stripped of his adult form’s jumping prowess but making up for it in cuteness and quick speed.

Haruto

For all the Yakuza series relishes in brutal street fights, getting drunk at hostess clubs and generally behaving like a Yakuza, it always comes back to humanity at its core. Many of the games in the series have protagonist Kazuma Kiryu looking after a kid, but Yakuza 6: The Song Of Life takes it a step farther by making him responsible for baby Haruto, the son of his previous ward Haruka Sawamura. When Haruka is left in a coma after a car accident. Kiryu must tote the little guy around, handing him off to bystanders when he needs to make a point with his fists. Haruto is one of the most believable babies in gaming, and when Yakuza 6 ends with Kiryu watching him take his first steps you really feel like a good parent.

Dr. Fetus

The antagonist in Super Meat Boy is pretty damn impressive for being an unborn baby in a jar. Not much is known about the bad-tempered baby known as Dr. Fetus, aside from the fact that he spends most of his time trolling on the Internet when he’s not kidnapping Bandage Girl and forcing Meat Boy to jump and run through a gauntlet of death traps to get her back. The game’s creators have never made explicit the origins of this villain, but according to his Twitter account his first name is Keith, so do with that information what you will.

Cafleo

The Simple 2000 series was a notorious line of budget games published by D3 that combined some bizarre concepts with bottom-of-the-barrel production values. One of the oddest was The Akachampion: Come On Baby, developed by a Korean studio named “Expotato.” Based on an arcade game, The Akachampion let you control one of six adorable cartoon babies in a variety of athletic-themed minigames. Our pick for the best baby is the smug Cafleo, who wears a power tie as he leaps electrified jump ropes and slaps other babies in the face.

Baby

Indie game Who’s Your Daddy is an asymmetric multiplayer experience like none you’ve ever played. Each session pits two players against each other – one as the Daddy, and one as the Baby. The Baby’s goal? Kill itself by any means necessary, including sticking forks into electrical outlets, drinking chemicals or dozens of other potential fatalities, while the Daddy tries frantically to stop them and baby-proof the house in the process. Few games have made us laugh quite so much or quite so guiltily, and the Baby is just a juggernaut of self-destruction that can only be slowed, never stopped.

The Lone Wanderer

Yes, the protagonist of Fallout 3 isn’t always a baby, but one enterprising soul managed to complete the entire game without ever growing up. Bethesda’s 2008 post-apocalyptic RPG starts out with a brief prologue where you play as a baby version of the Lone Wanderer and assign your SPECIAL stats that will carry you through the rest of the game. But players discovered a glitch that would let you leave the playpen and stay as an infant for the entirety of the game. Playing as a baby is very difficult – you’re stuck moving at a literal crawl, can’t swim, and have trouble interacting with certain items. Having a smaller hitbox is cool, though.

Googoo

The Clay Fighter franchise was never known for its deep mechanics or great balance, but boy did it boast a bunch of weird-ass characters. In addition to an evil snowman and a living banana, players of C2: Judgement Clay could opt to play as Googoo, an overgrown baby in nappies and bonnet who performed a number of infantile special attacks like throwing his bottle as a lethal projectile and the fearsome “diaper uppercut.” You can also unlock Googoo’s evil counterpart Spike, who is a palette swap with darker skin and a jumping butt attack.

Upa

Obscure Famicom game Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa didn’t get a Western release until twenty years after it came out in Japan, being selected as one of the untranslated games to come over on the Wii’s Virtual Console. Developed by Konami, the game casts you as Upa, the youngest prince of a faraway kingdom tormented by a powerful demon. Armed only with a magical rattle that allows you to inflate enemies and use them as platforms or projectiles, Upa must travel the world to free his people. Bottles of milk restore his health and a short-lived power-up lets him walk instead of crawl and destroy every enemy in his path.

Baby Metroid

In the first Metroid game, the gelatinous floating aliens that give the game its title are terrifying and implacable, parasitic energy vampires that can only be destroyed by freezing them and blowing them up with missiles. But as the series continued, we learned more about them, and by 1994’s brilliant Super Metroid Samus Aran would come to bond with a baby Metroid in one of the best game endings of all time. After battling through the planet Zebes and knocking off Mother Brain’s cronies, Samus finds herself helpless in front of the space pirate leader until a baby Metroid swoops in, intercepting its killing blow and giving our heroine the energy she needs to win the day.

For more on babies in video games, check out our deeper thoughts on Babysitting Mama and the baby minigame from 1-2 Switch.

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