Baba is You - A unique puzzle game

The Game Room
21

This is a fascinating game. I picked it up after reading this thread and have been playing with it for a day or so. I’m a fan of games of this sort, but some of the levels really have had me stumped. It’s very much an “aha!” game, where once you get the key insight for the level you can normally work out the rest easily. What’s so impressive about it is that there are so many completely different “aha!” moments arising from such a relatively simple set of rules.

Those without self-control should skip this, but there’s a nice “spoiler-free” hint site that I’ve referred to once or twice. It doesn’t give the solutions, but it does a good job of nudging you in the right direction:

https://www.keyofw.com/baba-is-hint/overworld

One problem I have with games like this, and I think this one is no exception, is that in the process of going through the levels you’re building up the skills and the mental language to tackle more difficult problems. That’s absolutely what you want to make a great game. But for me, if I step away from it for a period of time, could even be a few hours, I tend to have that knowledge erode. I’ve been stuck at least once because I didn’t remember a very basic thing from ten levels earlier, which I don’t think was really supposed to be part of the puzzle, it was a just a symptom of not being able to hold everything in my head at once for a really long period of time.

I had a very similar experience with The Witness – it was great working out the tricks, but unless you can access them all when you need them it can be frustrating. I’m fully willing to believe this is more of a “me” problem than a general one.

22

I have that problem with any game that has complex or unusual rules (or control schemes).

In my case, it seems like every time I play Elite: Dangerous, I haven’t played in months and need to redo the tutorials.

I started playing Murdered: Soul Suspect again after a long hiatus. I am a bit lost. I’m in the middle of multiple investigations and I have no idea where to go next with them. And I spent a lot of time getting comfortable with all the ghost powers, juggling the real world and spirit world, handling violent spirits, etc. It almost feels like I’m trying to play someone else’s game who is near the end.

I don’t think it’s you, I think there are certain games you almost need to binge to get through. You can pick up a bike and ride it again naturally, you might not be able to do that with a fighter jet.

23

This game is fun, but every time I clear level I realize how easy it was, and then when I get to the next level, I discover again how stupid I am.

24

I love this game. I’ve finished… I don’t know, half the levels or so, and some of them are wicked hard.

Among my favorite discoveries:

X IS Y AND Z lets you generate duplicate objects.
X HAS X gives you an indestructible X that can plow through things.

EMPTY as a noun is mind-bending. I have solved very few of those levels.

One of my favorite things about it is that you’ll beat a level and then there will be a bonus level that differs in just a single grid location, but you have to beat it an entirely different way. Extremely clever level design.

25

This was one of my favorite discoveries to make. It’s the kind of thing you don’t think about as being possible until you realize that it is, and it’s exactly what you need.

26

The game is a lot longer than I expected, and I’m surprised that the puzzle quality has stayed high. If anything it has saved some of the more clever and mind blowing surprises deep in the game.

I also had issues with wrapping my head around the keyword EMPTY. I completed the space area eventually, but I had to use a lot more trial and error as it was sometimes hard to predict the consequences of rules.

I’ll spoiler tag my favourite discovery as it’s a nice surprise relatively deep in the game.

Favourite discovery was solving the world map

27

Well, if nothing else, there’s this to make you all feel a little better. :slight_smile: Thoughts, no particular order:

If you get this thinking you can do all kinds of weird things or get really creative with solutions (I thought that way for a while), it’s going to be a massive disappointment. Other than a few really easy levels, each level in the game is geared toward one and only one solution. In fact, some levels with unexpected alternate solutions were later modified to take them out. There are certain rules that can’t be changed because they’re either in corners or blocked off, and as the game progresses more and more of them become inviolable. For total control and creativity, Minecraft is still the champ. (Creative mode, I mean, as the only thing Survival is a champ of is Neverending Death By Witch, but that’s another thread.)

The singular solutions are going to result in frustration, mainly because a lot of things that look like they’d work at first glance have a rule or property that makes them impossible. “X is X” is a prime example of this.

There aren’t any dirty tricks, at least not that I found. If you find yourself going “Man, why didn’t I think of that?” it’s probably because you didn’t consider every possibility or didn’t fully understand how a rule or property worked. It pays to work out the solution one step at a time rather than waiting for a big eureka moment.

It does get super hard, and moreover, it gets super complicated. Kudos to whoever had the patience to make these and make sure that there were actual solutions. Definitely not for the easily frustrated (like me).

Given that Baba (or whatever else is “You” at the moment) can only push, not pull, this may be a concern to players who played things like Sokoban in the past and were really bad at it (like me). From what I’ve seen, this isn’t any to be worried about. There are situations where you don’t want to push an object a certain way or the way is blocked, but there aren’t extremely complex labyrinths that Sokoban is infamous for. Mostly you need to understand where things go and how to get them there.

You can’t go in with pretensions. What a certain object is and does is dictated solely by what it “Is” at the moment. Doors can open walls, lava can be pushed, grass can be impassible, and water can float in midair. Other than the fixed rules, anything is possible.

Verdict? It looks pretty, but I’m going to wait until somewhere has all the solutions before I consider buying it. (That no such place exists yet tells me that this one’s a long haul.) There’s just too much bang-head-into-desk potential here. This is one of those games where I’d have an absolute blast with a hacked version, but that’s probably years off, if it ever happens.

28

So, it was on sale (-25%) this past weekend, and I finally gave up on waiting for a half-off sale and bought it. So far, my biggest frustration isn’t in figuring out what pieces to move where; it’s just in the long sequences of boring keypresses to move some object a long distance (but I don’t want to just hold down the arrow key, because it’s usually possible to move something too far).

My favorite insight so far (though it was a small one) was a puzzle that looked like a Sokoban maze (and a particularly nasty one), until I realized, “Wait, there’s no WALL IS rule anywhere here; I can just walk right through those!”.

Do colors (like “Rose IS Red” and “Violet IS Blue”) ever have any significance other than decorative?

29

No mobile version yet? Boooo

30

Oh, one other thing I’ve noticed: Getting into the “Game Over” state (because there is no object on the level that Is You) does not necessarily mean that the game is over. A thing that Is You might Have something that becomes You, for instance, or something that Is Move might push text around that makes something else Is You, after many turns of not having any You. One level I played, I had to cross a lot of Water (Is Sink), and I ended up with something like “Baba Is You, Baba Has Rock, Rock Is Baba”. So I’d walk my one Baba into the water, Baba would sink (removing both the water and Baba, causing the Game Over state), then a Rock would spawn in Baba’s place, and then the Rock would immediately become a Baba, and I’d be back in the game.

31

Have you not discovered the undo button?

32

I hadn’t, when I posted that. I have now.

33

OK, this game is officially ALL KINDS of crazy. You’ve noticed that the main map has a BABA IS YOU and a FLAG IS WIN down in the bottom right corner? Well, that’s because the main map is itself actually a game level, with those rules. And so if you can manage to get a BABA and a FLAG on that map, you can win the map. Which is actually possible. And which, of course, leads to even more craziness.

34

That was my favourite moment, but the game still has some more surprises in store after that.

35

I have found that, alas, BABA IS EWE doesn’t do anything.

36

Well, the other day I finally completely absolutely finished the game, 226 dandelions in all (yes, 226: There’s one super-secret level that doesn’t count for any of the achievements). I will confess that I had to look up hints for a few of the puzzles, and in one case (The Box) I had to actually look up a full solution online, because I didn’t even realize that that sort of interaction was even possible. In another (AB), I managed to solve it on my own, but with a method that I couldn’t replicate, and which I think might have been a glitch, before looking up a better solution online.

The final puzzle that I solved was “Security Check”, the last puzzle in the ??? zone. I eventually decided that, darn it, I was absolutely NOT going to look up hints for that one, and set out to make a systematic and exhaustive list of every piece of text available in that level, and hence every conceivable rule I could make, to conclusively rule out each one of them until I got the answer. Turns out the second rule on my list was the one I needed.

I am thoroughly convinced, by the way, that the creator of that game is completely and thoroughly insane. Even if he wasn’t at the start of the project, he is now.

37

I’m glad to hear other people have enjoyed this game. I also used hints for about 5 levels out of 226. It’s interesting that different people run into obstacles on different levels.

Spoiler tagging some in-depth info on later levels in case there are people trying to get through it on their own:

[spoiler]I took some time trying to figure out The Box. I came back to the puzzle after a while, and the name of the level finally clicked. My thought process was something like this: "The box, huh? Guess I should think outside the box. Wait… Think outside The Box. Holy crap, it worked.

I had major difficulties in turning the Crushers level in Depths into Text. I didn’t realize I could stack two text together with Text is Shift and make it move on it’s own infinitely that way.

I also didn’t believe for a longest time that the Booby Trap level could be turned into both Text and Flag simultaneously. I didn’t think it was possible, but it seemed to be necessary to turn the Cursor into a level. In the end it was the only level where I looked up the complete solution, and I’m not sure I would have ever figured it out on my own.

I loved the Meta world overall the most, and discovering each new world map was always a great surprise. It was a lot of fun trying to figure out all the different things you could turn levels into in order to progress in the world map. You needed to consider both what you needed in the Meta world to progress, and what each individual level was possible to turn into.
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