Puzzles, at best, immediately provide enjoyment when the player can see the intentions of the game designer in the puzzles. It comes from the almost audible click that occurs when you stop thinking about the game and understanding how to think to play effectively.
Baba Is You multiplies this onslaught, because before a breakthrough comes, the player must design the rules of the puzzle. It’s not about thinking like someone trying to solve a puzzle. It’s about thinking like a game designer who has complete control over the objects in the game, including their functionality and features.
GOTY # 4: Baba are you
For our Guide to 2019 the best games of the yearPolygon counted down our top 5 on each day of the week, ending with our top pick and full list of our top 50 favorites from 2019. Later in the month, we’ll be looking back at the year with special videos and essays, and surprises!
Baba Is You is a two-part puzzle game and the second part is straightforward. The player must touch a target on the screen to finish the puzzle. Often, this goal is blocked by an obstacle that must somehow be overcome, such as a river that is to be crossed. It is nothing new. But before that happens, players must create a condition under which they can win the puzzle. In each level you will find the parts that you need to succeed. However, you must first arrange it yourself.
How elegant is this design? The title of the game itself, Baba Is You, serves as a tutorial explaining the main mechanics. The players have to change the syntax of the puzzle rules of each one to solve them. Nothing has inherent behavior. The role of an object can be reassigned to reach a goal, as long as the rules are manipulated.
Here is an example to understand the concept. In the first puzzle I see a white rabbit on one side of a corridor and a flag on the other side, separated by a stone barrier. Also visible are four rulesets: Baba is you, flag is victory, wall is stop and rock is push. In this case, since I am Baba – because Baba is you – I control my little rabbit to push the stones out of the way and touch the flag to win.
But the stone is not the only thing that can be pushed around. In each puzzle, the ingredients that make up the rules can be moved freely to change the possible. Nothing prevents me from rearranging the first part of these rules to create my own winning conditions. Rock could be win. Could also Wall. I can even turn into the flag and make Baba a victory condition. It is this immediate flexibility that makes the most rudimentary puzzle a pleasure – and the later puzzles of the game that bend the mind.
Hempuli Oy on polygon
While the first riddle does not make it clear that rules should be broken, the second puzzle immediately takes the idea home. I’ve been trapped in four walls since Wall Is Stop. To win, I literally have to break the rules. If I push Wall out of the way so that a rule is no longer complete, there are no rules for how the walls work. They just become pixels on the screen. And if they are nothing, I can flip through them to solve the puzzle. Changing and breaking rules is all in Baba Is You.
But flag does not always win and I’m not always baba. This is because the later puzzles of Baba Is You expand these basic ideas to create something much more nuanced and interesting. As I delve deeper into the ideas of the game, I sometimes have to apply its compliant rules to further undermine my expectations, for example, to shun rivers like Moses, control two characters at the same time, or change objects.
It is up to me to reorganize, manipulate and remix my previous reflections on the functioning of the game systems. While other jigsaw puzzles throw in pieces of jigsaw puzzles to spice things up, at Baba Is You, I rewrote the rules of the individual puzzles to overcome the game’s biggest head-scratchers.
Hempuli Oy
Luckily, every puzzle is an independent challenge that I can come back to when I’m ready. I have often thought about how I can restructure puzzles when I have not played, usually in everyday tasks. There were times when I came up with a solution when I was not actively thinking about the game and I ran to my switch to test it. Baba Is You is one of those games that get stuck in your head and I routinely felt that my subconscious was chewing on the logic of the game, even if it was not up to date.
I can not remember the last time I tried to disassemble and manipulate a game to that extent, and I can not imagine examples of games I had to do to progress. Knowing that each puzzle has several solutions beyond my expectations makes it one of the few jigsaw puzzles I can not wait to start all over again.
