Hello and welcome back to my blog!
I have become a huge fan of unique indie titles. There is no shortage of creativity in this segment, and it seems like every studio is experimenting with something or the other. When I saw someone talking about Baba Is You, I knew this game was for me.
What drew me towards this game is the puzzle-solving and out-of-the-box thinking approach. "Baba is You" is not just a game about solving puzzles, but creating the rules of those puzzles and changing some to meet the goal. In this game, words can be rearranged to change the rules of the game. Some of those puzzles are mind-bending, and it feels like you are hacking the game to solve those puzzles.
I have done my share of programming in my college days, and I loved logic and making algorithms for real-life math problems. It was quite fun, and now you are telling me there is a game where I can do exactly that?
The game starts with basic puzzles where you break some of the laws. For example, in the first level, you are trapped inside a wall with the three connected blocks that say, Wall is Stop, you can just break the connection so the walls are no longer stopping you. Just like this, you can tamper with almost anything you can push.
Some rooms have fixed laws that can't be pushed. Baba, the playable character, can only push those blocks and can't pull them, so you have to keep the blocks away from the edge if you want to reuse them later. You can even change the winning conditions, make hazards do nothing, make rocks pushable, water swimmable, etc.
The art style is very minimalistic, which I think works well with a puzzle game like this. It is not distracting at all, and less clutter on the screen helps you focus on the core logic of the puzzle as well, without the background or other visual elements on the screen confusing you.
The difficulty starts to shoot up quickly, especially in some of the sections where all the puzzles are tough. Sometimes there are many logical blocks on the map which can be connected in many ways to open/close doors, move rocks, or change Baba's form, etc.
Some sections are blocked, requiring you to collect a certain number of items from the clearing stages. I have completed more than 20 stages already. Some of them took me a few seconds, while some took me like 20 minutes to figure out. And when you finally figure out that one thing which you overlooked, you don't feel like a master of logic but a fool and a complete idiot for missing a simple thing. This is like seeing the solution to a chess position and then evaluating if it was easy... Of course, once you know, it would seem easy.
Except for a few frustrating levels, I am having a lot of fun. I am a bit surprised that I found this game this late. It came out in 2019, and I didn't know about it for that long. This was developed by one guy only, and it shows. No polished graphics or music, but very clever puzzles and pure logic.
I don't know if the game has a story to it. It would be cool to have some equivalent of a Boss fight in this game. But I have no clue how it can be implemented in a puzzle game like this. And that's why I am not a developer and did programming mostly for fun rather than making a career out of it.
I love to break codes as well, and I tried it in one of the levels. Making two conditions which are different, like "Flag is Stop" and "Flag is Jelly". The game doesn't allow the second statement, and there is a big red cross on the second contradictory statement. That's a good way to eliminate ambiguity in your code. Who knew that games would be teaching these programming concepts?
I would recommend people who want to go into programming and want to improve their logic to try this game. I am pretty sure it will get quite complex as I progress further on the map. Even if you don't care about those aspects, it is a solid puzzle game. I am very impressed with it.
Until next puzzle...
