Baba Is You
I’m so glad this is coming more or less immediately after And Yet It Moves . Though the story of these two games is different, what they are and fundamentally represent is the same. And Yet It Moves takes platformers and forces you to rethink what’s possible. Baba is You takes puzzle games and forces you to rethink why the rules are what they are, or indeed, if they have any validity at all. I love it very much.
But of course, it’s helpful to introduce the gameplay before fawning over what a game represents. Baba is You is a puzzle game, and in terms of its controls and actual gameplay, it’s fairly simple and straightforward. You play as Baba, a little rabbit creature, pushing rocks, crabs, and the rules to its world around a map.
Rules? Oh yes. Baba pushes the rules. Baba breaks the rules. Baba rewrites reality in Baba’s own image.
This doesn’t work as well as I want it to.
The crux of Baba is You is not in trying to figure out which rock to push in which direction like most puzzle games. Rather, Baba is You structures the world through rules statements and challenges you to reshape the world to solve the puzzle. It’s not enough to look at the world as is; we have to look at the world as it could be to really understand a puzzle.
I love this very much.
If the system doesn’t work for you, break the system.
I have, on multiple occasions, already talked about how I love games that ask you to rethink their genres. In the case of Baba is You, it masters this request, sending you through puzzles where there is no single solution, and where red herrings abound. I joke in the stream that this is a grammar game, but that’s fundamentally true. You use the language and grammatical constructions of the rules to explain how the puzzle will be solved before actually solving it. Some of the levels I enjoyed the most were the ones where I understood which pieces to move where, but puzzled over which grammatical rules I would need to put in place to make that particular story possible.
What I enjoy about games like these, though, is that they challenge our suppositions about reality, not just in the context of the game, but more generally. Playing a puzzle game where the rules themselves are what need to change to succeed trains your brain to look at the world itself in a different light. Maybe instead of fighting the same social battles in the same spheres, it’s helpful every once in a while to look at the rules and structure, and consider whether they themselves need to change. Maybe it’s sometimes a good idea to whether “x is x” is still a good mantra, or if perhaps a few blocks need to be rearranged here and there. Baba is You is a game that leaves you to think, both about the game, and about what rules actually are.
Developer: Hempuli
Genre: Puzzle
Year: 2019
Country: Finland
Language: Its Own
Play Time: 35-40 Hours