by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Baba is You
• Developer: Arvi Teikari
• Publisher:  Arvi Teikari
• PC, Switch

Contrary to its title, one of the first things Baba is You taught me that my adorable sheep avatar was not in fact always me. Sometimes I’m a rock, or a ghost, or every single wall in the room. Sometimes the goal is to get Baba to a flag to win, sometimes the goal is to get something else there, transform into it and then make yourself the win condition. If that sounds confusing or inconsistent that’s because Baba is You is fundamentally about changing its own rules.

While other games slowly have you internalize the rules of the game through play, Baba is You lays out every object and property in blocks of text, which when combined by “IS” statements or conjunctions create conditional statements that control how everything reacts. And I mean *everything*. Even the win and loss conditions are controlled by these and subsequently can also be changed. Alongside the charming art style it creates a playful sandbox feel, where solutions often come about from sidestepping assumptions and realizing that the systems are way more expressive than I initially thought.

Initial stages lay out the broad palette of options, establishing that basic fundamentals like object collisions, character movement and even win conditions are flexible. Baba is You is at its most joyous here, with discoveries coming fast solutions making me laugh aloud at the way the game asks you to ”break” the game.

It carries the same energy of creating a game, where possibilities at the start feel endless, with joy coming from the simple act of making objects move and interact with each other. I couldn’t help but think of it as a more playful and accessible take on ideas explored in games like Human Resource Machine or Double Fine’s Hack ‘n’ Slash, which were obfuscated behind numbers and complicated parsers.

The sense of making the rules as you go begins to fall away in the latter part of the game. Here conditions for each puzzle begin to be restricted, having limited interaction and introducing more stages with unchangeable conditions. Solutions still venture into absurd situations that made me laugh, and there’s still the same sense of epiphany, but the focus moves from outright breaking the rules to finding the weak points in the system and manipulating them into a solution. Individual steps become more important here, with limited spaces requiring blocks to be lined up in a proper order. 

Thankfully, aside from the later, more difficult stages, there isn’t anything that nears the level of restricted movement and meticulous long term planning that Sokoban style puzzle games require. Unlimited rewind and instant restart also relieve pain points, preventing the possibility of getting stuck because of a single wrong move.

Latter game puzzles continue to be as inventive and clever as earlier stages, and in some ways are even better that the ones Baba is You begins with, but in honesty I do prefer the approach of the earlier stages. There’s something wild and expressive about the sandbox-like approach of those stages and the momentum I built storming through them contains a different energy than the mental maps I drew to solve later puzzles. That might just be a result of the way I’m wired, though. Friends I talked to seemed to find earlier levels closer in difficulty level to the later stages, and as a rule anything with multi-stage solutions tends to stump me.

Losing that momentum did, however, give me a much deeper appreciation of how well thought out Baba is You is. Even at its most methodical, there’s something playful about the way it allows you to mess with language, and turn the rules back on themselves. Most impressive is the way it takes the trappings of programming games and presents them in a way that’s immediately parasable for regular people. It’s so easy to imagine a version of this game with a mechanical, digital exterior that achieves the same things, but leaves out the joy of manipulating cute versions of recognizable objects. It’s that warmth and playfulness that carries it through even at the most challenging.

In short: Baba is Good And Cute And Joy.