BABA IS GOOD
IS
YOU
AND
CUTE

35 hours in, i am stuck on a puzzle for over one hour. i push blocks around aimlessly. i go to a different world. i accidentally do something that will change my understanding of the game forever. in my hubris for thinking i was close to the end, baba has humbled me.

i use the website Baba Is Hint for the rest of the game (which i HIGHLY recommend). the opening phrase is "the Main Game is basically just a tutorial for the Late Game." i bury my head in my hands.

on hour 64, i have 100%'d the game. i am free and i long for more of the prison.

Baba is You offers an interesting take on the puzzle genre. In essence, it is a combination of Sokoban and programming. While the programming portion of manipulating the rules already gives it infinite potential to make any puzzle, the Sokuban aspect contextualizes the puzzles to make them less abstract (even then Baba is You is an extremely abstract game).

This freedom of the mechanics allows for really wild setups that can be made, giving the player many tools (tools in the sense of ideas, and not an in-game gameplay ability) at their disposal. Many levels throughout the whole game are designed around figuring out those tools.

On the other side, those tools are later reused in tandem with other ideas to create more and more complex levels. Those would be the majority of the levels in-game, even though most players would find themselves taking more time on the former set of levels.

Till the very end of the game, new rules are getting added, which adds more and more that can be learned. This isn't to say that the game just plays on a new gimmick for every level to keep the attention of the player - it thoroughly explores each and every mechanic it present to the player. The game is very long and it can feel like it has already exhausted what it can teach you by the end, even though by the very nature of the mechanics this is impossible.

While the game offers extremely interesting puzzles and mechanics, it still suffers several issues. It has somewhat inconsistent difficulty, which gets worse the deeper you get in the game (in a sense this is close to unavoidable to an extent considering how abstract the puzzles get later on). A good amount of the levels that are about learning a new trick could be very abstruse to figure out in the most later zones. Also, the last zone reuses many ideas of the first zones, however, by that point in the game, the player might have forgotten some of the less used ideas - I found myself having to replay the game twice to be able to beat the full game due to this. It would have been nice to have a refresher to those ideas somewhere so that the player should not figure them out again but in a more complex scenario.

The game is still amazing, even if the last areas are not paced as good as the rest of the game (they still offer some of the best puzzles in the game). The game is also going to get an official level editor in the future and with the nature of the mechanics, it has amazing potential for community levels.

At its best it's charming and challenging, and when you finish a particularly tough puzzle it does feel really rewarding. At its worst, the puzzles can rely too heavily on knowing the game and its mechanics inside out, with not enough prior gameplay to have been able to master whatever obscure gameplay aspect is needed for that puzzle.

Overall, I like the game, but man it can be frustrating when puzzles rely on mechanics that you have to accidentally learn.

Update: 100% Completed the game, very convoluted ending but I guess that's what trying to complete it gets me lmao. Overall glad I played the game, as frustrating it got near the end.