#hempuli

Sokoban is a very popular format for puzzle games: in a top-down grid, you push boxes around a tight space to fit them in to specific locations. Created by Hiroyuki Imabayashi in 1981 for Japanese home computers, this basic formula has been endlessly recycled and copied; I'm familiar with it thanks to the Bulldozer clones in John Hattan's 1997 Windows compilation 40 Games. Anyway, Baba Is You is like Sokoban, except you can change the rules by moving word blocks around. Starting as a Nordic Game Jam 2017 project with 14 levels, the creator Arvi "Hempuli" Teikari hugely expanded the concept for this full release, with hundreds of levels that iterate on the rules ideas in many clever ways.

The game starts you off easy. Baba Is You, and Flag Is Win. Maybe a rock is in your way, but Rock Is Push so you can move it away. But what if you can move the word "Rock" so that Rock Is Win? What if Wall is You? What if there's a dozen contradictory rules that can be changed at will, new objects and behaviours piling up? It can get overwhelming, which is why it's good that generally multiple levels open up at a time so you can take a break and come back later, but still make progress elsewhere. Or step away and let your brain cool down. Maybe my main criticism is that the game isn't quite open *enough*… different people will find every level easier or harder, or won't get the trick at all, so you can easily get gated off from chunks of levels.

It's hard to talk about Baba Is You beyond that. It's really good at setting up puzzles with multiple-stage tricks, so you think you've cracked it only to find another wrinkle that needs to be navigated. I was constantly in a loop of feeling stupid, then having a flash of inspiration that left me feeling like the smartest genius in world history. (Sometimes I never got to the second step, and sometimes the Baba Is Hint unofficial nudge guide could help, or it was no help at all.) My initial time with the game was in a voice call with friends, as they lent their brains or gave me clues, which helped a lot with getting familiar with the basic logic and grammar of how you can manipulate the rules.

I really liked how the game slowly introduced new concepts, stacking them on top of previous mechanics that you'd learnt. Later on there's fun subversions too, including turning the map itself into a puzzle, and breaking free of its constraints to find a hidden world of weirder puzzles, which in turn has its own secrets to discover. In the end everything comes down to one finale puzzle though, and I spent a long time barking up the wrong tree having done an early stage in an unintended way before succumbing to a more thorough guide, just so I could see the credits. I had over 100 clears by that point so I don't feel too bad.

Despite the brain-twistingly fiendish difficulty of many of the puzzles, the presentation is very gentle. Mellow music tracks keep you at ease, while the cute blobby characters are so charming (the jam version had Baba as some kind of robot, while the final game makes them a white four-legged almost Moomin-esque creature). It almost makes you regret pushing Keke or Me into a puddle of lava to solve whatever puzzle requires it. Almost.

The game is also great on features. A simple button press or hold can infinitely undo your steps, so a wrong move is never punished. There's a few nice accessibility features, but for outright hints you have to rely on external sources. Also included alongside the campaign are a new puzzle map which goes further with more out-there rules, new objects and modifiers, and wacky mechanics (like turning the game into a first-person 3D dungeon crawler), as well as the Museum, a showcase of discarded ideas, early iterations, and unused levels; a fascinating playable archive rivalling Analgesic's laudable efforts in this space.