The trailer probably does a better job selling it than I can.
The core of the game is a block-pushing puzzle, game, with a twist of rules manipulation. Some of the blocks are nouns and modifiers, that affect the world state.
Usually, BABA (the little goat-bunny-thing) IS YOU (i.e. player controlled). But what if you pushed the word “ROCK” in place of BABA? Now, ROCK is you, and you control the rock. But actually, you control all the rocks on the screen.
What if push some blocks around and now BABA IS ROCK? Well, all the BABAs on the screen turn into rocks, and now you control them, too.
Normally, WALL IS STOP, and FLAG IS WIN, but what if FLAG is MELT, and WALL IS WIN and DOOR IS STOP and ROCK IS FLAG and WATER IS DEFEAT and KEY IS CRAB…?
I really like this game. It’s a great twist on Sokoban. Not much else to say except it’s charming and well conceived and the puzzles are so so devious.
I will say that there’s very little Sokoban fiddliness to it. You’re much more often trying to puzzle out how to use the words than how to move that block over there. The Sokoban “rules” are mostly used to block you from changing certain things, e.g. the game will put “FLAG IS WIN” in a corner so there’s no way you can move it. That said, you still might be able to manipulate it. This game requires thinking outside the box and continually evaluating how you can break rules it’s spent several levels training you not to break.
Some of the interactions seem a bit fuzzy but they do follow concrete rules that you have to figure out by trial and error, e.g. I think MELT only responds to HOT things, BABA IS ROCK is not the same as ROCK IS BABA, etc.
This is actually one of the very interesting things about the grammar. IS function like the assignment operator in programming (“=”, usually). It isn’t bi-directional. A = B means “change the value of A to be (the value of) B”.
I wonder if the assignment of objects (and their mutability) comes easier to people will have a programming background.
Its clear that the really hard puzzles here would be incredibly hard. You get later elements like MOVE that can introduce timing elements, and meta-blocks like TEXT, that can turn rock objects into the word ROCK. I haven’t hit really novel use cases yet, but the possibilities are clearly there.
That level is full of red herrings. It’s not as hard as it seems.
The final island level, “Prison” seems utterly impossible. It’s not the first time I’ve thought that about a level though, so I’ll keep plugging at it, but it’s dead simple and I simply cannot see how any combination of things will let me beat it. I can feel my brain twisting in knots.
Wow, this game is so hard. The forest and beyond are just brutal. It’s really good. I’ve cleared the lake and the island, and I already feel way smarter than I have any right to.
The obvious comparison is to Stephen’s Sausage Roll–another low-fi pixel-art Sokoban-like with a twist. I like SSR quite a bit, but BIY is still significantly better. I don’t think it’s going to supplant The Witness as my favorite puzzle game (not counting Zach-likes), but it’s really very good.
While you can approach the levels however you want, I don’t think it’s necessary to clear all the levels in a zone before moving on. I think the decision not to require it for advancement was deliberate, because sometimes you just aren’t going to hit on the necessary inspiration for a level.
Leaving g it alone and coming back later can help, although it’s also true that you might end up overthinking it when you come back, because many of the areas have something of a theme uniting the levels.
I finally figured out 12 and 13 so that will help move me along. Did a run of about 6 and hit another snag, they seem easy or hard :) The “extras” maps I guess are just bonus maps or do they open up new areas?
I think Stephen’s Sausage Roll is amazing (it is even one of my favourite games ever), not only because of the brilliance of its puzzles in a way that @Vesper described earlier, but also because its esthetics set an incredible atmosphere. Has Baba is You a peculiar atmosphere to it?
