Baba Is You review

Recommended

by Rahul

Baba is You is a clever puzzle game that falls off really hard after 100 puzzles.

It's difficult to get into the specifics of this game without ruining the magic of learning the game's mechanics. It does a great job teaching the player without explicit tutorials. A majority of the puzzles are very well done with a wide range of difficulty. You don't have to complete every puzzle to complete the game, however "Completing the Game" is a pretty ambiguously defined state.

The puzzles start out clever. As I learned how to manipulate the rules of the game, I enjoyed it. After 100 or so puzzles, it turned from clever to tedious. The levels got larger and larger, and its cleverness devolved. Every level involved taking a minute to take in the rules, then taking about 10 minutes to permute through every possible combination of those rules. To get a bit technical, the amount of stuff present in any given level went beyond the typical cognitive capacity. I have no doubt that I could have solved each puzzle eventually, but it got too tedious.

Good puzzle game for both beginners and enthusiasts of the genre. It had potential to be more special than it is, but later puzzles fell into the age old trope of "keep layering on more shit until it becomes difficult." These puzzles can be optional, depending on how much of the game you'd like to complete.

Baba is you is an extremely original puzzle game made by an author I loved the previous game (environmental Station Alpha, which is one of my favorite Metroid games). Being a great lover of puzzle games, I waited for the release of this game impatiently, but after spending many hours there, I'm rather disappointed. The concept of Baba is you is to be a game at the Sokoban (the famous game of puzzles of 1982 where one pushes crates in a hangar) of very classic appearance but where the rules of the game themselves can be pushed like the rest: for example , blocks marked "BABA", "IS" and "YOU", connected from left to right or top to bottom, form "BABA IS YOU" which indicates that we play Baba the rabbit, but if we push a block marked "KEY" in place of the block marked "BABA", the command will become "KEY IS YOU" , which will make us play a key instead of Baba (if there is a key in the playground). In the same way, the functions STOP, PUSH, SHUT, OPEN, SINK, DEFEAT, WIN, etc. can be attributed or not, verbs HAS, MAKE, etc. can be used, and so on. The concept is simple, but produces in cascade amazing situations and unusual and transgressive puzzles. The whole beginning of the game is based in fact on transgression: we are confronted with situations of play of ordinary puzzles, with keys, doors, crates, bodies of water, etc. but all the characteristics of these elements can be shaken in pushing ruler blocks to break some commands to write others-we will find yourself pushing bodies of water, running crates in the grass, or opening a mushroom with a skull to get a flag inside. This transgression, this rewrite of the videogame codes, this way of mixing the elements of the play with the rules of the game, all this is very clever, and we have a lot of fun... for roughly half of the adventure. By the time I write this assessment, the game has a very high overall score, but less than 5% of people have finished the fifth world while the game has a dozen, and it's from this fifth World (which I ended up at 100% , like the previous ones) that I disenchanted: as we progress, Baba is you becomes ever more complicated, more obscure and more boring, and spent half the game, I just don't want to play it anymore while I love puzzle games. As I often remember when I evaluate a game of puzzles, a good game of the genre must have clear and intuitive rules, a level design clean and perfectly readable, and problems whose appearance is extremely simple even (and especially) if they are Complicated. Games like Sokobond, Toki Tori, A good snowman is hard to build, hiding spot, the two Snakebird or obviously Stephen's sausage roll, to name only games on steam, follow all these principles and are all excellent puzzle games, which is not a coincidence. Baba is you quickly fails to respect any of these principles, with confusing rules often not explained, an overloaded level design (sometimes unnecessarily with elements that are strictly useless, which is in my opinion an objective fault) and prob which are very complicated until the abscons. When I start a puzzle and I find myself facing more than 50 blocks of text to decrypt (without any exaggeration), I just do not want to solve it, I want to do something else, it seems more a drudgery of debugging on a prototype than a real game. The games I mentioned above are no easier than Baba is you, but their puzzles and solutions are much better designed, more challenging, more elegant and more satisfying. It must be known that almost three weeks after its release, Baba is you is still updated very regularly to correct its levels, sometimes several times a day, indicating that its level design was simply not mastered. On the other hand, the game universe has no personality outside its shaking graphics, without history or context, while the principle of the game could have been a fun exhibition. Baba is you is immediately sympathetic, but after progressing enough, we realize that his level design is problematic. At low cost, it is worth to be discovered for its beginning and the originality of its concept, but past its 50% I simply do not want to play it and I regret to have bought it at a high price. (my time spent on the game is much less than what says steam, I usually let some games run in windowed mode by doing something else)