Staff – March 26, 2019 at 8:17 AM
Baba Is You. Wall Is Stop. Rock Is Push. Flag Is Win.
These are the rules to the opening level in Baba Is You, a top-down, grid-based puzzle game. As you might expect, these rules stipulate that you control Baba, a small sheep-like creature; you cannot pass through walls; you can push rocks; and you must make contact with the flag in order to solve the puzzle.
But here’s the magic of Baba Is You: Each of the words listed above is a represented by a movable block. If you rearrange the blocks to read “Wall Is You,” you control the wall. If you rearrange them to say “Rock Is Win,” touching a rock will complete the puzzle.
In short, Baba Is You is a puzzle game about manipulating the rules of the game itself. All rules are structured the same way, connecting nouns and verbs via operators like “Is,” “And,” and “Has.” It’s also a turn-based, block-pushing game, meaning the player must be attentive to their organization of space. New levels introduce new word blocks, each with their own unique properties and relationships to other words.
Baba Is You’s creator, Arvi Teikari, originally developed the core concept of the game as a part of the 2017 Nordic Game Jam. “The theme of the jam was ‘Not There,’ which made me think of logic operators; mainly, how you can have a statement ‘X’ and then reverse its meaning by stating ‘Not X,’” Teikari explained.
That sounds pretty abstract, but his implementation wasn’t. Teikari first imagined a block of ice that could withstand hot lava if the player created the statement “Ice Is Not Melt.” As Teikari continued to develop the game past its initial game jam prototype, he started incorporating more and more colorful words into the game’s vocabulary — words like “Love” and “Weak” — while eventually moving towards more existential terms like “Empty” or “All.”
“I got a lot of ideas fairly organically from thinking of the game concept and trying to figure out scenarios and structures that'd feel ‘cool’ or amusing under its logic,” Teikari said. The game is full of “What if?” decision-making and experimentation. Clever combinations might yield surprising results, like teleporting water from one end of the level to the other, or storing a heart inside of a rock.
Upon first impression, Baba Is You’s use of the English language recalls the way coders treat it. Syntax determines meaning (i.e., “Baba Is Wall” is not the same as “Wall Is Baba”) and logical statements can be compounded upon one another (i.e., “Rock And Box Is Float” will cause both objects to float). Xs appear over any word combinations that defy the current logic.
But there’s something even more meaningful behind Baba Is You’s mechanics and level design. With the exception of a small handful of background objects, the game’s rules always account for everything visible on the screen. There’s a satisfying sense of order in this premise alone; the idea that the world is tethered together by simple rules that work in harmony bears some serious metaphysical heft.
As the game’s vocabulary grows over the course of successive levels, it continues to find new, natural ways to surprise the player, which Teikari said was a conscious effort. “I've tried to make almost every level elicit some kind of a ‘realization’ — or an ‘a-ha moment,’ I guess — from the player,” Teikari said.
These “a-ha moments” arrive frequently. The moment you grant a key the ability to move or cause a river to float feels like playing a whimsical God. Where many puzzle games are about restoring order to a disordered situation, Baba Is You is about finding alternate means of order through fantasy and playfulness.
Ultimately, however, the irony of Baba Is You is that, for a game about language and rules, it’s actually pretty hard to capture the way it feels to play the game with words. You’ll just have to play it for yourself to fully understand its magic.
The game gets increasingly difficult, and the solutions to its puzzles become more and more complex and obscure. Yet that moment, when everything that seemed impossible changes with a simple turn of words — that feeling is the very best of what the puzzle genre has to offer. Baba Is You And Capable Of Wonders.
Luckily, Baba Is Available on PC for you to play today.
