A Puzzle Game That Breaks the Rules: Baba Is You Review
Baba Is You is a puzzle game with a simple design and genius game mechanisms. It's different from other puzzle games, and let me explain why.
Updated by Game Maker's Toolkit in Baba Is You
How Baba is You Works
From first glance, this game looks pretty simple. You hop around a grid and push blocks - making it part of a sub genre of block-shoving puzzlers, all inspired by the Japanese game Sokoban.
Here's where things start getting strange, though: in each level, the rules of the game are written on screen as simple sentences. Like, "Baba Is You", which means you control a funny white critter called Baba. Or "Wall Is Stop", which means you can't walk through walls. "Rock Is Push" means you can shove rocks around, and "Flag Is Win" means touching the flag will finish the level.
And then here's the kicker: those rules are, themselves, blocks that can be pushed around - allowing you to break the logic that dictates the level at hand, and create entirely new gameplay by rewriting the rules.
Remove the word "Stop" from "Wall Is Stop", for example, and now you can walk straight past walls.
Change "Flag Is Win" to "Rock Is Win", and now the rock becomes your goal.
Or push "Rock: into this sentence, and you switch the main character of the game into a tiny brown boulder. Cheeky.
And thus begins a few hundred levels where the solution is never to simply reach the goal - but to rewrite the rules of the universe until you're in a world where the goal is now reachable. It is infinitely intelligent and endlessly surprising. It's tough, but far from impossible, and practically every level is a revalatory experience with a satisfying aha! moment.
