The indie gaming market has been saturated in terms of the puzzle genre for some time. Therefore, games like Baba Is You have a lot of work to do to stand out from the crowd. Probably the best way to stand out is to have innovative or unusual gameplay.
Baba Is You does just that. At Nordic Game Jam 2017, Arvi Teikari drew inspiration from logical operators to invent a new type of puzzle. Instead of creating satisfying puzzles first, the Finnish developer came up with interesting solutions. He then worked backwards to find a way for the player to arrive at that solution. After almost two years of work, the title was released on PC and Nintendo Switch on March 13, 2019.
Game
As previously mentioned, Baba Is You takes the idea of logic gates and manipulates them to solve puzzles. Two operator blocks can be linked with different words such as “è” or “e” to influence the level. Every puzzle in the game works the same, which means you have to push these different blocks to create different effects. Moving the “win” block under the name of another object and the “is” block will become the target. Moving a “stop” block from the wall and “is” blocks will make the walls walkable.
Basically, players have to change the rules of each level to progress. Occasionally, the rules are forced by placing blocks in positions where they cannot be moved. In total, there are more than 200 individual steps to go through and they work in much the same way.
For the most part, you take control of a small character known as Baba. However, it is possible to play as other characters or objects. Sometimes this happens from the beginning of the level, but other times you are forced to take control. You can do this by moving the name of another object into the “is” and “you” blocks. The concept, therefore, is quite simple. Explaining this in more detail is difficult as it is much easier to see how it works by playing.
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