Games Showcase: Baba Is You

“Baba is you” is a sliding blocks puzzle game—yawn. Where the rules are encoded as blocks on the board—wait, what?

So, for example, the simplest possible game has the rules:

And then somewhere on the board is Baba, and somewhere is a flag.

Because “Baba is you”, you can move Baba.

You win if “you” are on a square containing a “win” object. In this case, “flag is win”.

So: move Baba to the flag, and you won. Easy!

This May Get Complicated

Given the two simple rules above, you could do a surprising number of things.

You could move Baba to push the word “you” downwards. At this point “Baba” is no longer “you”, the player can no longer move Baba, and the game is over—except that, fortunately, there is a turn by turn “undo”. You’ll be using it a lot.

You could instead turn the flag into an extra Baba, by making:

—the instant you do this, the flag will turn into a Baba, and that Baba is also “you”, so it’s under the player’s control too. Not particularly helpful.

But! You could also manipulate these rules to win without touching the flag:

The combination of “Baba is you” and “Baba is win” is an instant win—unless there are contradictory rules elsewhere on the board.

I Did Say Complicated

The complexity just hinted at is introduced in the first few levels, so they’re not really spoilers; after that, the new complexity keeps coming, with new nouns, verbs and joining words, requiring you to discover new tricks along the way.

Usually you won’t have access to the “is win” rule as that would be too easy—there will be some kind of permanent barrier to prevent you from modifying it. Barriers only work due to rules, of course; “wall is stop”, itself protected by walls, is a start. You’ll find various ways to break past it.

Baba Is Hint

The game gets incredibly difficult—you could easily spend an hour struggling with one of the hard ones then ultimately give up. For this case, I highly recommend the website:

Baba is Hint

—which gives difficulty ratings, gentle hints, bigger hints, and sometimes specific hints, for each puzzle.

If you do give up, the solutions can be found on other websites or on YouTube.

Highly Recommended

“Baba is You” will stretch your logical reasoning and imagination to the breaking point and beyond, with puzzles ranging from quick and pleasing to headscratchers that will have you utterly convinced that the goal is impossible.

> “Baba is You” is one of the most inventive, exciting puzzle games you will ever play. It’s beautifully simple in its graphics and its core design, but it’ll make your brain hurt with how nonsensical the solutions appear to be. — PocketGamer

It’s available for Windows, Linux, macOS, Switch, iOS and Android.

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