Retro Throwback Saturday Spotlight - Baba is You
Block-pushing puzzles want you to follow the rules to create a path; Baba is You wants you to break and redefine them.
Retro Throwback Saturday Spotlight is a weekly bonus feature where I’ll highlight a modern game that captures the style and feel of some of the retro games we’re highlighting in this series. While I’ll feature some games that are emerging or well-known, I’ll also include some that are a little bit off the beaten path!
GENRE: Puzzler
RELEASE DATE: 2019
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Arvi Teikari / Hempuli Oy
PLATFORMS: PC, Switch, Mobile
As I’ll say again and again in this series, it took me awhile to warm up to retro-style indie games because so many of them felt either jokey or overly nostalgic for the days of 8-bit and 16-bit console gaming. I guess I presumed Baba is You fell into one camp or the other with its simplistic pixel art graphics and its bizarre title, and it took me until this year to finally dust if off from my vast trove of unplayed games and give it a whirl.
What I found was an experience I legitimately loved – a smart and extremely playable puzzle game that’s full of surprises. At first, it feels like it might just be a variation on the Sōkoban/Boxyboy-style puzzlers where you push crates in a precise order to clear a path to the exit, which is a style of gameplay any fan of The Legend of Zelda will be familiar with since many of the top-down Zelda games involve some puzzles with blocks that have to be pushed to open up progression. But Baba is You quickly turns into something far more interesting that involves manipulating logical statements in order to find a victory condition. All of the tactics used to solve box-pushing puzzle games quickly fly out the window, and Baba is You instead reveals that its true intent is not to get you to follow the rules to the solution, but to break and change them.
For example, one of the most conventional rules of the game is “Baba is You,” which means that your character (a white rabbit) is under your direct control. Each of these words takes up a space on the game’s gridlike playfield, and so long as they’re connected horizontally or vertically, you are free to move Baba the rabbit around the screen. If you simply break the continuity between these words, you lose control of Baba and cannot move, but if you replace “Baba” with another provided noun, such as “Rock” or “Cog” or “Robot,” you can take control of the corresponding object. What’s more, if you replace “You” with that noun instead, you can transform Baba into whatever the sentence now says.
Early puzzles will open your mind up to some fascinating opportunities – perhaps the way to reach a flag trapped in a passageway is to become the flag and move it to Baba yourself. Or perhaps a flag trapped inside a prison of walls can be reached if you become the walls and move them on top of the flag. Maybe an object that’s impeding your progress can have its physical properties removed so you can walk right over it, or maybe that object can be turned into the goal so you can simply touch it to clear the level instead.
The game also teaches you early on that there are rules that can be broken and other rules that can’t be due to their placement on the game’s playfields behind walls, along the sides of the screen or in corners… unless, of course, you can find a way to break the rules inhibiting you or to play off those rules in a Scrabble-like fashion by adding in additional operators and components. Some sneaky puzzles don’t make it obvious that you can walk through objects you assume are solid or that you can even cross the boundaries of the playfield due to the required conditions not being in place. While you can press a button to review the rules in effect via a list of statements, the fact that the rules can be changed makes this only temporarily useful as you try to determine how a change in the rules can give you a pathway to the solution.
This all sounds a bit confusing at first, and it can quickly lead to some head-scratching puzzles where you can really get yourself into an unwinnable situation. Fortunately, you can rewind your steps all the way back to your first movement if you find yourself stuck, a design philosophy which rewards experimentation rather than punitively punishing you for failing to follow the intended sequence precisely. It also really forces players to consider each puzzle independently of the others. One of my favorite tricks the game loves to pull is to introduce a challenge on a map and then revisit the same setup with new conditions, rendering the previous solution completely useless for the new outing.
But once you master those easy puzzles, the game opens up even further and you’ll find there are many other rules you can modify. Some allow you to change basic attributes like color, facing or movement, even giving you the chance to make objects float above the map or become invisible. Others allow you to apply properties like “defeat” or “melt” or “open” or “weak” that impact what the objects can do in the game world. There are also some really wild rules that can be applied – “teleport” can create some particular chaos on the playfield, “level” can apply commands to the entire stage, and “3D” allows you to turn Baba is You into a 3D maze experience similar to the style of Wolfenstein 3D.
Baba is You grows quite challenging as it goes on and eventually can become a true brain-buster as it goes because so much of the game involves understanding how its syntax and operators work. It’s not uncommon to spend a lot of time staring at the screen just trying to figure out what the rules will and won’t allow you to do. As a result, it’s not surprising that the game has a fanbase among those who enjoy programming and coding, and yet everything in the game – from the level editor to the puzzles themselves – can be controlled with a simple gamepad with just a couple of buttons.
While it’s exceptionally modern in its sensibilities and design, the way the game is actually played takes me back to 1980s PC games from The Learning Company like Rocky’s Boots, Think Quick! and Robot Odyssey, each of which was based on the cursor movement style pioneered in Warren Robinett’s Adventure on the Atari VCS/2600. These games all stood out in their time because they used logic, strategy and game world manipulation to teach players to think about the approach to solving puzzles rather than to simply solve them. And whereas many adventure games and puzzlers of the 1980s and 1990s rewarded linear or lateral thinking with very limited degrees of freedom, those Learning Company games offered so much freedom that players could endlessly experiment and come up with very novel solutions to problems.
And this leads me to wonder why this style of gameplay fell off as sharply as it did; even in the 1990s, excellent puzzlers like The Incredible Machine and Sid and Al’s Incredible Toons seem to have been designed with specific solutions in mind and most of the puzzlers that offered a more freeform experience were designed in the walled garden style of Tetris or the lock and key adventure game style of King’s Quest V or Myst rather than centering on object manipulation.
Designer Arvi Teikari is Finnish and probably didn’t have access to many of these older games growing up; in one interview, he says he was influenced by more contemporary (and completely worthwhile!) Sōkoban variants like A Good Snowman is Hard to Build, Stephen’s Sausage Roll and Jelly no Puzzle and the Sokoban-meets-Snake game Snakebird. He further explains he wanted to integrate the idea of logical statements into that framework – particularly “not” statements, which are definitely harder to get gamers to understand and utilize than positive attribute statements. (Think back to Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams collaborating to make “no tea” an inventory item in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and you can see it’s a tried and true problem area for puzzle-solving!)
Despite its similarities to games from the past, my suspicion is that Baba is You is less a dialogue with the past than a rediscovery of some of its ideas as the creator worked to escape the confines of decades of box-pushing games. But the result is something really special, and the sense of freedom the game offers is unusual for a puzzler of any era. If you’ve missed this one, you’ve got to check it out. It tends to run $10-15 depending upon when it’s on sale, but it’s worth every penny. And if you want more than that, Fangamer even sells a plushy of the titular character you can use to break the rules of real life.
Meanwhile, In Our Main Series…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!