Baba Is You - The Backlog

To kick off my hopeful decimation of my backlog this year ("decimating" actually meaning to remove one tenth of, of course), the first game I'm playing is Baba Is You, a game which I only got quite recently but has been on my Nintendo Switch wishlist since time immemorial.

It's a puzzle game that came out in 2019, where each stage has different rules determined by blocks which you can move around on the stage.

For example, the very first stage starts with four rules: Baba Is You, Flag Is Win, Wall Is Stop, and Rock Is Push. If an object "Is You" that means you control it, if an object "Is Win" that means if you touch it you beat the level, if an object "Is Stop" that means you cannot go through it, and if an object "Is Push" that means you can push it around.

You can leave the conditions as they are, however you can actually move the words that make up the rules around to create new rules! For example, you could move some to say "Rock Is You" so you can control all of the rocks, or maybe even "Wall Is Win" so that touching any of the walls makes you win.

The game starts out with these simple concepts but keeps building upon them, and later adds lots of different objects and modifiers. There's doors which you need to open, water that you can sink objects (or yourself) in, a modifier that makes objects move automatically, and one that makes objects weak and create other objects when broken. All of the ones I mentioned are just from the three first worlds, so I am very curious as to what more the game has in store, as I don't think I am even halfway through.

Although I really like this game, I do have one criticism of it (though it might just be me), which is that I feel like it's quite inconsistent in terms of difficulty. I really struggled with some maps while breezing through others right after, and some use some mechanics that aren't directly explained and that you just have to infer.

This is sometimes fun to do, but other times it feels a bit irritating, and I won't deny that I had to look up some hints for some of them :: cough cough :: Island-11 :: cough cough ::

Regardless, Baba Is You is a pleasant and overall still very fun puzzle game. Even though I haven't gotten that far into it yet, and I haven't touched the level editor which I am very curious about, it has still generally been a delight to play!