Baba Is You lets you "change the rules of the game"

Baba Is You is an interesting puzzle game from Finnish developer Hempuli, otherwise known as Finnish game designer Arvi Teikari. It's already been released on PC and Nintendo Switch, but we got to talk to Teikari a bit about the concept behind the game during our interview at Gamelab 2019.

"I definitely try to think of how to explain it as quickly as possible, because it can be kind of a mouthful, but the basic idea is that it's a turn-based, block-pushing, puzzle game where the twist is that you have sentences, and the words of the sentence are also pushable blocks," he explained. "And because you can push those blocks around, you can form new sentences and thus change the rules of the game. That is kind of the basic gist of the game."

"A big part of the game's surprisingness is it takes many familiar concepts you see in many games, also puzzle games. For example, a thing that walls are something you cannot move through or rocks are something you can push around, and a gold flag is something you have to touch to beat a level, and in Baba Is You, that is usually the case, but because all these interactions are marked by these rules and you can change the rules, you can actually change what different things do."

"So for example, we have the rule 'wall is stop', which means that you cannot walk through walls, but you could just say that 'rock is stop', in which case rocks would be walls, or you could break the 'wall is stop' rule to be able to move through walls. So the game offers these kinds of surprising moments where the player has to realise 'okay I cannot just assume that this wall is going to stop me'. It might do something completely different."

You can check out the full interview below to hear more about Baba Is You, as well as a trailer illustrating how these concepts work in practice.

Do you like these kinds of puzzles?