Item — HN Reader

The game this article is based on is “Baba Is You” [1]. It’s a logic puzzle game where you try to get “you” to “flag” — or more precisely, “win” (which, by default most of the time, “flag is win”) — but you manipulate a number of objects and join them with other words to change the “rules” of the game.

I highly recommend it to the HN crowd.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/736260/Baba_Is_You/

7 comments

Something that set Baba is You apart for me compared to any other puzzle game I can remember playing is the puzzles themselves were actually "funny." Not like Portal, where you solved puzzles alongside a funny narrative, but in the actually language of the puzzles themselves there are setups which get subverted in absurd and delightful ways, often in multiple layers, as you work your way through to a solution. Playing made me feel like the math part of my brain was laughing.

The game doesn't hold your hand, and I think it took about 10 hours for me to learn enough of the puzzle language for things to get really good (and then it started to descend into frustrating fiddliness in the deep endgame), but the middle 30 hours or so we're some of the most gratifying gameplay I've experienced.

It kind of felt like the anti-Witness. The Witness was fastidiously fair and so carefully constructed I can look back at it and marvel, but actually playing it was pretty formal and mirthless. Baba is You can be a little sloppy and unfair, but it's warm and fun and funny, and the actual craftsmanship of the puzzles themselves is still top tier, in it's own way.

If anyone wants to try some levels before buying it, the game jam version of the game is on itch.io: https://hempuli.itch.io/baba-is-you

That's Windows-only, though. Someone recently released a "demake" with fewer levels for Pico-8 that you can play in a browser: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=142638

What is a game jam? What is a demake?

A game jam is like a weekend hacking event where a bunch of people make small games in a short time frame and then get feedback or compared. A demake is a remake but usually for older systems or in an older style / lower resolution. In the indie game scene lots of the big hit games were first created at a game jam. No tomfoolery, they're useful words to describe things, that don't have other easy ways to describe.

Demakes can also be games that boil down the essence of their genre or original game to simpler rules. A great example of this is Footsies, which is a demake of the trad fighting genre.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1344740/FOOTSIES_Rollback...

Game jam - like a hackathon, for games. Groups are given a theme or conditions and a short time (eg a weekend) to make a game as a challenge / for fun.

Demake - remaking a game for a more limited set of hardware. Remake normally implies increasing quality, whereas a demake is focused on cramming as much quality as possible in a much more constrained execution environment. (In this case, a PC/iOS game to a Pico-8 game.)

Demake in modern times is often used for example with porting DOOM to (insert electronic device like a temperature sensor that shouldn't normally play games). Since the target platform has less features, it's not a re-make, it's a de-make. This could also be for more academic purposes, like "what kind of game would we make if we deleted all the guns out of DOOM".

But it comes from the old days of gaming. You could play an amazing fighting game at the arcade, but the home console had considerably less power. So the home version of that game might be very limited.

Back then we would just call that a port. Port was used to mean taking something from its native platform and putting it on something else, which was rarely an upgrade. Putting an NES/famicom game onto Genesis/master system would involve upgrades (sprite capability) and side or downgrades (sound chip differences).

Port today generally means a game has the same quality across all platforms, barring the bare facts of hardware capability. So de-make now often means a port with some intentional limitation. "I know a digital home pregnancy test can't run DOOM, but can it run enough to be playable?"

DOOM on a pregnancy test is still a port and not a demake. A demake is not specifically on more primitive hardware but is in a morr primitive style that may run on more primitive hardware.

Search engines are your friend :)

But it is from dialogue that knowledge emerges. Please feel free to ignore questions that don't interest you. I appreciate the question and its answers.

Over the years more and more people would disagree with this though

Enjoy it while it lasts…

I bought it on recommendation from an earlier HN thread, and my 7-year-old, 8-year-old and I play it together. We're only about three hours into the game, but it has been very enjoyable. As a sibling comment says, the puzzles are often very funny to all three of us, and even the youngest of us is able to suggest and find solutions. There have been levels where the 7-year-old thought of the solution before I did.

Also available on Google Play Store [1], and it successfully derailed my sleep plans last night. Really breaks your expectations of "I move the character around" within minutes.

It reminds me a bit of the card game Fluxx [2], where every card you play changes the rules.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.hempuli.ba...

[2] https://www.looneylabs.com/games/fluxx

Baba Is You strikes me as an exceptional game for phones, since one can do a single level at a time and the controls are simple. Thanks for the link.

I own it and play it and it challenges the limits of my thinking. I feel I can recommend it despite the fact that I myself get stuck.

Has a lot of “aha” moments.

I love being able to change the rules of a game.

When playing something like UNO we did the same, whoever wins one game can add any rule for the next and all previous rules are kept, unless if it turns out that a rule we added ruins the game, then we remove it.

After that it becomes a mad scramble to remember all the previous rules while coming up with new wacky additions.

This game would be a nice AI (note, there's no "G") benchmark