Baba Is You Puts Your Puzzle-Solving Skills To The Test

Featuring innovative puzzle mechanics

Baba Is Win If You Think Outside The Box

Deceptively Simple Brain Scratchers

Think you’ve got puzzle games all figured out? Or are you looking for a challenge to get those brain cells running? Either way, try this one on for size! Infamous for its over 200 levels of rather difficult puzzles and its deceptive simplicity, Baba is You is the ultimate test.

Baba is You is a puzzle game where the rules of the game are seen directly on the screen in the form of interactable blocks. Players will take on the form of the titular Baba and move these word blocks around, pushing them onto different spaces to create new rules that will lead you to victory. Simple block-pushing can turn rules like Baba is You to Wall is You, effectively turning you into a wall, or turn normal grass patches into fiery obstacles, or even change the overall win condition! There are a multitude of ways to go about the puzzles in the game, sometimes even requiring the player to think outside the box to clear an area.

Just remember—Block is Move, Baba is Win.

Unique Gameplay Leaves Players Thinking Hard

Given its innovative gameplay, the player base shared the overall same sentiment in its difficulty. Most players wrote on the Steam review page that the game manages to make them feel amazingly smart in some areas, while simultaneously making them feel rather dumb due to how simple the solution was in a puzzle they got stuck on. Nevertheless, the feeling of accomplishment was all worth it in the end.

In a nutshell: “Totally addicting, but also super frustrating,” said one Steam user. With that said, no wonder it boasts an Overwhelmingly Positive review rating on the platform, with 97% of 17,611 total reviews recommending it.

The Genius Behind Baba Is You

Hempuli Oy’s Solo Developer Arvi Teikari

Finnish solo developer Arvi Teikari, also known by his professional or studio name Hempuli Oy, is the mastermind behind this creative game. Originally made for the Nordic Game Jam back in 2017, the game is a blend of inspiration from other turn-based block pushing games such as Stephen’s Sausage Roll, Jelly no Puzzle, Snakebird, and A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build, and the overall theme of the game jam called “Not There.”

In an interview with Medium in 2019, he shared that “This made me think of logic operators, especially the way one can negate the meaning of a statement with “not”...Eventually the concept solidified in my head to the mental image of a block of ice remaining frost in a pool of lava due to the statement “Ice Is Not Melt”! I started semi-hesitantly prototyping this idea and while the “Is Not”-statement didn’t make it into the entry, the basic concept stayed fairly similar.”

A Gamer From Childhood

Teikari told Game Pilgrim in an interview in April 2019 that video games have been part of his life since kindergarten, watching relatives and people in his environment play video games. In primary school, he was introduced to Game Maker by a schoolmate and dabbled a little in it with other kids interested in the program. However, it proved to be quite a difficult task as it required a thorough understanding of its own scripting language, which was also entirely in English. Later on, he discovered Clickteam’s The Games Factory with the help of another schoolmate, which was more user-friendly to him at that time due to the simple drag-and-drop system. Finnish community websites featuring games made by other fellow Finnish school kids further “fueled” his interest in the hobby.

But after high school, he hit a little slump—”Game development as a career didn’t feel secure enough, especially considering that I didn’t really know how to program, so I decided to study other things and make games solely as a hobby,” he said in the Game Pilgrim interview. Although, after finishing a particularly large project, he decided to release it as a commercial project—as an indie company. “In 2015, my company released its first commercial title, Environmental Station Alpha. I've also been part of the team developing the game Noita from 2013, working mainly as an artist.”

Plans For The Future

While ongoing development on Baba is You has ended, Hempuli Oy is well on its way to creating more games, such as the long-stalled Environmental Station Alpha [ESA] sequel and a solitaire-themed puzzle game with a twist called A Solitaire Mystery. He’s not expecting the same attention that Baba is You received for these games as he shared to Games Industry in 2020, but he’s pushing on these as passion projects and that he also feels “an obligation to people who spent several years watching me make ESA 2 and other games. I would like to not disappoint those people by bailing on it [ESA 2].”

He also streams the development process on his official Twitch, so you can check those out too!

Baba Is Here To Stay

Its strange title is sure to turn heads, and doubles down on it with equally strange but unique gameplay. It’s a good mind boggling game that’s sure to crank those mind gears, and can even be a cooperative effort to solve—grab a friend or two (or more) to solve the puzzles! Despite being five years old, Baba is You still rakes in an audience of at least a hundred players daily. Dozens of players have poured hours into this game and still haven’t beat it—will you be one of the new challengers?

Baba is You is available to play on PC (Steam, Itch.io, Humble Store), Switch, as well as Android and iOS devices.