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Baba Is You | OT Is Open
- Thread starter More_Badass
- Start date
I have been completing out whole worlds before moving on. I did all of Fall before moving onto Ruins even though I had access to both and it made Ruins feel really easy in comparison.
I flew through all of Ruins in about an hour without any help after being stuck in Fall for 5+ hours with me looking up a solution or two.
I really enjoyed "But Where's The Key" and "Further Fields", those were the hardest even if I figured out the gist of what to do pretty fast. Sometimes you have to work out the kinks as the first few solutions you have get held up.
I flew through all of Ruins in about an hour without any help after being stuck in Fall for 5+ hours with me looking up a solution or two.
I really enjoyed "But Where's The Key" and "Further Fields", those were the hardest even if I figured out the gist of what to do pretty fast. Sometimes you have to work out the kinks as the first few solutions you have get held up.
You forget, Baba Is You is a lateral thinking puzzle game. When the game presents you with information, that's like an early period class. When you misunderstand the information and fail, that's not an exam, that's a late period class, and fail states are how the game teaches you.
In order to get back into a level that's been transformed into something else, you need to put the cursor on it. You also can't enter levels if they're positioned over a dotted line.
"But Where's The Key" is where I'm stuck right now. I feel like I know what it wants me to do, but can't see the right combination to make it happen. Maybe I should go back and play some other stages I might have moved past without playing.
You have to re-arrange the rules after every step you take. There are a few levels that taught me that lesson in Fall.
I first got stuck on not being able to move the key once I got it and had to re-think my strategy.
Ey guys, if you will post screenshots of advanced levels, please, use a spoiler tag :)
Some of us are playing this without skipping levels, in the exact numbered order and without guides.
So it will took us MONTHS, blood, sweat and signing a pact with the devil to reach these levels.
Some of us are playing this without skipping levels, in the exact numbered order and without guides.
So it will took us MONTHS, blood, sweat and signing a pact with the devil to reach these levels.
Nope.
I also like changing as many things as possible in a level into Keke just for funsies.
130-something puzzles in and had to look up my first full solution for Depths-3. There is no way I would have figured out that type of interaction without randomly stumbling upon it otherwise.
Getting a word on top of another word and then making "Text is Shift" to have them shift each other, thus creating a moving block. Come on!
I had one of those. Only to get back and try it for it not to work lol.
It's frequently TEXT IS FLOAT that catches me out in that sort of regard.
Except that the only people who complain are the ones having a problem, and people who don't have a problem don't complain. Your sample is skewed.
One question about a mechanic from the third world, going north after the second world.
2. Yeah, I think The Witness ramps up more gently and makes sure you completely absorb the mechanics before moving on. Just like you, it wasn't fully clear to me what SINK did. For a while, I thought it was a unique interaction with whatever is YOU. There have been a few other occasions where I felt like I just haven't been given the opportunities to learn all the nuances before being thrown 8 possibilities and I have to test one at a time. And in this game, experimentation CAN be time/brain costing.
- When KEY is OPEN and PUSH, you can push a key into a door and it will consume a key to open the door.
- When KEY is YOU and OPEN, you can open a door as yourself and you don't consume yourself.
Why?
- When KEY is YOU and OPEN, you can open a door as yourself and you don't consume yourself.
Why?
1. He's saying the WAIT notation is not present in the other levels, not the move levels.It does actually say 'wait'.
I can empathise, this relates back a little to something I did complain about earlier; something the game taught me but then didn't particularly hammer home (I was comparing it to The Witness, that really hashes out a concept in detail to underline it). I think an occasional issue in Baba is You is it's a little too easy in early stages to hit a solution without having a full understanding of a given mechanic and then get caught out when that more-advanced understanding is required in a later level, but that later level isn't a good environment in which to learn that more-advanced understanding - in my case it was precise behaviour of SINK that I got hung up on.
But then I'm not necessarily certain that's a problem with the game, I go back and forth on the issue. At what point does it become the player's responsibility to have properly learned a lesson?
2. Yeah, I think The Witness ramps up more gently and makes sure you completely absorb the mechanics before moving on. Just like you, it wasn't fully clear to me what SINK did. For a while, I thought it was a unique interaction with whatever is YOU. There have been a few other occasions where I felt like I just haven't been given the opportunities to learn all the nuances before being thrown 8 possibilities and I have to test one at a time. And in this game, experimentation CAN be time/brain costing.
I know exactly which trap solution you're talking about. ;)
Same thing happened to me, was trying to
push flag into is win by pushing is, water, and sink into the skulls to, but I couldn't get the cog across the river. Felt stupid when I found out the real answer.
Are you sure that's the exact interaction that's taking place? KEY IS YOU/OPEN *does* consume the key, there's quite a few puzzles where that's an essential part of the difficulty. Can you post a screenshot of the situation where the latter isn't taking place?
But other tutorial messages only appear in the first levels that you need that control in, too.
I think one thing that serves against it is that prototyping an idea that you want to experiment with is kinda fiddly since you need to set up the rules first and then execute them. The actual actions required in The Witness are simple and quick to try and re-try, here - simply through necessity due to the nature of the problems - you can't really do that.
The fun thing about that is
The reason there are three skulls is specifically to block that solution, but it's so easy to think that it just means you need a fourth object rather than you need a completely distinct solution!
'Baba Is You' doesn't pretend to communicate you its mechanics.
It's intended as a playground to experiment with the rules of the game, learning every action through the act of toying with the in-game elements.
Completely different approaches in its design.
Also, the video game history is much more rich that a few well-know games.
'Baba Is You' is much more close to the spirit of 'Corrypt' by Michael Brough than to 'The Witness'.
That is exactly what consumed two hours of my life that I'll never get back. I was sure that had to be it because the board is so simple.
I know someone mentioned Steven's Sausage Roll and that seems like a good recommendation for someone enjoying Baba. The Witness has also come up in conversation. I know Blow loved Steven's Sausage Roll. I wonder what he thinks of Baba.
In hindsight, though in a couple of cases - in particular often the EXTRA puzzles that are small modifications from existing challenges - you can get *big* hints from studying to spot what else - other than the obvious wrinkle - is subtly different from the version you're used to.
Lake Extra 1 and Lake Extra 2:
"Hey, just why is there one fewer crab by the flag this time?"
Forest-8 and Forest-Extra 1
"Hey, just why has that kink in the top-right corner been removed?"
Checking his twitter, it looks like he participated in a Twitch stream on it:
Haven't found the specific stream in their archive, though, there's a few likely candidates.
Jonathan Blow not only participated in the stream.
He is listed as a beta tester in the credits of the game :)
Together with a long list of illustrious video game designers such as Terry Cavanagh.
Sure, but perhaps that way of experimenting doesn't lend itself well to a game where trying out an interaction could take minutes of pushing text around to get it into the configuration you want JUST to test. The Witness was fail fast, learn fast in this regard.
Doesn't mean the comparison is invalid. An existing game does something better than this one. I don't care where the inspiration came from.
"Better" is always something subjective.
'Baba Is You' is not intended as game that you will rush, completing this in a week.
But it's intended as commute game, that can take months or years to complete.
I made a comparison a few pages ago with 'Colossal Adventure Game', the first adventure game ever made, and one of the first video games that I played as a kid.
It was a time without internet, so to look to the solutions of the puzzles wasn't an option.
And it took me almost an entire decade to finally complete the game, figuring each puzzle.
With long hiatus playing the game, until feeling in the mood, again, for trying to figure other approaches to its puzzles.
For me, this was a magical and unforgettable experience.
And 'Baba Is You' transmits me these same feelings.
A few posts before, someone was putting an example of a professor teaching lessons to his students, and that if most of the students are not able to pass an exam, it's the teacher's fault.
And this is to make mistake, about the intentions of the game.
Because a concept like teaching a lesson, learning, it's something tied to common knowledge, established conventions. Something necessary in life, if you ask me.
But the approach of 'Baba Is You' is fighting against the established conventions and the common sense.
And this is a great part of the magic of the whole indie scene.
Developers experimenting and doing their own thing.
And trying to create games that are not intended for a general public, so they are not installed in the common sense.
But games that are trying instead to resonate among a very specific audience.
And it's fine to have games that are not trying to appeal to a massive public, because we have enough of these created each year.
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Do you think increasing the movement/rewind speed past what it allows in the settings intrudes on your grand vision here? Because that's pretty much what I'm advocating for, in part. On any given level, I have envisioned a few end states I want to try. I understand the nuances of pushing to allow me to execute my vision. Each path takes minutes of pushing and rewinding to execute. I want to learn what works and what doesn't. I want to experiment. I also sometimes sigh at the amount of time it takes to experiment. Let me do it faster. Let me increase game speed. Let me set 1 checkpoint I can instantly rewind to. I don't see how this impedes upon whatever you're seeing.
Those are interesting ideas, I definetely wouldn't say no to them. I do think that just even having the reward function is really nice. I've played my fair share of Sokoban puzzlers that (a) force you to restart when you die or (b) only allow a rewind of one move.
I thing that the game is pretty generous letting you to experiment, thanks to its rewind button, in which you can return to any previous state :)
This function is used to remark its "playground" approach to situations.
I personally haven't had any problem with the flow or the speed of the game.
But it's also truth that I'm playing this in portable mode, as a commute thing, while I watch TV or I'm doing other things.
I can't imagine playing this, for example, in front of a TV with a controller, due to the type of experience.
If it's the level I'm thinking of, check that you haven't accidentally stacked multiple copies into the same space. Unlike 'sink' it only consumes the pair of objects, not everything.
I'm also playing on Switch! I play primarily on my commute, so time is limited before I have to context switch. Which is why I'm even more of a hurry to fail faster!
Picked this up yesterday and haven't been able to put it down since. I'm at 68 solutions so far; initially I was taking the approach of doing every level in numerical sequence with no skips or jumping around, but then I conceded what many of you have realized already—that branching out and solving as many puzzles as you can, as efficiently as you can, helps you rapidly perceive the solutions to earlier puzzles that hadn't quite come together. Still, I'm trying to be as exhaustive as I can manage. So far I've done all of Lake, Island, Fall, and Ruins (in that order) with only three skips for now: Island-Extra 3 (Tiny Isle), Island-11 (Prison), and Fall-14 (Dead End).
My biggest annoyance with the game, by far, is that (playing on the Switch) the B button doesn't take me from a zone map back into the world map. I have accidentally entered a stage instead of zooming out so, so many times, and this is such a standard UI expectation of map systems like this one that it strikes me as a serious oversight.
One gleaming virtue of the game that I certainly didn't expect is that the puzzles are so much more than just abstract block-pushing. In levels like this one, and many more besides, they take on a memorable thematic flavour. I think you can see the dividends in this very thread, where even with this huge selection of puzzles, they are easy to describe and talk about in shorthand that other players can recognize right away.
Seconded. I typically don't jump into OTs until I'm done with a game, especially a game like this one where I really don't want any guides or hints, but people have been very good about spoiler-marking here, and it was fun to jump in here to see what everyone else was having trouble with, or to read about their approaches to problems I've already solved.
I had the same experience going from Fall to Ruins, aside from putting off Dead End for later. I blew right through all of Ruins as there was hardly anything there I hadn't already seen in a more elaborate context.
That speaks to what truly makes this game click. Progressing through it isn't really about mastering one object or statement at a time as they are introduced. Rather, it's about developing high-level patterns, manoeuvres, and tactics that are reusable from one puzzle type to the next, and which help you even when concepts are introduced. It's like how solving a Rubik's Cube isn't about thinking move by move, but about familiarizing yourself with sequences like building crosses and swapping corners.
Baba Is You is like that: you think in terms of making crosses to free up text, building flip-switches with parallel IS, doubling movement with multiple IS YOUs, setting up overlaps and collisions, or diving into a level and instantly making a mental note of what can or can't be manipulated based on its placement. The objects in the game are pretty much interchangeable entities (and in fact, the point of the game is that they're interchangeable entities), which exist to give you a contextual hook for what you're doing, so the actual rules you are learning are the meta-rules: that statements are parsed in a left-to-right or top-to-bottom line, the semantics of HAS or NOT, the priority system for multiple IS assignments or conflicting properties (like PUSH overriding DEFEAT), how text objects behave as objects, and so on.
Much of this is undocumented, hidden, not that explicitly taught, and in some cases a bit finicky, but this is what players are really solving as they make their way through the game. Whenever I see a new element introduced—and there are so, so many—the first thing I do is not search for a solution but fool around with the new toy, perhaps intentionally triggering a failure condition, to get a sense of how it works. It saves time and thinking in the long run.
When I got to Ruins, I had already been put through a wringer of a learning phase, and so it was relatively easy to spot the high-level concept of what to do—just a matter of doing the Zelda block-pushing to get everything in the right place. In general, I find the game is more interesting when a solution is hard to see but easy to execute than when it's easy to see and hard to execute (which usually means it just takes time and a lot of undos when you accidentally budge pieces into walls), although there is a healthy mix of both.
My biggest annoyance with the game, by far, is that (playing on the Switch) the B button doesn't take me from a zone map back into the world map. I have accidentally entered a stage instead of zooming out so, so many times, and this is such a standard UI expectation of map systems like this one that it strikes me as a serious oversight.
One gleaming virtue of the game that I certainly didn't expect is that the puzzles are so much more than just abstract block-pushing. In levels like this one, and many more besides, they take on a memorable thematic flavour. I think you can see the dividends in this very thread, where even with this huge selection of puzzles, they are easy to describe and talk about in shorthand that other players can recognize right away.
Seconded. I typically don't jump into OTs until I'm done with a game, especially a game like this one where I really don't want any guides or hints, but people have been very good about spoiler-marking here, and it was fun to jump in here to see what everyone else was having trouble with, or to read about their approaches to problems I've already solved.
I had the same experience going from Fall to Ruins, aside from putting off Dead End for later. I blew right through all of Ruins as there was hardly anything there I hadn't already seen in a more elaborate context.
That speaks to what truly makes this game click. Progressing through it isn't really about mastering one object or statement at a time as they are introduced. Rather, it's about developing high-level patterns, manoeuvres, and tactics that are reusable from one puzzle type to the next, and which help you even when concepts are introduced. It's like how solving a Rubik's Cube isn't about thinking move by move, but about familiarizing yourself with sequences like building crosses and swapping corners.
Baba Is You is like that: you think in terms of making crosses to free up text, building flip-switches with parallel IS, doubling movement with multiple IS YOUs, setting up overlaps and collisions, or diving into a level and instantly making a mental note of what can or can't be manipulated based on its placement. The objects in the game are pretty much interchangeable entities (and in fact, the point of the game is that they're interchangeable entities), which exist to give you a contextual hook for what you're doing, so the actual rules you are learning are the meta-rules: that statements are parsed in a left-to-right or top-to-bottom line, the semantics of HAS or NOT, the priority system for multiple IS assignments or conflicting properties (like PUSH overriding DEFEAT), how text objects behave as objects, and so on.
Much of this is undocumented, hidden, not that explicitly taught, and in some cases a bit finicky, but this is what players are really solving as they make their way through the game. Whenever I see a new element introduced—and there are so, so many—the first thing I do is not search for a solution but fool around with the new toy, perhaps intentionally triggering a failure condition, to get a sense of how it works. It saves time and thinking in the long run.
When I got to Ruins, I had already been put through a wringer of a learning phase, and so it was relatively easy to spot the high-level concept of what to do—just a matter of doing the Zelda block-pushing to get everything in the right place. In general, I find the game is more interesting when a solution is hard to see but easy to execute than when it's easy to see and hard to execute (which usually means it just takes time and a lot of undos when you accidentally budge pieces into walls), although there is a healthy mix of both.
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Wow that's hilarious. I did another solution but this one is funnier.
I've had a similar experience where I went to Fall first and banged my head against it for hours on end, and since then everything has felt easy -- or, at least, doable with a little experimentation. I dunno if it's that Fall is actually much harder than the subsequent few areas, or if I just clicked into the right way of thinking.
This is a fundamental problem I have with many puzzle games. Or more specifically, what we might call "character puzzle" games where you control a physical entity embedded in a 2D or 3D environment (as opposed to, say, Sudoku where you are the hand of god in an abstract setting). One of the worst offenders is The Talos Principle, where testing solutions to puzzles meant manually picking up and carrying multiple objects repeatedly across large mazes and positioning them in a continuous 3D space, and where success often depended on the fairly precise positioning of those objects. A huge portion of the playtime was rote implementation. Here, the state space is discrete, levels are pretty small, and the undo button lets you rewind quickly, so it's not so bad.
One of the few games that fully solved the problem is The Witness, by totally divorcing your character in 3D space from the actual mechanics of puzzle-solving, while still integrating the 3D space into the puzzles. Portal 1&2 handled this by making the fundamental interaction with the world work at a distance, so you're mostly limited by how fast you can point and click rather than how fast your avatar moves through 3D space. I suspect that Obra Dinn is also works well on this front.
Heh, comparisons to The Witness was what led to this conversation in the first place. Obra Dinn's greatest criticism was actually the movement speed coupled with the amount of backtracking you had to do if you forgot something.
Is there a way to tell if I'm done with areas that don't have their own level counts?
I have 205 levels completed, 11 flowers, and 4 orbs and I don't think I have anything left outside of Meta but I'm not sure. I know that the main overworld is completed but I'm not sure about Depths or ??? because I never got a message and there aren't flowers around the warp to those maps. I completed 5 levels and 5 extra levels in Depths. In ??? I completed the 12 regular levels, 4 extra levels, the rock and water levels, and got 2 orbs.
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Thanks. Based on that and what I count on the last map I might be missing one somewhere but I guess I'll find out after I finish these levels.
I've noticed some (promotional? Beta?) screenshots have the label for worlds as explicitly being numbered (so when you put the cursor over Lake, for instance, the tooltip says "1. Lake"). That's not the case on my version; dunno if it was removed at some point prior to release, or another small difference between Switch and PC.
If the worlds are numbered elsewhere, I'm kind of curious to hear what the suggested order actually is.
Finally beat Where's the Key. I was completely missing what I needed to do to keep control...seems so obvious now.