The first time I saw this game, my reaction was what the hell is this name, it's so weird. Then I looked into the basic mechanism of this game, I thought it is just a simple Sokoban game. But after I played this game, I found that I was totally wrong. This is the best puzzle game I have ever seen. Since I'm still on the way finishing this wonderful game, I only write down how I feel about this game for now.
As you can see in the picture above, this is a very simple level of this game. I said that this is a Sokoban game, so the player could push any word box in this game. For this level, the player could push "WALL", "BABA", "IS", "STOP" and "YOU". But wait, who could push these boxes? Every player's first reaction is that white rabbit-like animal. Well, it's true but it's also false. Because in this game, all the true things are from the sentences in the scene. In this scene, we have "Wall is stop" and "BABA is you" these two completed sentences. So these come out to two results, one is the player is BABA and the other is the wall could not go through. And for the goal, most of time there will be a sentence "Flag is win" in the scene, I don't know why this capture missed but it doesn't matter. Everyone knows to reach the flag. Alright, now we already know how this game works, what shall we do next?
The player will find out that, if they break the sentence, the truth will change. If he push the "STOP" up one step, the sentence "Wall is stop" will be broken. That means the wall could not block you any more. Then the player could go through the wall then reach the flag. Wait, but is it the only way to win? Let's look at the following picture.
Look, in this level, we can't break "Wall is stop". What should we do now? What if we change the sentence to "Flag is you"? The player could find that he could control the flag not baba now. However, the player still could not win because the wall blocks his way (Sorry for that I did not snip a picture for this). But what will happen if the player put "IS" and "WIN" under "BABA" ?
The player could find that they auto win. There are also more tricks in this game. Like, if the play complete "Baba is flag", then baba will change to a flag. It is kind of weird but the player will feel it reasonable and free.
I can't describe more tricky stuff in this game because I have not finished it yet. But something I find from this game is that the main mechanism is from programming logic. Because every sentence is condition and they could combine or conflict during the game. The player need to find the solution from these conditions. As a programmer, I really like this design, it simple but really powerful. Now, I'd like to use a question to finish this blog.
- Who is BABA?
- BABA is you.
