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PUZZLE
Baba Is You Review: A Puzzle Game That Made Me Question Reality (And My Intelligence)
After twenty years of pushing blocks around puzzle games, I thought I'd seen it all. Then Baba Is You showed up and made me feel like I'd been playing with crayons this whole time while everyone else had actual tools.
Paul
December 22, 2025
8.7
Overall Score
"I'm genuinely annoyed that I have to give Baba Is You a score this high."
First Impressions (Or: When Cute Graphics Hide Existential Dread)
Look, I've been doing this for two decades. I've pushed blocks in Sokoban clones since before some of you were born. I opened Baba Is You expecting another derivative puzzle game with a quirky gimmick, maybe five minutes of mild entertainment before I moved on to write another scathing review. Instead, I got philosophically assaulted by animated text blocks. The first few levels seem innocent enough—push BABA into FLAG, congratulations, you win. Standard fare. Then the game casually introduces you to the concept that you can rewrite the fundamental laws of physics by shoving words around, and suddenly you're not playing a puzzle game anymore. You're having a conversation with reality itself, and reality is being a smug little jerk about it. I sat there, controller in hand, wondering if this is what it felt like when people first played Portal. I immediately resented that feeling.
The Core Mechanic That Ruined All Other Puzzle Games For Me
Here's the thing that makes me genuinely angry: Baba Is You is built on such an elegant, simple concept that I'm furious nobody thought of it sooner. Rules exist as physical objects in the world. 'BABA IS YOU' means you control Baba. 'WALL IS STOP' means walls block movement. 'FLAG IS WIN' means touching the flag wins the level. But you can PUSH these words. You can break 'WALL IS STOP' apart and suddenly walls are meaningless. You can create 'ROCK IS WIN' and just touch a rock. You can make 'BABA IS ROCK' and lose control of yourself entirely. The game teaches you basic logic, then weaponizes it against you. By level thirty, I was creating sentences like 'WALL IS YOU AND WIN' to possess walls and instantly win, feeling like a genius. By level fifty, the game was laughing at my pathetic understanding of its mechanics. It's Portal-level innovation, and I don't say that lightly. I hate that I'm saying it at all.
When Minimalism Actually Works (Don't Get Used To This Praise)
The pixel art is deliberately simple—borderline primitive, really—and somehow it's exactly right. Hempuli understood that when you're fundamentally breaking reality every thirty seconds, visual clarity matters more than flashy graphics. Every object is instantly readable. Every word block is clear. There's no particle effects or bloom lighting to distract you from the fact that you just turned yourself into a key and phased through a door. The music, though—look, it's fine. Catchy little chiptune loops that fit the aesthetic. But after three hours on a single puzzle, that same fifteen-second melody becomes a torture device. I found myself solving puzzles in silence just to preserve my sanity. The audio design is minimal but functional: little pops and clicks when you push things, a satisfying chime when you win. It serves the game without getting in the way, which is more than I can say for most indie soundtracks that think they're composing the next Undertale.
The Difficulty Curve (Or: My Descent Into Madness)
Baba Is You starts gentle. Almost patronizing. 'Look, you can push words! Isn't that neat?' Then around world three, it stops holding your hand and starts actively mocking you. The difficulty doesn't just curve—it becomes a vertical wall with razorblades. Some puzzles took me literal hours. Not because they're unfair, but because they require you to completely abandon every assumption you have about how puzzle games work. I'd stare at a level, convinced it was impossible, only to realize the solution required thinking in four dimensions while standing on my head. And here's the infuriating part: when you finally solve it, the answer seems OBVIOUS. The game never cheats. Every solution uses mechanics you already know. You just have to stop thinking like a normal human and start thinking like a deranged philosopher who's had too much coffee. Some levels I solved in thirty seconds. Others haunted my dreams. There's no middle ground, and I both love and hate Hempuli for that.
What This Game Actually Understands About Puzzles
Most puzzle games mistake 'hard' for 'good.' They hide solutions behind pixel-hunting or require frame-perfect timing or just throw random mechanics at you until you give up. Baba Is You understands that the best puzzles make you feel stupid, then make you feel like a genius, then make you feel stupid again for not seeing the answer sooner. Every level is a perfectly constructed logical trap. The rules are always visible. The mechanics never change. Your understanding is the only thing that evolves, and watching that evolution is genuinely remarkable. The game also knows when to let you break it. Some levels have multiple solutions. Some can be 'cheesed' in ways that feel like you've outsmarted the designer—until you realize Hempuli KNEW you'd do that and designed around it. It's the kind of tight, intelligent design that reminds me why I fell in love with games in the first place, back before every indie dev thought slapping pixel art on a platformer counted as innovation.
The Level Editor (For People Who Hate Themselves)
As if the base game wasn't enough brain damage, there's a level editor. A robust one. People have made thousands of custom levels, ranging from 'clever' to 'actively hostile to human cognition.' I've dabbled. I've created levels. I've immediately solved them because I'm the idiot who made them, which defeats the entire purpose. But the community? They've created nightmares. Elegant nightmares with perfect logic and solutions that require transcending your physical form. If you somehow exhaust the base game's hundreds of levels—and you won't, not completely, I've been playing for years and still haven't beaten everything—the community content ensures you'll never run out of new ways to feel inadequate. It's almost generous, in a sadistic sort of way.
Rating Breakdown
Quality
9
This is so polished it's practically reflective—no bugs, no crashes, just my ego shattering against walls I built myself.
Innovation
10
I haven't seen genuinely NEW puzzle mechanics since Portal, and frankly, this might be more original than even that.
Value
9
Hundreds of levels that'll last you months for the price of a decent sandwich—Hempuli clearly hates money.
Gameplay
9
Absolutely addictive until you hit a wall, stare at it for three hours, then solve it in your sleep and wake up angry.
Audio/Visual
7
Minimalist pixel art that serves the gameplay perfectly, though the music will loop in your brain forever like a curse.
Replayability
8
Once you've solved everything your brain is permanently rewired, but the level editor ensures masochists can suffer indefinitely.
What Didn't Annoy Me
Genuinely innovative mechanics I haven't seen anywhere else, and I've seen EVERYTHING
Every puzzle is fair even when it makes me want to throw my keyboard
The 'aha!' moments are legitimately euphoric, like solving a Rubik's cube made of pure logic
Hundreds of levels with wildly different solutions and approaches
Level editor with active community creating endless suffering—I mean content
Pixel art clarity that prioritizes function over flash, which is shockingly rare
What Made Me Sigh
Some puzzles are so obtuse I questioned whether Hempuli actually likes players
The music loops will haunt you in your sleep after extended sessions
Difficulty spikes are less 'curve' and more 'sudden cliff face'
No hint system means you either solve it or stare at blocks until heat death
Minimalist aesthetic might disappoint people expecting visual spectacle
Final Verdict
I'm genuinely annoyed that I have to give Baba Is You a score this high. This is the kind of puzzle game that comes along once a decade—genuinely innovative, perfectly executed, and so well-designed it makes everything else in the genre look lazy by comparison. Hempuli took a simple concept and built something that feels like it rewires your brain, level by level. Yes, it'll make you feel stupid. Yes, you'll get stuck for hours. Yes, the minimalist presentation won't win any graphics awards. But this is what happens when a developer actually understands puzzle design at a fundamental level. It's Portal-tier innovation wrapped in accessible mechanics, and I hate that I can't find more things wrong with it. If you have even a passing interest in puzzle games and don't own this already, you're doing yourself a genuine disservice. Just don't blame me when you're still awake at 3 AM trying to figure out how to make BABA IS DEFEAT AND WIN simultaneously.
Baba Is You
Tags
puzzle
block-pushing
rule-manipulation
brain-melting
indie
logic
metacognitive
award-winning
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