When I pushed the words “BABA IS YOU” together in the first level of “Baba Is You” and watched the white rabbit on the screen suddenly become a controllable character, I didn’t realize that what I had just solved was not a puzzle, but the source of the whole game world. Code.
The opening of the game is as simple as a children’s picture book. There are several word squares scattered on the blue background: “BABA”, “IS”, “YOU”, “FLAG”, “WIN”. According to the experience of other games, I should control Baba to touch FLAG. But when I inadvertently pushed the “IS” square, the logic of the whole world suddenly collapsed and reorganized — it turned out that the rule of “FLAG IS WIN” itself was a prop that could be rewritten.
The most shocking moment happened in the third world. I was stuck in a seemingly unsolved puzzle for half an hour, until I suddenly wanted to change “WALL IS STOP” to “WALL IS PUSH”. Those insurmountable red brick walls suddenly turned into movable blocks. When I pushed a wall next to the FLAG and wrote “WALL IS WIN”, I clapped my hands at the screen at the moment of clearing the customs — this game is not teaching me how to solve puzzles, but teaching me how to become a rule. The one who decided.
As the level goes deeper, the combination of words becomes more and more crazy. I tried to make “ROCK IS YOU”, but the result was to control a pile of stones struggling; I tried “KEKE IS BABA”, which made the original NPC become the protagonist; the craziest time, I even combined “LEVEL IS COMPLETE” and skipped it directly. The whole level. Every time I break the rules, the game will encourage me with cheerful sound effects, as if saying, “Yes, the world should be so free.”
The most profound philosophical thinking of the game appears in the final level. When all the rule blocks became interactive objects, I realized that even the most basic definition of “BABA IS YOU” could be modified. At that moment, I suddenly stopped the operation and thought about a terrible question: if even the concept of “I” can be redefined, what’s the point of customs clearance? This seemingly simple box-pushing game actually made me doubt my self-awareness in the last puzzle.
For a long time after clearing the customs, I also began to subconsciously “deconstruct the rules” in real life. When you see the signboard of “No trampling on the lawn”, you will think about whether it will be more effective if it is changed to “the lawn is a trampoline”; when encountering a complicated process, you will think about which link’s rules can be reorganized and optimized. This change in the way of thinking may be the greatest gift from the game to me.
If you are tired of playing in the rules set by others and want to experience the pleasure of creating rules, _Baba Is You_ is the game you have been looking for. It will not give you the answer, but give you a set of realistic metaphors that can be disassembled and reorganized at will. After all, when you can define “victory” as anything, the real challenge has just begun — how do you define your own “victory”?
