baba is stuck

I think the level ultimately teaches you something useful, but if I were to design that puzzle above it would basically be a tutorial level; no red herrings or alternative things to try. Just an impossible looking room stripped down to the absolute essentials. You can introduce more complexities once you’re sure a player has learned that unintuitive lesson.

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this is definitely wisdom that the game ignores on a pretty regular basis, for better or worse

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Yeah, those rules are sympatico with the standard properties of water. It seems likely there was a time when water didn’t have those properties innately and melt/hot was going to be needed to always define water. With this many levels I would not be surprised if it slipped through.

there are some properties/rules that I just don’t get. can anyone explain what all actually does? it seems like it behaves completely differently on each stage.

like… on one stage I set “baba is all” and the screen filled with skulls?? like that has to be a glitch.

I wonder if these are the exact same 6 (1,2,3,4,5,7) and 4 (6,8,9,12) I’m currently stuck at.

Yeah, it’s a fine line to walk, because good puzzles aren’t strict tutorials. In this case, I find the mechanic especially fiddly and I think it’s worth tutorialization.

I think Stephen Lavelle is more practiced on this front. I mean, Stephen’s Sausage Roll is considerably more brutal to get started so maybe it only makes sense in my puzzle-addled mind, but I always got the “ah-ha, of course!” moment in his levels when he’s teaching a new facet of the mechanics, where Baba’s been more hit and miss for me.

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I think the ambiguity and the lessened emphasis on strict teaching can actually be less tiring – in general I much prefer puzzle games that have some flexibility to them, it’s just that most aren’t as simultaneously complex as this – but it does open you up to justifying occasionally questionable design

Oooh, some of the difference might be scope, too. The puzzle-space for Baba is absolutely gigantic, so he can’t afford to individually teach you every facet. Sausage Roll gets a lot of mileage out of each mechanic.

I agree with you that that Sausage Roll is much more tiring, but Fall-3 gave me Sausage-Roll-style fatigue too.

All means every object in the current level (except text?)
If All is Baba, everything turns into Baba. If Baba is All, Baba turns into a tree, and a skull, a keke, a Baba… so Baba square is filled with every object in the level. Maybe everything turning into a skull was a chain reaction to that?? Idk

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Water… doesn’t have those properties innately? I didn’t see that as a red herring in Rocky Road, just something that quickly narrows the end state to pushing the rock onto the water. I did think of foliage as a red herring though – initially I was trying to stack it on one tile. If foliage was replaced with a wall, I think the puzzle would be about as concise as Gate88 is suggesting.

What sometimes helps me is imagining what might be motivating the designer to include a certain puzzle, as they often hinge on a corollary of a new property. The Tele puzzle before Rocky Road showed one thing that happens with Tele, so maybe this one will show another?

Another thing that helps is being suspicious of why certain objects are included in a puzzle. In Rocky Road, I was messing around with Tele and Push independently, but why are there two IS verbs?

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pretty sure the only objects in this game that have innate properties are text

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This one is Actually Impossible I swear

(I’ve already managed to get my hands on the Swap)

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yeah this is one where I loaded it, looked at it for a minute, and just exited right back out

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Maybe I should get back in, I remember being surprised as water dropped language in subsequent levels that I thought it needed.

this game makes me feel a lot of things but “fuck incarceration” is a new one

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That level is so fucking good. Let me ruminate on how to hint it.

Edit: What’s the ‘and’ for?

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Shouldn’t! There’s a lot of attributes they typically use with water (hot, melt, defeat, sink) but none of them are innate. The interactions in this game can be kind of subtle sometimes, especially because the language that’s used doesn’t tell you exactly how it works. ( e.g. Does pull mean that you can pull it, or that it can pull you?)

just checked and I have not been able to clear level 7, and have actually only finished 5 in space, otherwise it would be the exact same ones. good to know that I won’t find 9 any easier :slight_smile:

I solved 9A with a david foster wallace reference

70-80 puzzles cleared is definitely where it starts to get really hard though

I absolutely adore this game

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