Baba Is You – Thankfully Less Stressful Than Coding:

For those who follow my Twitter (@CaitlinRC), you’ll know that I am in my final year of university and am studying Computer Science. So programming, logic and technology are a major part of my life – academically and recreationally. Despite all the programming languages that my studies have taught me, at its core – logic statements are what will make or break a program. You can have the most sophisticated interface on the planet but that does nothing if the assumptions you’ve based it all on are incorrect.

When I spotted Baba Is You on the Nintendo Switch Shop, I was intrigued. Normally, gaming doesn’t always have the most accurate grasp on the pillars of computing as an industry – focusing more on the science fiction fantasies. These are great and all, some of which forming stellar gameplay ideas and storylines but to really understand programming, you need to understand logical thinking. My university got us to do a series of logic puzzles and problems, like those you’d find in a Professor Layton game, as tutorial work for our first module. So, a game based around logical statements, gradually growing more complex and adding new variables as you progress? Right up my alley.

Before I get into the meat of Baba Is You, I want to talk a bit about logical thinking and its influence on our lives. Growing up, I was always told that people tend to either be logical or creative, and that the two rarely crossed over. Those who were more creative, would go on to study drama, art and humanities whilst the logical kids would be the scientists of the future. Nowadays, we all know that’s a bunch of horse shit but as a kid it really stuck with me. I was clearly logical, excelling more at maths and science than at drawing a picture of a bunch of bananas or taking on the role of Reno in a production of Anything Goes. Art, writing and drama seemed out of reach for me.

However, logic and creativity are so strongly interlinked that one cannot feasibly exist without the other. Some of the greatest accomplishments in human history have come from the combination of logical thinking and creative ideas – such as Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine sketches, drawn over four hundred years before the Wright brothers had their first successful flight. Any problem can be broke down and overcome with a little imagination and logic. It’s an incredible feat of humanity, that has persisted across our evolution.

For me, logic rules my thinking most of the time. I am an incredibly logical person, to the point where there’s a running joke that I’m secretly an android infiltrating humanity. I can neither confirm nor deny it! When it comes to emotions, relationships and social interaction, I struggle to apply this logic to other people. I’ll examine body language, tone of voice and any other cues I can find, in order to draw a conclusion from a situation. This does lead to some apparently “insightful” and “wise” observations on my part (according to my friends anyways), but it also leads to a lot of stress on my mental state.

For logic to be successful, you need all the details. You must understand every facet of the situation in order to build your set of rules. Much like an android, I strive to analyse and understand everything and everyone around me, like a ridiculously elaborate game of spot the difference. Building the rulesets is hard. You’re terrified of being wrong but the anxiety that comes from not having those rules in place to help navigate the situation can be even worse. It’s part of the reason I love programming so much. It’s the joy of finding a solution that works, solving a complex problem and knowing that the rules are set in stone for you to follow.

Baba Is You is a cute little puzzle game, that applies logical thinking and the basics of programming to create a unique world with challenges that you genuinely wish to solve. It uses “blocks” of writing to establish three different parameters that you must play with – Actions, Objects/States and Connectives. Your aim is to win each level, by touching whatever object has been defined as “win”. Each connected series of “Object -> Connective -> Action” establishes a rule that must be adhered to as long as the rule is active. However, you can change the rules! Switching out one object for another, “deactivating” the rule as a whole or finding a sneaky loophole that allows you to skip over a seemingly unbeatable section of the level, is what Baba Is You is about.

With over 200 levels, a ridiculous amount of adorable characters and creative solutions, I think it’s a game that I will come back to a lot. If you like logic puzzles and cute little characters, I’d highly recommend trying it out.

2019 has been a great year for Mind Games. We launched in April and have been growing from week to week, with each amazing supporter of the site being a huge inspiration for me to keep working as hard as I can. In 2020, I am planning on upgrading the site a bit, so it looks a bit more professional and you can read some of my older posts without having to scroll through nearly a years-worth of content!

Thank you all once more and I hope you had a good festive period! Keep an eye out on the site’s Twitter for announcements, updates and ideas for new content – @OurMindGames.

Till next year,

CaitlinRC.

Tags: baba is you, code, computing, creativity, logic, mind game, nintendo switch, programming, puzzles, the mind games