Baba is You is a wonder. It delivers the greatest possible delta in experiences from one moment to another, often within seconds of each other. Never have I felt such tremendous whiplash of feeling completely and utterly lost to kicking the cosmos right in the ass with my gigantic fucking brain.
Of course, it just as often goes the other way with Baba is You. You can think you have something figured out, clip-clop forward, and then realize wow that would never work of course it wouldn’t work you fucking dumbass. And that’s kind of the brilliance of the game. It makes both possibilities plentiful enough that you build your own mythos of success and failure in this epic of galactic powers, all delivered through whatever the hell a Baba is. (You.)
And don’t get it wrong: this game is on the grandest of scales. Each thing you do is impossibly intimate. You’ll push a brick one way, stumble into death another, and claim flags with your bare hands. You interact with your physical, soft, white body at every turn, giving the entire thing a deeply personal sensation.
But the results are immense—infinite, even. By nudging two letters just a single block left, you rewrite the rules of this jittery little universe. You inhabit anything. Your influence is everywhere. There is nothing that is beyond your grasp in this game because you are everything.
That makes the contrast even more striking when, high on your mountaintop where the gods romp, you are struck dumb by a little river of lava. Or a simple wall of bricks. You are cut down by the simplest of obstacles, rendering your omnipotence hilariously impotent. There are times in this game where all you can do is laugh, turn it off, and go do something more realistic like take a walk or pull a cloud out of the sky with your stupid floppy human hands.
I likely will never finish Baba is You. My galaxy brain can only ascend so high. But knowing that I can go back to it whenever I want and tempt the fates with either a moon-shattering high or a soul-crushing low is enough for me.
And Baba is me.
