Counterpoint on Baba Is You — Reading Through the Negative Reviews

Introduction

Komugi's review handed Baba Is You a 9.5/10, calling it a once-in-a-medium invention — a Sokoban where you push the words that make the rules. I, Mayoi, want to put a foot on the brake. The negative reviews on Steam, Game Informer, and Metacritic contain pointed observations that are too useful to ignore.

A disclosure first: this is not a transcript of specific Steam reviews. It's my reconstruction of the recurring criticisms leveled at Hempuli Oy's Baba Is You across Steam, Metacritic, forums, and critical press. Use it as a thinking scaffold while reading the actual Steam reviews yourself.

The typified critiques I expect to find

The recurring critiques of Baba Is You I see across Steam and its surrounding discourse fall into five buckets.

One: difficulty is not a curve but a wall. Two or three hours past the tutorial world, players hit levels that simply stop them. Two: each level has effectively one intended solution, and the developer has carefully removed unintended ones — so players aren't being creative, they're being asked to guess the designer's mind. Three: as you progress, the board fills with objects and rule-words until the language-puzzle elegance of the opening hours is buried under variable explosion.

Four: to borrow Game Informer's framing, frustration overtakes fun for long stretches of the late game. Five: difficulty variance between adjacent levels is jarring — a thirty-second puzzle is followed by one that stares back at you for thirty minutes. Each of these is specific, and each touches the game's design at the root. I'll take a position on every one.

Examining — dissecting the five claims

Difficulty as wall. This complaint maps onto a whole class of hardcore puzzlers — Stephen's Sausage Roll, Snakebird, English Country Tune. From the designer's side, the wall is intentional. Each new Baba world introduces a verb (MOVE, SHIFT, SHUT/OPEN) and then spends five to ten levels exhausting its consequences. Hitting a wall is a design signal that you haven't fully understood the verb. The fair criticism is that the signal isn't legible: players can't easily tell whether they are bad, or whether they haven't yet absorbed the rule.

The single-solution charge. Because Baba inherits Sokoban DNA, this is structurally unavoidable. With a discrete grid and combinatorial rules, the solution set has to be small. The Witness or Outer Wilds can offer multiple solution paths only because their space is continuous or their observations are non-deterministic — incompatible with Baba's design. The sharper version of the criticism is not 'there is one solution' but 'there is one solution and not enough scaffolding to find it.'

Variable explosion, frustration, and uneven difficulty are really one symptom with three names. In the final-world cluster, Baba stacks rule-words three and four deep into multi-variable states. It is the same approach Recursed and Patrick's Parabox use with recursion depth. Parabox spreads its tutorial across eighty-plus stages of carefully graded steps; Baba's post-rule application levels span a wider band, so it's harder to predict how hard the next level will be. That predictability gap is a legitimate target.

Where I side with the negative reviews

I agree most with two complaints: difficulty variance and low hint density. In the late game, Baba demands a multi-dimensional search — which verb, in what order, pushed how many times — but the hint density remains at tutorial-era levels. Players spend long stretches haunted by the suspicion that they're missing a verb, or that the level's real degrees of freedom are wider than they see. That is a kind of stress, not pure thinking pleasure. Komugi's review doesn't address this.

I also agree that resumption cost is high. Past world 8, restoring your mental model after a save-and-quit takes serious time. Baba is harder than its reputation to recommend as a 'pick up in spare minutes' puzzler — it is not a lunch-break game. That is purchase-relevant information the original review skips over.

Where I push back

On the 'single solution is a defect' charge, I push back hard. Baba's language is fully combinatorial — rewriting a rule-word produces a unique state transition. The moment you allow multiple solutions, the rule-word semantics blur and the meta-puzzle premise collapses. Hempuli Oy removing unintended solutions isn't QA hygiene, it's a linguistic necessity. That is a tradition running from Sokoban (1982) through Stephen's Sausage Roll.

I also push back, conditionally, on the 'wall' framing. Baba's walls aren't there to test you — they exist to make sure you've learned the next verb. Players who stall on a wall for thirty minutes can almost always patch their rule-understanding by revisiting earlier stages of the same world. The key to passing the wall is sleeping somewhere in the past levels you've already cleared. Many negative reviews stop short of noticing this and rest on the verdict 'too hard.'

Closing — who to recommend it to, who not

Verdict. Baba Is You is for players who can stomach Sokoban-style solution construction, who don't mind spending days on a single world with a paper notebook, and who want the linguistic pleasure of 'understanding a verb.' For that audience, Komugi's 9.5/10 is, I think, accurate.

It is not for players who want difficulty to feel like a satisfying growth curve, who can't tolerate long stalls, or who need a weekly sense of completion. Baba's late-game walls are intentionally tall, and for anyone who can't reframe wall-climbing as 'rediscovering the language' rather than 'getting better at the game,' the second half becomes a slog.

My final read: against Komugi's 9.5, this is a game whose score depends on the buyer. For the right audience, near-perfect; for the wrong one, a 5/10. The truth in the negative Steam reviews is that this is not a universal masterpiece, and at roughly fifteen US dollars that warning carries weight. Watch ten minutes of a tutorial video and look at two screenshots from world 8 before you buy. You will know within a minute whether you are on the right side.