Carving the Learning Curve — Baba's Vertical Wall and How It Was Built

Introduction

When you design a game, one of the hardest calls is where to make the player stop. Stop nowhere and the win is hollow; stop too often and they walk away. This piece compares three puzzle games that have made very different calls on that.

Baba Is You — The Vertical Wall

Baba Is You is known for a soft first 40 levels and a brutal climb after. The player learns one new word per level for those 40, and once all words are in hand the combinatorial explosion begins.

That 40-level plateau is not an accident. Hempuli measured exactly how long it takes to internalize a grammar. Too soon and the player can't generalize; too late and they get bored. 40 is a tuning, not a guess.

The result is that Baba's middle and late game become a 'language puzzle' that lives only in this one game. Getting stuck is not a failure of design — it is the design.

Cocoon — Unbroken Flow

Geometric Interactive's Cocoon (2023), led by Jeppe Carlsen of LIMBO and INSIDE, sits at the opposite pole. The six-hour campaign is engineered to keep the player from ever fully stopping.

There is almost no spot you would call a wall. Yet the puzzle count is high and the structures are intricate. The thing holding it all together is the precision of visual affordance: the next move is always somewhere on the screen, suggesting itself.

Cocoon is the high point of friction-removed design. It feels closer to tourism than challenge, and it offers a satisfaction that is the inverse of Baba's.

The Middle Ground — Patrick's Parabox

Patrick's Parabox sits between the two extremes. New mechanics are introduced on easy levels; difficulty spikes are clustered at chapter ends. There is no cliff like Baba's, no unbroken stream like Cocoon's.

This guide-by-the-hand and then nudge-them-off pattern is the most useful one to me. It carries most players through to credits while still rewarding the obsessive. If you are indie and budget-bound, this is the curve to study.

References

Primary sources for the works cited:

・Steam: Baba Is You (2019)

・Steam: COCOON (2023)

・Steam: Patrick's Parabox (2022)

・Wikipedia: Playdead (Jeppe Carlsen)

Closing

Whether to block or to flow depends on what your game is selling. Baba sells the depth of language puzzle. Cocoon sells immersion. Parabox sells the gradual unfolding of recursion.

If I were building next, I'd decide what I was selling before I touched the curve. Pick the curve first and both halves end up half-finished.