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"Verbs Made of Smaller Verbs" — Andrew Plotkin's Zoom-Out Design Pattern, from ThinkyCon 2025
One piece today: "Towers of Pen: puzzle experiences that zoom out and out" by Andrew Plotkin, from ThinkyCon 2025 (free online puzzle game developer conference, November 5–7, 2025). A YouTube recording and an essay version at eblong.com are both available. Plotkin describes a design pattern he calls "verbs made of smaller verbs": puzzle games where players discover that the moves they've been making at a high level are themselves entire puzzles at a lower level. Using Hadean Lands, Baba Is You, COCOON, and others as case studies, he lays out three conditions for the pattern to hold, and examines why games like Myst came close but ultimately did not achieve it.
'Game' Cannot Be Defined — Wittgenstein × Baba Is You
I sat down to write 'What is a puzzle?' for the site's intro page and froze. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations says there is no single thread running through everything we call a game — only an overlapping web of similarities he named family resemblance. I test the idea against Baba Is You, the game that literally puts its rules on the board as word blocks, and come away thinking about genre as a family tree instead of a definition.
Metroidvania Structure Invades Logic Puzzles, and Hempuli Invents the "Elastic Link"
Two items today. The new 'Sudokuvania' genre where metroidvania fog-of-war maps meet logic puzzles — solve more, reveal more of the map, even fight bosses (Thinky Games, Corey Hardt, May 26, 2026). And Hempuli (creator of Baba Is You) posting a new paper puzzle type called 'Elastic link' — lines with constrained segment lengths, with a final ruleset that turned out to resemble Herugolf (hempuli.com, April 3, 2026).
Inside Arvi Teikari's Philosophy — Wanting to Surprise You, He Lets You Play the Rules Themselves
"The greatest motivator is just general desire for self-expression." Finnish solo developer Arvi Teikari (Hempuli) startled the world with Baba Is You, a game that lays its rules out as word-blocks on the board and lets players rewrite them. We read his philosophy, obsessions, failures, dilemmas and influences through his own words.
Soundtrack: Baba Is You — A small loop that never scolds you for being wrong
The music of Baba Is You is chiptune written in a tracker (OpenMPT) by Arvi 'Hempuli' Teikari, who made the entire game alone. It is a game you retry hundreds of times, yet the music announces neither victory nor defeat — it just keeps spinning a bright little loop. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this 'music that never scolds' keeps trial-and-error feeling light, through a lens you can take home to your own writing.
Counterpoint on Baba Is You — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave Baba Is You a 9.5/10. I sort five recurring negative-review patterns from Steam, Metacritic, and the critical press — the difficulty wall, the single-solution charge, variable explosion, frustration overtaking fun, and uneven difficulty between adjacent levels — and decide where I agree and where I push back.
