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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.