The archive · Games & Play · Product decision · 2017–2019
Baba Is You puts the game's own rules on screen — then lets players rewrite them
In Baba Is You, sentences like 'Wall is Stop' sit in the level as pushable word blocks — so solving a puzzle means rewriting the rules.
Hempuli (Arvi Teikari)
What it had to solve
Teikari wanted to make a puzzle game for years; the jam theme 'Not There' sparked a thought about negation in logic — what if a player could invert any rule, and eventually rewrite all of them?
How it works
Baba Is You, released in March 2019, is a Sokoban-style puzzle game whose twist is that the rules of each level appear inside it as blocks of text. 'Baba is You,' 'Wall is Stop' and 'Flag is Win' sit in the world as physical word tiles, and the player pushes them around — turning 'Wall is Stop' into 'Wall is You' or 'Lava is Hot' into 'Lava is Push' literally changes how the game behaves.
The idea arrived at the 2017 Nordic Game Jam, whose theme was 'Not There.' Developer Arvi Teikari combined that theme with his long-held wish to make a puzzle game and got a mental image of an ice block that could be saved by writing 'Ice is not Melt.' From there he spent two years turning the jam prototype into a full game, rewriting large parts of the code to make the rule system dynamic rather than hardcoded.
The result was a game that is conceptually one sentence long but fiendishly deep: Gamespot's review praised how it lets players redefine the conditions of victory, and the industry agreed. It won Excellence in Design and Best Student Game at IGF 2018 and Best Design at the 2019 Game Developers Choice Awards, and its rule-rewriting mechanic became a benchmark that dozens of later puzzle games referenced.
Why it lands
- The rules being physical makes understanding the game the game — every solution is a discovery, not a chore.
- A tiny concept ('push words around') generated over 200 levels, showing how far one strong mechanic can stretch.
- Dynamic rules meant players could combine words freely, producing surprise interactions the developer had to test against.
- The word 'Not' plus grammar meant the jam's theme stayed alive in the final design — the idea was the constraint, and the constraint was the idea.
What it did
It won IGF 2018 Excellence in Design and Best Student Game, then the 2019 GDC Choice Award for Best Design, sold over a million copies, and became the reference point for 'the rules are the puzzle' design.
What you can take
Make the interface the content: when understanding the rules is itself the challenge, every level becomes a moment of discovery, and one simple concept can carry hundreds of puzzles.
Since then
Baba Is You became one of the most-awarded puzzle games of its era and a fixture of streaming culture, where watching a player realize they can rewrite the rules is the entertainment. Teikari kept experimenting — he later shipped Environmental Station Alpha 2 and other projects — but the game's lasting influence is visible in the wave of 'meta-rule' puzzle titles and level editors it inspired. Its difficulty also became part of its identity, and the GDC talk Teikari gave on the rule engine remains a standard reference for designing rule-based systems.
Sources
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