Games worth discovering

Mobile Suit Baba is a brilliant combination of two amazing indie classics

984 View2024-01-05

Mobile Suit Baba

TacticalActionStrategyPixel

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SHOULD I PLAY MOBILE SUIT BABA?

Definitely play this if you’re a fan of either Baba Is You or Into The Breach, but you may want to check those games out first if you haven’t already. Mobile Suit Baba takes the smartest ideas from both of these indie classics and remixes them into a surprisingly satisfying—and challenging!—puzzle game. However, it’ll be pretty disorienting for anyone coming to it fresh, without having played either of the games it’s based on.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played a couple hours of Mobile Suit Baba, which has been enough time for me to clear the first seven levels or so. That included a couple optional levels, which branch off from the main, linear track through the campaign. The story has the little white Baba creature and friends donning huge mech suits (shaped just like their normal bodies, just way bigger), and travel around their island to make sure their stockpiles of delicious fruit are safe from evil floating skulls. To do that, I had to use each character’s unique movement patterns and special abilities, and also mess with the rules of the game itself by physically moving parts of sentences around in each level.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT MOBILE SUIT BABA?

• The weird concept works incredibly well. I knew what the gimmick was going in, and while I loved both Into The Breach and Baba Is You, I was skeptical that the two (very different!) games could be combined in a way that made any sense. Fortunately, my fears were completely unfounded. Each little Baba character had their own movement patterns and special abilities for moving things around, but I found that I was able to easily keep track of who could do what once I had a couple levels under my belt. I always wanted to keep Baba on my team, because it could toss other units all the way across the map, where they’d then be able to use their abilities.

• It looks perfect. At a glance, I might have easily confused any screenshot of Mobile Suit Baba with one from Into the Breach, and each of the creatures’ mech suits looks right at home, while still clearly being pulled from Baba Is You.

• The puzzles are tricky. Just as with Baba Is You, I found the puzzle difficulty ramped up quickly to the point where each new level took me a while to work out. There was no filler in what I played, which has included a couple levels dedicated to demonstrating new mechanics. Every new stage has pushed me to rethink what I know about the game and its rules, and I loved how it demanded creative solutions each time.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT MOBILE SUIT BABA?

• Nothing, really. The one thing that I found a bit annoying was that it was hard to immediately tell where the floating skull enemies were—the perspective sometimes makes it unclear which square they’re floating over. Fortunately, I could just move my mouse cursor around until I found the one that popped the skull info up on the side of the screen.