Unless you’ve literally beaten the entire game, this exercise works if you play a level you haven’t played before.
I haven’t beaten every level in the game, but I don’t have access to any levels that I haven’t played before, because the reason I stopped playing was that I had already tried and failed every remaining available level.
(Though I suppose I could cheat and look up the solution for where I got stuck...)
Summarize the key concept of the solution
This might not apply to the early levels you’ve focused on in your examples, but an observation I made while playing the more advanced levels of this game was that often there was not just one key concept.
In most puzzle games that I’ve played, I find I can quickly get a sort of feel for the general shape of the solution: I start here, I have to end up there, therefore there must be a step in the middle that bridges those two. This often narrows the possible search space quite a lot, because the missing link has to touch the parts I know about at both the beginning and the end.
Lots of puzzles in Baba Is You have two significant steps in the middle. And this is a huge jump in difficulty, because it means there’s an intermediate state between those two steps and I have no idea what that intermediate state looks like so I can’t use it to infer the shape of those steps. Each of the missing steps has only 1 constraint instead of 2.
I haven’t beaten every level in the game, but I don’t have access to any levels that I haven’t played before, because the reason I stopped playing was that I had already tried and failed every remaining available level.
(Though I suppose I could cheat and look up the solution for where I got stuck...)
I’m not sure I understand. If you have levels leftover that you haven’t beaten beacuse they were too hard, I think this is still a fine exercise (the fact that “it’s hard” isn’t a crux for me. I do think it’s doable, and I think the constraints of the exercise probably help about as much as they hinder.
(You might not succeed at doing succeeding within three tries of one-shotting, but I think you’re more likely to go on to beat the level afterwards, and still learn something from it)
On a literal level, I can’t play “a level I haven’t played before”, which is what the instructions call for.
On a practical level, I’ve already spent multiple hours beating my head against this wall, and when I stopped I had no remotely promising ideas for how to make further progress. (And most of that time was spent staring at the puzzle and thinking hard without interacting with it, so it was already kind of similar to this exercise.)
Admittedly, this was years ago, so maybe it’s time to revisit the puzzle anyway.
I will note that a level editor for this game seems to exist, so in theory you could craft custom levels for this exercise. Though insofar as the point is being potentially-surprised by the rules, maybe that doesn’t help if you aren’t inventing new rules as well.
One note: custom levels now exist and you can go browse them directly even if you’ve beaten the game.
I do agree that this exercise, as-worded, probably nudges towards a flavor of “explicit thinking”, which I don’t think is even necessarily the best strategy for Baba is You overall.
I don’t think this exercise necessarily says “think explicitly” – the section on metacognitive brainstorming is meant to fuzzy/experiential/”go-take-a-shower”/”meditate” style options.
I haven’t beaten every level in the game, but I don’t have access to any levels that I haven’t played before, because the reason I stopped playing was that I had already tried and failed every remaining available level.
(Though I suppose I could cheat and look up the solution for where I got stuck...)
This might not apply to the early levels you’ve focused on in your examples, but an observation I made while playing the more advanced levels of this game was that often there was not just one key concept.
In most puzzle games that I’ve played, I find I can quickly get a sort of feel for the general shape of the solution: I start here, I have to end up there, therefore there must be a step in the middle that bridges those two. This often narrows the possible search space quite a lot, because the missing link has to touch the parts I know about at both the beginning and the end.
Lots of puzzles in Baba Is You have two significant steps in the middle. And this is a huge jump in difficulty, because it means there’s an intermediate state between those two steps and I have no idea what that intermediate state looks like so I can’t use it to infer the shape of those steps. Each of the missing steps has only 1 constraint instead of 2.
I’m not sure I understand. If you have levels leftover that you haven’t beaten beacuse they were too hard, I think this is still a fine exercise (the fact that “it’s hard” isn’t a crux for me. I do think it’s doable, and I think the constraints of the exercise probably help about as much as they hinder.
(You might not succeed at doing succeeding within three tries of one-shotting, but I think you’re more likely to go on to beat the level afterwards, and still learn something from it)
On a literal level, I can’t play “a level I haven’t played before”, which is what the instructions call for.
On a practical level, I’ve already spent multiple hours beating my head against this wall, and when I stopped I had no remotely promising ideas for how to make further progress. (And most of that time was spent staring at the puzzle and thinking hard without interacting with it, so it was already kind of similar to this exercise.)
Admittedly, this was years ago, so maybe it’s time to revisit the puzzle anyway.
I will note that a level editor for this game seems to exist, so in theory you could craft custom levels for this exercise. Though insofar as the point is being potentially-surprised by the rules, maybe that doesn’t help if you aren’t inventing new rules as well.
One note: custom levels now exist and you can go browse them directly even if you’ve beaten the game.
I do agree that this exercise, as-worded, probably nudges towards a flavor of “explicit thinking”, which I don’t think is even necessarily the best strategy for Baba is You overall.
I don’t think this exercise necessarily says “think explicitly” – the section on metacognitive brainstorming is meant to fuzzy/experiential/”go-take-a-shower”/”meditate” style options.
To clarify slightly more: I think it’s fine to a do a hard level you haven’t beaten before, even if you’ve played it.
Nod, these instructions were generated for people doing early levels but I agree about how later levels feel.