If you’ve already played Baba Is You and are looking for other options: Humble Bundle has a puzzle bundle going for the next 5 days. It’s $10 for 7 games, of which The Witness is the lowest rated at 85% positive, and the rest range from 93-99%
Baba Is You is an unusual puzzle game in a way that seems relevant here.
One way of classifying puzzle games might be on a continuum from logic-based to exploration-based (or, if you like, between logical uncertainty and environmental uncertainty).
At the first extreme you have stuff like Sudoku, or logic grids, or three gods named True, False, and Random, or blue eyes. In these puzzles, you are given all necessary information up-front, and you should (if the puzzle is well-constructed) be able to verify the solution entirely on your own, without requiring an external authority to confirm it.
At the opposite extreme, there’s 20 questions ormastermind or Guess Who?, where the entire point is that necessary information is being withheld and you need to interact with the puzzle to expose it. Knowing all the information is the solution; there would be no point without the concealment.
Baba Is You is pretty close to the first extreme, but not all the way there. It does ask you learn the basic rules of the game by interacting with it, and it does gradually introduce new rules, but most of the difficulty comes from logical uncertainty. Some puzzles do not introduce new rules at all, or only introduce new rules in the sense of exploring the edge cases of a previously-established rule. It also makes the entire puzzle visible at once, so once you understand the rules it becomes a pure logic puzzle.
This exercise relies on the possibility of being empirically surprised, but also on being able to make fairly detailed plans in spite of that possibility. This seems like it requires (or at least heavily benefits from) being at a pretty narrow area within the logic ⇔ exploration continuum, which Baba Is You happens to be exactly situated at.
Most puzzle video games lean more heavily on exploration than that. You mentioned The Witness, which I would classify as primarily exploration-based: each series of puzzles centers around a secret rule that you need to infer through experimentation, and most puzzles are easy once you have figured out the secret rule. (The game Understand, mentioned by another commenter, has the same premise.)
Another puzzle game I recognize from the bundle you linked is Superliminal, which has the premise that you’re inside a dream and solve puzzles using dream-logic. I’d also consider that heavily exploration-based.
The Talos Principle is much closer to Baba Is You’s point on this continuum, with a relatively small number of rules and an emphasis on applying them creatively, although in The Talos Principle you can’t always see the entire puzzle before you begin solving it, and I’d say the puzzle components’ appearances are less suggestive of their functions than the adjectives in Baba Is You, probably making it significantly harder to guess how they’ll behave without doing some experimentation.
Patrick’s Parabox is similar to Baba Is You in that they are both Sokoban games, though I didn’t play too far in Patrick’s Parabox because the puzzles felt more workaday and less mind-bendy and I just got bored. (Though it’s highly rated, so presumably most people didn’t.)
Quick note that I have another exercise in the works about the beginning of Patrick’s Parabox, but after having investigated more I think the rest of the game doesn’t hold up for my purposes.
I like your breakdown of why Baba is You fits exactly here.
I do think most puzzle games lend themselves to some kind of rationality exercise, but not necessarily this one.
It’s 6 months later and I still feel impressed by how this comment articulated what’s important about Baba is You.
Someone recently mentioned another major thing about Baba though, which is that it has a high density of puzzles that imply a few particular potential solutions, which are dead ends. (Whereas many puzzle games have the property of “I feel totally stuck” to “oh, the solution is suddenly obvious.”)
This makes it particularly valuable as a research-taste training tool. (I’m not sure offhand how intrinsic the mechanics of Baba is to this property. You could almost surely design Baba puzzles that don’t have this property, it might just be about a particular skill of the game designer).
I think Causality would be good for this. Levels have their full state visible from the start, and there’s no randomness. There’s a relatively small number of mechanics to learn, though I worry that some of them (particularly around details of movement, like “what will an astronaut do when they can’t move forward any more?”) might be “there are multiple equally good guesses here” which seems suboptimal.
Actually, there’s one detail of state that I’m not sure is visible, in some levels:
When you come out of a portal, which way do you face? I think there’s probably a consistent rule for this but I’m not sure, I could believe that in some levels you just have to try it to see.
What about Outer Wilds? It’s not strictly a puzzle game, but I think it might go well with this exercise. Also, what games would you recommend for this to someone who has already played every available level in Baba Is You?
I recently played Outer Wilds and Subnautica, and the exercise I recommend for both of these games is : Get to the end of the game without ever failing. In subnautica that’s dying once, in Outer Wilds it’s a spoiler to describe what failing is (successfully getting to the end could certainly be argued to be a fail). I failed in both of these. I played Outer Wilds first and was surprised at my fail, which inspired me to play Subnautica without dying. I got pretty far but also died from a mix of 1 unexpected game mechanic, uncareful measure of another mechanic, lack of redundancy in my contingency plans.
If you’ve already played Baba Is You and are looking for other options: Humble Bundle has a puzzle bundle going for the next 5 days. It’s $10 for 7 games, of which The Witness is the lowest rated at 85% positive, and the rest range from 93-99%
Baba Is You is an unusual puzzle game in a way that seems relevant here.
One way of classifying puzzle games might be on a continuum from logic-based to exploration-based (or, if you like, between logical uncertainty and environmental uncertainty).
At the first extreme you have stuff like Sudoku, or logic grids, or three gods named True, False, and Random, or blue eyes. In these puzzles, you are given all necessary information up-front, and you should (if the puzzle is well-constructed) be able to verify the solution entirely on your own, without requiring an external authority to confirm it.
At the opposite extreme, there’s 20 questions ormastermind or Guess Who?, where the entire point is that necessary information is being withheld and you need to interact with the puzzle to expose it. Knowing all the information is the solution; there would be no point without the concealment.
Baba Is You is pretty close to the first extreme, but not all the way there. It does ask you learn the basic rules of the game by interacting with it, and it does gradually introduce new rules, but most of the difficulty comes from logical uncertainty. Some puzzles do not introduce new rules at all, or only introduce new rules in the sense of exploring the edge cases of a previously-established rule. It also makes the entire puzzle visible at once, so once you understand the rules it becomes a pure logic puzzle.
This exercise relies on the possibility of being empirically surprised, but also on being able to make fairly detailed plans in spite of that possibility. This seems like it requires (or at least heavily benefits from) being at a pretty narrow area within the logic ⇔ exploration continuum, which Baba Is You happens to be exactly situated at.
Most puzzle video games lean more heavily on exploration than that. You mentioned The Witness, which I would classify as primarily exploration-based: each series of puzzles centers around a secret rule that you need to infer through experimentation, and most puzzles are easy once you have figured out the secret rule. (The game Understand, mentioned by another commenter, has the same premise.)
Another puzzle game I recognize from the bundle you linked is Superliminal, which has the premise that you’re inside a dream and solve puzzles using dream-logic. I’d also consider that heavily exploration-based.
The Talos Principle is much closer to Baba Is You’s point on this continuum, with a relatively small number of rules and an emphasis on applying them creatively, although in The Talos Principle you can’t always see the entire puzzle before you begin solving it, and I’d say the puzzle components’ appearances are less suggestive of their functions than the adjectives in Baba Is You, probably making it significantly harder to guess how they’ll behave without doing some experimentation.
Patrick’s Parabox is similar to Baba Is You in that they are both Sokoban games, though I didn’t play too far in Patrick’s Parabox because the puzzles felt more workaday and less mind-bendy and I just got bored. (Though it’s highly rated, so presumably most people didn’t.)
Quick note that I have another exercise in the works about the beginning of Patrick’s Parabox, but after having investigated more I think the rest of the game doesn’t hold up for my purposes.
I like your breakdown of why Baba is You fits exactly here.
I do think most puzzle games lend themselves to some kind of rationality exercise, but not necessarily this one.
It’s 6 months later and I still feel impressed by how this comment articulated what’s important about Baba is You.
Someone recently mentioned another major thing about Baba though, which is that it has a high density of puzzles that imply a few particular potential solutions, which are dead ends. (Whereas many puzzle games have the property of “I feel totally stuck” to “oh, the solution is suddenly obvious.”)
This makes it particularly valuable as a research-taste training tool. (I’m not sure offhand how intrinsic the mechanics of Baba is to this property. You could almost surely design Baba puzzles that don’t have this property, it might just be about a particular skill of the game designer).
I think Causality would be good for this. Levels have their full state visible from the start, and there’s no randomness. There’s a relatively small number of mechanics to learn, though I worry that some of them (particularly around details of movement, like “what will an astronaut do when they can’t move forward any more?”) might be “there are multiple equally good guesses here” which seems suboptimal.
Actually, there’s one detail of state that I’m not sure is visible, in some levels:
When you come out of a portal, which way do you face? I think there’s probably a consistent rule for this but I’m not sure, I could believe that in some levels you just have to try it to see.
Or Understand for 4 EUR which has a highly upvoted lesswrong post recommending it.
Fwiw I tried out Understand and was underwhelmed. (Cool concept but it wasn’t actually better as an exercise than other good puzzle games)
What about Outer Wilds? It’s not strictly a puzzle game, but I think it might go well with this exercise. Also, what games would you recommend for this to someone who has already played every available level in Baba Is You?
I think I’d end up constructing a new exercise for Outer Wilds but could see doing something with ir. (I have started but not completed Outer Wilds)
I think this exercise works best for games where puzzles come in relatively discrete chunks where you can see most of the puzzle at once.
I recently played Outer Wilds and Subnautica, and the exercise I recommend for both of these games is : Get to the end of the game without ever failing.
In subnautica that’s dying once, in Outer Wilds it’s a spoiler to describe what failing is (successfully getting to the end could certainly be argued to be a fail).
I failed in both of these. I played Outer Wilds first and was surprised at my fail, which inspired me to play Subnautica without dying. I got pretty far but also died from a mix of 1 unexpected game mechanic, uncareful measure of another mechanic, lack of redundancy in my contingency plans.