BaBa is Secret

I just completed the wonderful puzzle game BaBa is You. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a 2D block pushing puzzle game like Sokoban. The twist is that the rules of each level are also expressed through pushable blocks. The titular blocks “BaBa”, “Is”, and “You” tell you that you control BaBa. Rock Is Push, Wall Is Stop, and Flag Is Win create the basic Sokoban level. Push the rocks out of the way, move BaBa to the flag, win. Next you might find the flag trapped in a square of walls, and so you push that pesky Stop block away, leaving Wall all alone. Without the rule, walls no longer impede BaBa. 

The game goes a hundred miles on this concept. It starts so simple, but by the end you have brain bending puzzles where you’re transforming blocks into other blocks, controlling all the walls in a level, and absurd meta-strategies you need to use to complete the toughest secret levels. 

As with any time I complete a really brilliant game, I think about how it can be applied to my tabletop games. 

The basic lesson is level design. The game is a masterclass in introducing mechanics and interactions between mechanics before throwing you in the deep end. If you’re trying to write a cohesive adventure, you should seriously be thinking about level design in this way. If you have a dungeon faction that reacts in certain ways to your player’s actions, you need to introduce that and then ramp up. I believe playing this game will make you better at that. But the biggest lesson is secret design. 

Secrets

I’m going to use some spoilers from the game as examples here.

The ideal secret is something your players solve and it makes them feel smart. It engrosses them in their character, because it makes them feel more like an expert adventurer. That’s why a lot of people view secrets as a scale:

Not a Secret <–> The Sweet Spot <–> They Never Find it

This frames it as a difficulty knob, and the design process as tweaking that knob. But I like to frame the two goals separately. 

Goal One: The players solve the secret. 

The first step is letting your players know there is something to solve. This is easy. Unless you have a good reason not to, you can put the existence of the secret right in front of the players. They might not yet know there’s more to it than it appears, but they should notice it. For example, here’s the world map of BaBa is you.

See that level on the bottom right? I assumed I’d unlock it after I completed the grey level above it, or the yellow level to its left. But here’s the map again, after you’ve beaten the game.

So how the hell are we supposed to get there? I wasn’t sure. But another thing sticks out here. Down in the very corner, the blocks Baba is You and Flag is Win. I had assumed throughout the game that those were just decoration, or to help teach the basic goal of the game. But, they are exactly the same as the blocks in the levels.

So they’ve given two big glaring oddities. This secret turns out to be hugely crucial, as a lot of game content is hidden behind it, so they had to make sure we noticed it. It’s one thing to hide a little bit of loot in a place that players might overlook, but what about the Necromancer’s Secret Lair? The game stops if they don’t find it, but it still has to be a secret. In this case, we know there’s something afoot, but we have no idea of how to interact with it. 

Goal Two: They Feel Brilliant For Solving It

In truth, we’re incapable of interacting with it until we enter level 09. 

A new block. Level. This is the big game changer, the swing moment in the game. When you solve this puzzle, it changes everything about how you’ve thought so far. The game throws two red herrings in front of you. First, “Level Is Weak”. This spells instant defeat. The second  the Win. You’ve been trained to focus on those Win blocks, your path to victory.

But your mind is racing at this point, and the red herrings only serve to make you feel brilliant when you figure out the true solution. You’re not even supposed to win this level. You’re just here to form the words Level is Baba.

You can now walk around the world map as BaBa, and get to that secret level. But why do you feel so smart? Creating that sentence is trivially easy. If you knew that was your goal, this could easily be one of the 8 tutorial puzzles. A big part is that the red herrings make you think you’ve discovered a hidden side path, when you really discovered the path the developers wanted you to take. But more importantly, your understanding of the system has just made a leap into a whole new order of magnitude. 

These revelatory moments are the lifeblood of a good secret, little or enormous. The moment they think, “Yes! This changes things!”. Even if the revelation only leads them a few rooms back in the dungeon to take another crack at that odd statue and find some treasure, that moment is why we include secrets in the first place. Hell, even if the player is wrong, they still feel more actively engaged in that moment than in most others. 

Example – The Gateway of Xing

Art by Sandra Duchiewicz

All across the continent of Maravor stand large stone archways, attended by large stone pedestals. Each pedestal is an ancient map of the Old Xing Empire, though many only show local regions or have lost pieces to damage over time. On each map is a crystal figurine with simple geography. The crystal is bound to the table, though it can be slid around to any of the nodes, each corresponding to another Xing Gateway.

Most of the gateways are inside gate temples. Small domed buildings, white stone on the outside with beautiful celestial paintings on the inside of the domes. The pedestal sits in the center of the circle, with the gate itself offset away from and facing the door. Each pedestal is round, save for a notch pointing towards the gate. The arches are monolithic, rather than made from stacked stones. 

As you have surmised, and as the people who have inhabited Maravor since the fall of Xing have surmised, the Xing Gateways form a travel network. The method of access is not complicated. You simply need your spiritual signature to be authorised in the Xing Imperial Ledger. Any Imperial Official can do it. The system was self sufficient at replacing officials, so you’ll find a surprising number of living people with low level titles. Failing that, ghosts, servitor elementals, and one civically minded vampire can assist.

At that point, you can move the crystal to any node, speak an incantation, and open a portal to the chosen location. Obviously, in order to prevent invasions, high ranking servants of Xing had great control over the gateways. They can be locally locked, deactivated, given more strict permissions, and a myriad of other options. Among living people, you won’t find anyone higher than a Sergeant or local Mayor, who can only perform basic operations like locking and unlocking gates locally. 

Art by Eric Basiletti

The First Secret

Here are the asynchronous pieces:

The players have a map that shows all of the major gates. Many are still locked, and so the players must travel to them on foot, unlocking minor gates along the way. There are some nodes on the outside of the paper map, out in the ocean, that you can’t seem to find links to at any gate. The map is slightly abstract, but even so they don’t seem to map to any locations you’ve ever heard of.

The Central Gate, deep in the ruins of the Imperial Palace, appears on almost every gate map, but is inaccessible. Strangely, gate scholars claim this is not because it is locked, but because it is currently open.

By all contemporary accounts, the Xing Empire ended when all of its people vanished without a trace.

The Turn: The Central Gate

The Ruins of The Imperial Palace will be a huge draw to players. It’s location is well known and central to the continent. Anyone who controls a gate would pay a fortune to someone who could unlock the central gate, and open it to their gate first. Perhaps a rumor tells you of foreign islands, whose gates can only be reached from the central hub. Plus treasure both from the ancient Xing and from would-be plunderers who came before. 

The first thing one notices is that the wind blows into the palace through any crack it can find. Doors that open outward are almost impossible to open, as the wind holds them shut. Doors that open inwards are likewise impossible to close, latches long since splintered.

The wind persists throughout the dungeon, blowing ever inwards. Rooms towards the center, and rooms at long dead ends are increasingly harder to breathe in. The royal vault for example, underground at the end of a lengthy hallway, has no air in it at all. 

The cause becomes apparent when one finds the Central Gate. The gate temple has an outward facing door, heavy iron. Opening it is hard, keeping it open is impossible. The wind all blows into the temple and through the open gate. Through the stone arch lies a vast blackness. The iron door will almost certainly shut behind the players. Keeping themselves from being blown through the gate is the main objective. 

Don’t worry about the portal sucking all the air off the planet. It will, eventually, but it’ll take over 10 million years! 

Their salvation lies on the ceiling. The gate crystal is there, affixed to a stretch of nothing in the middle of the giant painting of the heavens marking the inside of the dome. At this point, they should know the incantation one must say to close the gate, but laying hands on the crystal is now the difficult part. 

The red herring is attention grabbing, in that this room’s immediate purpose is to kill the players. The second red herring is the original goal: reopen the portal to a particular location. The secret is that the interior of the gate temple domes function exactly the same as the pedestals do. 

If they assume that this secret is only true for this temple, the second red herring is designed to teach them otherwise. They have to get the crystal back onto the pedestal map. Try as they might, they can’t lift it, only slide it. Trying to slide it up the pedestal also fails. The only way is to slide it up that notch, the same notch that’s present on every pedestal they’ve seen so far. 

The ceiling nodes lead to extraplanar locations, or other fantastical locales. This lets the Imperial Palace serve as a gate for high-level content. Really, anything you want to be inaccessable by normal means can go onto the domes.

Art by Nele Diel

The Second Secret

Your incongruities:

Try as you might, none of these secret locations hold the answers to the mysteries of Xing. They did have settlements here, and trade with the denizens. Powerful artifacts and locations can be found. Philosophical texts. But no concrete answer. Where did they go?

A loose gate crystal. The players may find a loose gate crystal. It can be used in place of a normal crystal at any gate, but they’ve yet to find a gate without a crystal. It’s cool, but offers little practical change. 

Zhou-Fu the Eternally Reflective. In the Imperial Palace, you find a “living” Xing man. He is meditating in a minimalist chamber below the Central Gate. His heart beats once every 11 days. He draws a full breath as the moon waxes, and releases it as it wanes. A gate crystal sits on his forehead. Any assault on his person, physical, magical, or spiritual, and the crystal glows. The attack is spirited away. A study of the texts found in the palace reveals that he was the last emperor of Xing.

The Army of Nowhere. Several attacks have been perpetrated. The pattern is the same. A stranger accesses the gate temple, by stealth or violence, and opens the gate. An army pours out, attacks, and pours back in. This is not unusual in and off itself, this strategy has been tried before. The issue is, no one can discover where they are attacking from. Captured soldiers have been interrogated, spies have followed the army back through the gate. They describe an army camp in a clean open field. The field is endless. The gateway there has no pedestal, and cannot be opened. It seems to open and shut of its own volition, for recruitment, for “shore” leave, and for assaults. Even the highest leadership is unclear how it works.

The Turn: The Interrogation of Geta Vex

Investigating the Army of Nowhere and its shadowy leader will eventually lead you to Tian Jan. A prison floating in the void. Here, the Xing kept all kinds of monstrosities and villains. The Nowhere King was one of them. There is no way to open the gate inside Tian Jan, the way must be opened from the Central Gate. Leave someone behind you trust, and keep a good schedule. Every inmate who escapes will be a bane to the world, and they do lay in ambush right on the other side.

Towards the end, you will find a room. It looks like a minimalist gate temple. But instead of a pedestal, there is a chair. And bound into it sits a demon. The bindings are impeccable. Even the other inmates, long since escaped from their cells, refuse to free Geta Vex. On his forehead sits a softly pulsing gate crystal. 

Any prisoner (At least the ones willing to speak to you, rather than fight you) can tell you his history. Geta Vex tried to start the apocalypse. He created a substance that liquified any life it touched into more of itself. The Xing couldn’t stop it. They captured him, but he was no longer necessary for the plan. He was impossible to interrogate. So they took him to the room upstairs. An army of ten thousand marched up. Less than a hundred returned, but soon after the crisis was averted.

This should be the origin story for a great desert somewhere on the continent

The Secret: The gates can open into more than physical locations. They can open into the minds of others. This is where the Nowhere Army has been hiding. In the mind of their general. There are obviously many ways to discover this without coming to Tian Jan. Experimentation with a loose crystal. Defeating the Nowhere King. But this is a more surefire method.

Note that nothing originating inside a mind is real. It cannot be brought out. But changes can be made, and knowledge can be recovered.

There may be a temptation to enter Geta Vex’s mind. The demon knows many secrets. Immortality. Forbidden magics. The entire Ademic tongue, to which even stones respond. The Nowhere King was one of the survivors of the incursion, they say. Sacrificed a hundred people to gain immortality. Anyone who enters is likely to go mad, die, or both. 

The final secret to piece together is the fate of Xing. Returning to Zhou-Fu and speaking the incantation over his crystal will open the Central Gate. Beyond lies a boundless paradise he created in his mind. There, the people of Xing live on, working towards their ultimate goal of entering their own souls, thought to be the path to the true heaven.

Art by Shahab Alizadeh
This is basically what happens if you open the gate into Geta Vex’s head