What Would Baba Is You 2 Look Like?

Baba Is You (2019) (on Steam), is one of the most well-known puzzle games, a truly innovative game that turned the idea of "modifying rules as pieces of text you can manipulate" into a real game and explored the system massively. Unfortunately, I started my channel in 2022, having already played all of Baba Is You. While I did do a 'retrospective' talking over the game way later, I still miss that technically no one ever saw my reaction to the best moments in the game. And the game is amazing, many players don't even see the coolest layer of the game that is buried like 7 worlds deep, since it gets pretty difficult later on.

The game was so successful that custom level support with the Baba public level editor, and also full levelpack support with the Baba Make Level official update, which allowed fully ingame uploading of levels, a way to play levels in a curated Featured Levels list, introducing two new DLC's to the maingame ("New Adventures" which had 150 new levels and had almost a full game's worth of new words and worlds, and "Museum", a collection of cut content). The New Adventures pack releasing was actually the reason I started my channel, because I figured I may as well record it if I'm playing it anyway, and commentating was effectively free! (it's a topic for a future piece of content, but it is interesting the ways that commentating is not free anymore after 3-4 years of doing it)

Now, the creator of Taiji (another puzzle game you may know (it's an open world rule discovery game), and who is someone I've watched streams and devlogs for, for a while) occasionally mentions the opinion that New Adventures should have been a sequel instead of a free DLC expansion. This view should be tempered slightly by not having completed the games to a 'true ending' extent (I think), but I still think it's a very reasonable thing to say and I have been wondering about it for some time.

Like, the earlygame of New Adventures starts off strong with words like YOU2 which controls different characters based on WASD/arrow keys, and then the 3D property is completely insane and amazing, but ultimately, New Adventures is pretty normally paced and mostly just shows off new words (and art and music), and doesn't have any 'meta' shock like in the maingame (you should definitely play the game or at least watch my retrospective if you have not seen it!).

(The use of "YOU2" is also why sometimes the titles "Baba is You 2" or "Baba Is Two" have been thrown around.)

People may also expect a sequel to a game to look and play different (even in superficial ways), so something that played a bit too close to Baba might get a bit of the opposite criticism. So besides that you would expect a new mindblowing mechanic, I also think a sequel would want to tease hints of a new broader plot theming and aesthetic (which may seem not relevant, but I honestly think it is actually relevant). I know the second part is not really as interesting though, so I'll leave it for the end of this article.

This also ties into the second reason I started my channel, to experience the existing modding community. Being part of many previous ones I have come to expect modding communities have ideas can rival and sometimes surpass the maingame (with Portal, Terraria, Minecraft, Mario World romhacks, etc.) even if they are slightly janky and unpolished, I have always held deep respect for the sheer quality of the things you can find in them compared to their obscurity. It is a bit surprising to me that few others were doing modded Baba content.

Modded Content

Primary Sequelworthy Ideas

(Fun fact: this article is also doubling as a new player modpack recommendations list!)

Many packs I've played over the years have felt "sequelworthy" for having mechanics that feel unbelievably deep to think about and also have a huge novelty factor. Hempuli (the Baba Is You creator) has expressed not wanting to overlap custom mechanics in the past, so I am not suggesting to directly lift from any of these, but to see the potential as inspiration.

Letters+ by olie - (my playthrough) - The first levelpack I ever played that felt like a Baba sequel, with custom palettes, music, and art, as well as a satisfying conclusion to tie it up. This pack is so well liked that there are literally 4 fanpacks by different authors that directly are expansions of this one, which isn't even including the 2.0 release that added even more endgame content (a small bit of it even directly expands on something I thought of during my playthrough!). The original Baba Is You only had a small mini world that letters were used in. This pack's incredible variations on letters double-reading, abbreviations, heiroglyphics, and one of the best meta moments that I was shocked the maingame of Baba didn't do. I really love this pack!

Persistence by Randomiser - Introduces only one new word, PERSIST. But this word has immensely high sequel 'feeling'. A rule like KEY IS PERSIST means that if you complete the level with a key anywhere in the level, it remains in that location despite changing levels. You can bring items from and to the map, between levels, and it gets out of hand fast. While the mechanic delivers in the vibe of an incredibly powerful word, the difficulty to intuitively picture how the levels connect together is a bit overwhelming due to the far larger problem space (it's a very difficult pack). You could even potentially imagine a 3D overlay to make this pack easier to visualize, and potentially a more "3D" based theming.

Metatatext by Batata - (my playthrough) - Introduces metatext which references specific text. In the basegame, targets . But metatext: targets . This also means there are infinite layers of metatext and new types of possible structures.

I remember how awesome and strange it was to play with basegame "self-referential" or "meta-referential" mechanics like TEXT, WORD, EMPTY, and ALL. Those were already insane to see in a game, and so there's something very pure and thematic about this levelpack. It isn't the only metatext pack nowadays, but the level design is very faithful and great.

THE GENRE MOD by Shake Well - (my playthrough, in two parts) - I'm including this because of the 'theming' aspect of a sequel I mentioned. In this pack, for example, GENRE IS TEXT that can change the game into a text adventure, but this word "GENRE" can also be used to turn the game into door-opening inventory management puzzles, a puzzle platformer, and more. The levels are actually more traditionally puzzle-game than Baba Is You, but the theming is absolutely wonderful and unique. Check out the creator's other packs for other incredible story-gameplay merging.

An excellent mention to Edit the Levels by hutt3 (my playthrough) - a pack where you can use the level editor, with different tile types that restrict you on what you can place or edit the levels with. This pack is so great, but it's not 'native' to Baba: ultimately the player has to follow the rules on how to edit the levels, and it's a bit awkward to have to turn on a debug setting (to be able to press F3 to enter the level editor whenever you want) to play this pack in the best way*to enable debug mode: if you are on windows: press windows+r, type %appdata%, search for the Baba Is You folder, open SettingsC.txt, search the [settings] section and type anywhere in it: debug=1. Despite that, it is a great, great pack!

Secondary Sequelworthy Ideas

There are also many levelpacks that involve new words - coded either by hidden text (a technique that honestly feels rather unique to Baba Is You, that involves seamlessly simulating the behavior of truly coding in a custom property), or coded with actual Lua scripting. Some of these are really exciting and have a lot of potential, and of course a sequel should want to explore different properties. But they are less sequel-defining in a way.

Nimi's Garden by Marlowe, uses the 'Mega Modpack', a massive combination of fanmade words. This pack is often recommended to people, because it has a similar feel to New Adventures in playing with a bunch of new words, and also has incredibly elegant level design where there are not many overwhelming rules, but the puzzle is still tricky and unobvious.

Unfortunately, I don't have a full playthrough on this, but I know others love this pack! The main reason is because Modded Medley (my playthrough) by hutt3, also uses this same modpack, and I played it in full. That's just an awkward tendency for packs covering the same thing. (The same effect sort of happens for packs made prior to New Adventures to feel 'overlapped' as they were once thought of as "editor-exclusive" words instead of "New Adventures" words - in fact, "Repose" by the same creator, one of the earliest packs I played, could be classified as a New Adventures-overlap...)

There are also more obscure levelpacks that involve a lot of new words: check out "Baba Is You but it's a Parallel Universe" and "Baba Is You Parallel Universe Mega Modpack". (These videos are older and I made too many of them, but if you're wondering how to fix that Discord broke links from being linkable everywhere, you may need to post the Discord to yourself in one of your own servers to download the pack, sorry about that!)

Everypence, by the same creator as Letters+, has custom art, music, cutscenes, and 4 original words, but uses an entire world for each of them (and then a finale conclusion world). This came out before Nimi's Garden and was a huge innovation in story-gameplay at the time, I love the music and vibes of this pack.

Tertiary Sequelworthy Ideas

These ideas are great, but have 'problems' or aren't as deep as they may appear.

Color Conquest - This is my pack, actually! A short 10-level pack made for a levelmaking competition, with a very slight alternative rule that allows the vanilla color words like RED and BLUE to be more than just aesthetic. I am still proud of it to this day, even if the level design is a bit imperfect.

One obvious problem is colorblindness.

One less obvious problem: This idea is not deep enough, as color identification is not going to last for a full game. A different Lingo map I made (spoilers to mention it) does it better due to that game being 3D.

One problem: it uses the New Adventures word 'FEELING', which creates slightly awkward statements to read like "ALL FEELING RED IS YOU" and it doesn't even feel official even though it is part of the maingame now. It reminds me of discussions of the 'IF' word in Baba (and why there is no pack with the word "IF"), as you could make "ALL IF RED IS YOU", but there are grammar ambiguities and expectations of making statements like "IF BABA IS RED WALL IS YOU".

There are also many other packs of this theme of taking a property the maingame didn't use, and exploring it:

Taking Inventory Demo by DogeIsCut - (my playthrough) - for an inventory system in baba
In Control by SpecialAPI - (my playthrough) - making editing keyboard controls a puzzle mechanic, but this isn't mobile/switch compatible
Computer Keys by Ocean - (my playthrough) - collecting keyboard keys and using them like a metroidvania, this pack is still so high potential honestly.

There are also many packs with alternate rulesets like Word Scramble and Project Iterate. Many baba is you packs don't even have visible text, some of them recreate other games!

Finally, many levelpacks are about completely different types of parsing, which can sometimes be abstract and unintuitive. I am most recently playing a lot of packs by theominouspigeon that explore a lot of new parsing systems!

My Personal Thoughts

Hmm that was very long oh well oh no should I have elaborated more on specific examples of things in the pack but that's spoilers oh no

There was a smaller video I made at the end of 2023 - Baba Is You and the Best Cursed Levelpack Ideas - which involve some meta ideas of this kind. However, assuming I'd never played a Baba custom pack at all (not making any overlaps with the above)

• Truly good looking 3D: When I'm thinking of this, I'm thinking of how Risk of Rain 2, a sequel to a 2D platformer, turned 3D. Now, the "3D" property in New Adventures, once you actually play with it, is mostly a visual thing that's kind of cumbersome to play with (due to the disorientation and additional moves you must make when turning). My imagination of a 3D baba sequel would have much more 'satisfyingly animated' fluffy characters, probably not much verticality, but still be grid-based except when 'actions' happen.
• Much more visceral levels-in-levels: Baba Is You's "meta" about levels is partially getting a 'has been done' effect to some extent, as games like Maxwell's puzzling demon use levels becoming other objects and introduce it really early. There's still room to make this somehow feel unique in a sequel though, like massive rooms (each level) being formed, appearing and disappearing in and out of the environment. You'd probably want to avoid this feeling too much like just "Patrick's Parabox in Baba" though.
• Zooming into any object: This idea is inspired from some almost-forgotten puzzle games like SCALE and The Magic Circle - but it's the idea of being able to zoom into any object to edit or analyze it. In Baba, this could be a way to explore and edit the 'rules' of an object, or to have a different puzzle that is hidden inside the object. This may be hard to visualize how, but you could imagine a "hyperspeed warp tunnel" themed and shaped like it's the word or object you zoom in on.

Finally, I asked Hempuli, the inventor of Baba Is You, about the potential of a sequel on stream:

"I do have a bunch of notes about what I would want to do with what what I would want to do with a sequel. I think I have enough ideas to justify making a sequel. The problem is mostly that the idea of making a sequel to Baba Is You would be quite a big undertaking. It would require also me learning a bunch of new stuff that I don't currently have a good grasp on, and so I've been kind of simultaneously wanting to start working on that eventually, but also kind of dreading it because I know that it's going to be a major thing."

Conclusion

I've always thought after playing a game "they could have done more with the concept", for basically any game. Games with a sandbox vibe, though, can provide so much more depth and potential. It may even be a great design challenge to think of 100 mods of a game after playing it - I've never been satisfied at even short story based experiences that people consider perfect and not easy to make a sequel to. It is unbelievably possible, and I hope this article shows that!