My Favorite Troll Levels in Baba is You and other Puzzle Games
I recently finished an ultimate Baba troll levelpack that's in my Baba Is You Troll Levels playlist.
There's a prokopetz post with 8000 notes (so quite 'viral' there), which I will describe in text:
The Baba Is You modding community is sort of the exact opposite of every other video gaming modding community in that the troll levels are actually more interesting and accessible than the ones that purport to take the game and its design principles seriously. The "serious" level packs are like "here's a level that expects you to keep track of thirty plus unmodifiable rules and accepts exactly one valid solution which obliges you to carry out a two hundred step procedure to pile six different instructions on top of each other and exploit an obscure text stacking priority mechanic in a way that's deeply counterintuitive but technically base-game legal", while the "troll" level packs are like "let's see how long it takes them to notice that the pause button is an interactable object", and I'm 100% prepared to argue that the latter is more true to the base game's driving ethos than the former.
For me I personally feel deeply influencing to this quote because my Baba Is You custom videos, especially of me playing a levelpack that basically does what is described in that quote, a video with 70k views. Other levelpacks by this creator have also been incredibly well received, although the creator (AnActualCat) has the same problem I do with extremely high quality and unfinished projects for both Baba and Lingo.
Now is the quote true? Well, I probably wouldn't have written it, there's a sense of "sensationalized misconception debunky" that I don't like even though it was successful. I would be concerned about being perceived as insulting anyone who made levels that are intended to be fair and difficult and framing it like it's some sort of 300-step slog, as those levels do very much often intend to show a cool thing about the game.
First though, I have two playable Baba Is You custom levels I'm still very proud of, one of which I still have never really shown off in a video.
Use the levelcodes I2K3-M1MX and Y4WU-LXXG ingame to check them out. These are also levels that I've really enjoyed streamers' reactions for as well.
My thoughts on it, spoilered:
Key Change
It actually shocks me this was never used in the basegame. The closest thing I can think of would be one of the levels involving the 'WORD' property, where you have to literally think 'outside the box' because the WORD property makes it harder to detect the possibility of making certain rules. It's just so elegant, fitting the aesthetic of Baba, and without requiring custom code or reskinned sprites or anything, only an unobvious aspect of how a player would see a level.
Not As It Seams
The word "PIXEL" is a real vanilla word, but isn't ever used for the player and is editor-only, and ideally needs to be reskinned to be used like this. Gridlines also can spoil it. Besides that though, I literally always wanted a level interacting with the edge or border. This is sort of that but in a way, Baba still doesn't deliver on the full potential of this idea, as no level truly makes you go outside the border or anything. That's probably because you either couldn't see what was offscreen or it would add ridiculously cursed requirements to turn the game into a secret open world (also an option, honestly).
Watch a twitch clip of Not As It Seams, today now!
I mentioned my Baba Is You Troll Levels playlist before but I'd like to drop some personal highlights and history of them.
- Baba Is You but it's MORE troll levels: This levelpack was basically the first levelpack I had seen in my recommended page that got me into thinking about Baba customs for the first time and therefore played a small part in my channel's entire existence. It's got great jokes about using sentences that don't parse as anything or do anything special in normal Baba logic, but if you apply real-world logic or try to treat it like a real sentence then it 'works'.
- Baba Is You but it slowly gets more cursed: This pack takes the letters mechanic from the basegame and bends the rules slightly, just a bit, until it became a 3-parter series from all of the directions it went with it.
And finally the "Sus" Levels compilation where every level has a reveal that you must see for yourself, this is often a super rare reveal in other games:
Analysis
Troll levels are probably some sort of "acquired taste". You need to fully have the experience of respecting a system and its intent first to be able to appreciate the feeling of intentionally destroying your hard-earned symbol understanding with cursed math.
Ever since I've been making games, I've wondered if troll levels get in the way of making the game seem like a serious product. Having played games like Impossible Quiz and such, my personal taste is that it should get right to the action with these things.
I never found it too dissonant or stupid - even math can be 'trolly' if a problem is way easier than expected due to a trick. It's very easy for lateral outside-the-box thinking to generally have a trollish nature to it even though 'question your assumptions' is a very standard operation in puzzle games. But then, I wonder, if you introduce a completely new mechanic that is thematically fitting but mechanically completely unexpected, especially early on in the game, does this unknowingly lock you out of a lot of players who find the game too stupid to engage with?
You can also compare it with memes of a game, which often point out something in a game, or apply the 'wrong type' of logic to a game on purpose, but often are not 'tastefully' done. Not in the usual sense of 'tasteful' as appropriate, but are done to be one-off disposable jokes. What if instead, like with games like DDLC and Undertale, some of their best moments are basically memes dressed up in a way more professional context?
This is also reminiscent of Layton trick questions where a problem implies complicated math but then due to wording or a subtlety the answer is just 0 or something. This style of puzzle was always occasionally in Layton but became even more common in the fan-unloved Layton's Mystery Journey. Except unlike most people I literally loved every time that game did it.
My Games
I really, really enjoy this genre. I've made two 'main' games in this genre: Move Counters that get more cursed is that genre of troll game (I've even uploaded a video of my favorite streamer playing it), and Minescryer which is a much shorter experience.
However, I'm worried that there is a huge problem that I've unintentionally deeply filteredthere were 2 puzzle game developers, highly respcted, one did not understand the "Row Counter" mechanic and quit, one got through most of the game but spent a very long time on the Row Counter/Diagonal Counter sequence that I expected to be short. Those have no troll elements in them. I truly hope they give it a proper finish but it really makes you think. Especially gives you thoughts on all the testing and 'rounded corners' of a game like Portal 2. the amount of people who can play my game this way. And not even because of the trolling part, but because of the expectation of a player getting the hang of a game early enough to appreciate its systems first while still also getting the sense that it's a troll-game early. Which might be too much to compress in a short timeframe.
I'm grateful to koo-koo who has spiritually continued the 'games that get more cursed' series with Increasingly Cursed Knight Puzzles and Increasingly Cursed Wordle Puzzles and Increasingly Cursed Emoji Puzzles but I would bet those games also have unnoticed accessibility, ease of early confusion issues, not obvious to those who love and go through troll experiences smoothly. (Fun fact the inventors/fans who made various fanbooks of the Cursed Knight Puzzles are doing a collab right now)
For contrast, a different game "Strange Jigsaws" also has troll and weird vibes but seems more accessible to people. Now this is not completely a fair comparison as the creator has somewhat more of an audience than me. But still, I think it doesn't have this problem because it doesn't really have a system to try to establish and subvert, besides just the imagery of the jigsaw piece in odd places.
It's why my most recent games have been both more 'serious' and 'hooky', I suppose.
Other Games
Here are some screenshots of moments from other games I greatly enjoyed:
(Oh my god there surely are more examples than just these, but I must release this article today to not disappoint people)
Parabox has optional levels that often have custom code or are just unusual in another way, that could be considered 'troll' levels. These bonus/appendix levels, half of them are unusual in level design, the other are unusual in aesthetics, or something like that.
In particular the last image is very cursed for someone who's played the game but less obvious why if you haven't. I wish Parabox Open 5 was still a thing.
The game Islands of Insight that I worked on, eventually had a 'Trickster Island' full of troll puzzles and things exploring edge cases. I'm so glad this island made it into the game. You can look at these puzzles just in this article.
The game Bilattice also has a few moments I loved. One of these images is too good and has too much buildup to share and has no trolling but is a buildup to the trolling. The other you can spot the troll just from the single image, but probably not instantly.
Finally there are moments in Lingo custom maps like Ice Height but also involve way more context to understand.
Please remind me for more examples.
Comments and Appendix