Difficulty: ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Quality: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆
Uuuggghhh.
The puzzles mostly suck, to be honest. Of the 60 I solved (I did beat the game), 1 of them I would say is excellent, and the rest all ranged from "...ok, that's cool I guess" to "no, I don't want to solve another maze". Because that's what this game boils down to, unfortunately. It's just walking from A to B, where your options are slightly less obvious than they seem because of perspective adding/removing some. After you know the rules of exactly how perspective affects your options, the puzzles stop being interesting - you just get a bunch of new mechanics that don't have much of anything to do with the perspective shenanigans (move counters, buttons/doors, one-use tiles, pushable boxes, etc) and any novelty you see is in those rather than perspective. With worlds 5 and 6, this sort of stops being true - you do actually get a few neat interactions with perspective in those worlds, but a lot of puzzles still just feel like rehashes of previous ones. The puzzles after that, following one I will admit very cool reveal, don't do basically anything new in my opinion.
What's frustrating though, is not the bad parts of the game, but the good parts. In this game, every puzzle is paired with a little piece of story, often more related to the puzzle than it may look. While I don't like the puzzles themselves, the story is absolutely incredible. I happen to be one of the people managing a large community, the Baba Is You community (I'm in charge of the level competitions hosted there and a few other game-related things, as well as helping with general moderation), and while the story should be relatable to pretty much anyone who's been online a decent amount, this background caused me to see it in a different light that's much closer to me personally. The last few parts hit me like a truck. I will always prefer the "information game" method of telling stories, but as far as static stories go, this was amazing, and I will be thinking about it for a while.
But here's the thing: I as the player have no agency in this story. If I had watched a playthrough of this game instead of playing it myself, the story would have felt no different to me. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in my opinion if the gameplay is also good and worth doing, but it wasn't. It felt like I was forced to do puzzles I didn't want to do just so I could experience more of the story. So, at that point, why not just watch a playthrough instead? That, I think, is what I will do with the postgame, and what will be my recommendation to all of you.
(edit: I realized there were literally no full playthroughs on of this game on YouTube yet, so I got impatient and instead just decided to read all the monologue myself, or at least as much as I could. This went exactly the way I thought, on the occasions that I had some slight hope in the designer left and tried to solve the puzzle attached, it nearly always felt pointless, but the story I had left was engaging enough to continue. I stand by my recommendation to just watch a playthrough instead, and perhaps just wait until they exist first)
