A cleverly challenging puzzle game disguised as a grid-based strategy | Review - Mobile Suit Baba

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✨Overview

Mobile Suit Baba is turn-based strategy/puzzle game, combining the charm of Baba Is You (from the same creator Hempuli) with the inspiration drawn from Subset Games' Into the Breach. This fusion results in a unique gaming experience that challenges players with intricate logic puzzles the encourages, no, requires players to break the rules of the game. The game is currently available for free on Itch.io, with an upcoming price of $4 after December 27. And no, this game is not related to Gundam. 🟩Pros

+Creative fusion of Strategy and Puzzle game mechanics +Elaborate puzzle/level design and mission/character variety +Clever use of words and ‘programming’ to alter the rules of the game +Free to claim until December 27, and then after at a cheap price of $4

🟥Cons

-Can be brutally challenging, missions can be difficult to solve -Can be quite repetitive since it will require a lot of restarts and do-overs

⭐️Score: 8/10

📖Story and Premise

Mobile Suit Baba is set in a futuristic idyllic world where society has improved greatly upon the invention of the “Quantum Fruit Stockpiling Technology” , Massive animal looking robots have been developed to handle these stockpiling operations and its defense. However, a mysterious force aims to steal all the fruit. 🎨Visuals and Art

Mobile Suit Baba adopts a minimalistic and super retro visual style featuring anthropomorphic characters and complemented by an 8-bit soundtrack. The graphics may be simple, but the gameplay is definitely modern in its idea and mechanics, combining grid-based strategy with clever wordplay and programming mechanics. It offers a nostalgic yet an intellectually stimulating experience. 🎮Gameplay

At its core, Mobile Suit Baba is a puzzle game disguised as a grid-based strategy title. The game introduces clever use of words and ‘programming’, allowing players to alter the rules of the game dynamically. The game starts off relatively mild, just “visit” all the cities on the map, meaning moving on the city tiles at least once; and then it ups the objectives and introduces more elements as you complete more missions. Fruits to protect and avoid stepping on, Enemy Skulls and Robots to defeat, Hills to destroy, Rivers to cross, and more. And the solution isn’t as straightforward as you think like in a typical video game. Here, the rules are deliberately made to be broken. The objectives in each mission become progressively challenging, requiring players to think strategically and manipulate the environment to satisfy mission criteria. 🌍Missions

The objective is clear: foil the plans of the fruit-stealing force through 43 missions filled with tactical challenges, presenting players with a variety of objectives to accomplish within a set turn limit. The complexity of the missions lies in the deliberate breaking of rules, forcing players to think outside the conventional gaming norms. Within each level, the rules manifest as literal word tiles on the map, in which you can either move them or destroy them. Through manipulation, players can alter these rules, reshaping the level dynamics and giving rise to some intriguing interactions. For example. “Water is Sink” means travelling on water is impossible and any units that will attempt will sink. “Fruit is Weak” means the Fruit will get destroyed the moment you step on it. Pushing the “Water” word out breaks the sentence and thus changes the rules, which now makes Water traversable. Breaking the sentence will invalidate the rule and change the situation, and you can even form new sentences and see the results. Without breaking the rules, some of the objectives will seem impossible. For example, there was a mission where I had to defeat a lot of Skulls, only one of my unit was actually capable of killing them, and it isn’t enough for the default 5 turn limit of the mission. I had to push the word “Defeat” and the word “is” across the map and together with “Fire”, form the sentence “Fire is Defeat” in order to turn all the Fire tiles into something that can kill the Skulls, and I proceeded to push every Skull into the fire tiles to satisfy all the objectives before the turn limit ended. There are various units and characters available for missions, each possessing distinct speeds and abilities that players can utilize. Some units can dash forward across the map, others can push units over long distances, some can throw units on an arc to bypass obstacles, and some can outright destroy both units and blocks. Each unit introduces a unique approach to tackling missions and objectives. Having said that; It’s quite a small game that matches its asking price, the missions are all there is to the game. ⏫Difficulty

The missions provide a truly brain-teasing experience; very difficult and challenging and not everyone will appreciate this. However, there missions are by no means impossible. Completing them WILL require numerous restarts and undos, at least in my experience. Fortunately, one silver lining is that the game is quite forgiving, offering players ample opportunities for do-overs.

You can easily restart the entire turn if you make a mistake or undo a single move at a time. If all else fails, restarting the entire mission is just as straightforward — although it can be quite repetitive when it comes to it. Additionally, for particularly challenging scenarios, you have the option to decrease the difficulty by extending the turn limit with a + 1 or +3 option; although I found it does actually increases the difficulty in Fruit Survival missions, where you have to stop the enemies from destroying the Fruits because it gives you a longer timer that you need to survive. 📊Technical Performance

There’s not much to talk about, as the game is just 20MB it can basically run on anything. However one gripe I had is that there was no way to change the resolution of the game. Playing in Window mode will result in to a very small window with no way to adjust. ⚖️Conclusion As a free-to-claim title until December 27 on Itch.io, Mobile Suit Baba is a delightful early holiday gift that is surely worth a play to any Into The Breach or Baba Is You fans out there. Even if you happen to miss the deal and are already reading this review post Dec 27, the $4 price is almost like a gift in itself still. If you love brain-teasing puzzle strategy games, thinking out of the box, and don’t mind the minimalistic retro visuals, then you’ll sure love Mobile Suit Baba, a game where the rules are made to be broken.

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