Babbdi

2024-02-22
What if someone designed a soviet bloc era city while simultaneously on LSD and having a stroke? I imagine you'd get something that looks a bit like Babbdi. The architecture, the weird lore, objects adoring shelves, even the weird, mishappen faces on the people in the world are close enough to reality to be recognizable but when scrutinized at all are a bit fucked. Even the menus are a bit incoherent, I tried to check the resolution settings and ended up in a state where I had to restart the game. I wasn't sure if that was a bug or a design decision.

The actual game is centered around you trying to get out of Babbdi. The people are where you start mention needing a train ticket and your search for this ticket is the impetus for exploring the weird world that's been crafted. What's brilliant is all you can do it walk, run, interact with things, and, most importantly, equip one item and use it. The first item you find is a bat which when you swing it knocks you backwards quite far. What seems odd initially you quickly realize is a method of traversal. I used the bat to scale the entire outer wall of Babbdi to see if I could escape that way. Not possible, sure, but I had discovered the spirit of the items in the game. You find a motorcycle that just makes you go really fast. You can use that to scale the whole level in record time. You find a pickaxe that allows you scale any flat surface by jumping, sticking the axe in the wall, then jumping again. If you use this you can find a little gyrocopter thing, the ultimate item, that enables you to literally fly through the whole level in about 10 seconds.

And that's it. You can finish this game in 2 or 3 minutes. And even if you don't you'll likely finish it in an hour. It's a delightful little snack of weirdness sure. But it's also a great little capsule of game design where everything that's in the game is kind of fun and doesn't care too much about balance. In that, Babbdi's surreal incoherence resolves into sublime genius.