A Guidebook of Babel asks you to work through silly, puzzling situations, but if you get them wrong, the day repeats to give you another chance to get things right.
The game takes the concept of the butterfly effect and turns it into a game. Basically, you need to re-do a scene, time and time again, until you figure out the best way to achieve it. This gives you time to learn and explore, while also giving you quite the challenge.
In the small demo of The Guidebook of Babel that I was able to play at GDC, I seemed to have been trapped inside a lab. Someone else, who was trying to help me, was stuck under a vent that had an ice cream machine on top of it. I needed to find a way to break them out and escape before the guards came. Walking around the area, there were tons of things to interact with, but it was often hard to decide what the best course of action was.
I thought I could pull the ice cream machine off of the vent, but things weren’t that straightforward and I ended up trying to empty the machine by dumping out all of the ice cream, which didn’t work out so well and coated my friend in the sweet dessert. Soon, the guards came and it was clear that I was out of time – and then I got to try again.
Though I started on a hard level in A Guidebook of Babel, the game itself had a really interesting art style that sucked me in. The dialogue is funny, unpredictable, and makes for a great narrative-driven adventure game that looks like it gets to some wacky and fun situations within the gameplay itself. I didn’t have much time to play around in this level, but it’s a game I will be keeping my eye on as development continues, and you should too!
A Guidebook of Babel is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can add it to your Steam Wishlist.
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