A surprisingly emotional half time travelling puzzle, half visual novel about a potential afterlife. Follow the story of the Babel and its crew and passengers as the passengers navigate towards reincarnation.
After a short tutorial, you follow Braith and his daughter Lake on their journey through the Babel and learn how the ship operates and how things work. A lot of this game is about discovery and learning, so I’m hesitent to give anything away. I’ll stick to stuff that happens in the tutorial, and maybe a hook for the game’s main mystery.
The Babel is an afterlife ship. Anyone who dies in the human world has their soul brought aboard by the pufferfish, and then after some disinfection for lore reasons, they are brought through the various facilities of the Babel, such as the Dream-mail boxes that allow them to send their final message to their loved ones as dreams, and the Memory Factory, which wipes the soul’s memories and prepares them to reincarnate again. It’s a rather dark process when you think about it, but that’s just the natural cycle of life. It would be very weird if you could remember your previous lives after all, though fate may still find a way.
Finally after the Dripwood carinval, the souls are sent back to Earth via cloud cannon to be reborn anew.
But well, this is a story being recounted through a mysterious book that fell from the sky.
And stories have twists and turns and dead ends (which kind of sounds familliar). However unlike Beacon Pines, instead of investigating different branches of the same story, A Guidebook of Babel works more with the linear flow of time. At certain points, the only way to break past a dead end and progress the plot is to restart the stage, or go back to a previous stage, and rewrite history. Changing the script, as it were. Then the changes propogate forwards and you’ll find yourself with extra items or in different circumstances the second time around.
The game follows 4 character’s perspectives, though giving away anyone other than Braith might be a bit of a spoiler. This game is full of plenty of twists of its own after all. Not just the ones you make happen.
The game has a sort of clue system that isn’t strictly necessary to proceed with the plot, but can help in a bind, or confirm your own deductions. Every time you encounter something important, you unlock an event token. During quests, you can link these event tokens together to form a chain of causality, and then going to the start of that chain can clue you in to what specific change you have to make earlier on.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1467920 £12.79
Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/A-Guidebook-of-Babel-2415471.html £14.39
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