Escape First Alchemist
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A Guidebook of Babel is a story-adventure game based on the butterfly effect. It was released in 2022 during the Nintendo Indie World showcase!
You will go on a strange rebirth adventure on Babel. The crew would use Memory Extractor to erase your memories before launching you into the afterlife with the cloud cannon. Passengers frequently moan that it's too late to say farewell to the past, but the crew's prime focus is gathering memories as fuel!
If you enjoy absorbing stories and mind-bo...
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Release date:
2 August 2023
Recent Steam reviews:
Mixed
(10)
All Steam reviews:
Very positive
(731)
Visuals
Game features
Description
A Guidebook of Babel is a story-adventure game based on the butterfly effect. It was released in 2022 during the Nintendo Indie World showcase!
You will go on a strange rebirth adventure on Babel. The crew would use Memory Extractor to erase your memories before launching you into the afterlife with the cloud cannon. Passengers frequently moan that it's too late to say farewell to the past, but the crew's prime focus is gathering memories as fuel!
If you enjoy absorbing stories and mind-boggling puzzles, you've come to the right spot! Across four chapters, you'll need to go back in time and subtly rewrite history, trigger the butterfly effect, solve the puzzles hidden in it, and even change the future of Babel!
From the drenched deck to the bustling Central Station, the busy Memory Factory to the empty Giant Boiler...... Explore the Babel, meet panic-stricken humans and tough crew members, and investigate unprecedented instruments and strange creatures!
You need to help the trapped characters overcome difficulties: escape from the Interrogation Room, collect Stonehearth Crab Egg, and find mysterious signal sources... Don't expect to succeed with brute force!
Fortunately, you can travel back in time and discover what put them into trouble. Once you've located the crucial event, you can rewrite it with the pen in your hand. This move will immediately trigger a butterfly effect, change the plot's path, and reverse the current situation!
Feeling clueless? Then make use of this notebook. It will guide you through the process of assembling the collected evidence into a comprehensive reasoning chain!
The pilot stuck in the monsoon, the head chef worrying about the canned food, the swimming team captain chasing fugitives...... Oh, and the poor circus clown looking for his daughter! The fates of the characters complement each other, and this is destined to be a tragicomedy about separation.
Combining cute and funny, retro and cartoon, Babel is about to set sail. Grab your boat ticket, step on the deck, and enjoy the carnival!
Configurations
- Windows
- MacOS
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A cute game about helping serendipity along through altering various links in the chain of events.
The dead in this universe gather on a Pratchett-esque ship just before reincarnating, attended to by a supernatural crew not too dissimilar from a normal cruise line staff. All is not well however, as reluctant reincarnees butt heads with security, ambitious middle managers arrange crisis opportunities and slivers of a vaster world makes itself known through the politics of this wierd afterlife's factions.
Through a series of random events, key characters off a lost ship become embroiled in each other's stories and have to puzzle their way to as happy of an ending as the dead can expect!
So it's a bittersweet story about love!
And also a puzzle game!
Said puzzles mostly consist of playing it along until the characters reach unsurmountable impediments, after which point you can go back to a previous level to "rewrite" an event, item placement or the like, for use later on. While this at times is both intuitive and fun enough to really be engaging, it will rarely demand much more from players than a single change per puzzle. As such, especially in the beginning, most puzzles feel like they are mainly about trying to figure out the slightly convoluted interface. After that point it becomes curious fun rather than a challenge.
Sometimes you can feel how an interface is good enough to just define, or for that matter develop, a genre going forward.
The original System Shock's inventory system comes to mind.
The one here isn't that, but it is at the very least unique and fresh and there is value in that!
Stronger than the gameplay, I'd wager the story and artstyle will be the main things that keep people playing. Set during a period of two days, each time of day will coincide with a level to play. Sometimes character timelines occur simultaneously, with the opportunity to intersect storylines, while at other times levels are short intermissions to move the story forward. You can also collect little mementos to unlock backstory for some of the game's characters. There is more here than I expected, alluding to a sort of Culture Revolution-esque exodus event, as well as more personal tragedies in the tough lives led by the cast. Be aware that while all characters can collect these, an item is needed to do so that not all of them get their hands on until different points in the story.
The amount to do per level will vary from level to level from being pretty involved to being basically a little cutscene. You'll also often have to go back and alter an event to fit a character need later on. Much of your time will therefore be spent retracing your steps and replaying levels, which could easily have become incredibly tedious were it not for the game coming with a couple quality of life features to deal with this:
Fast forwarding is available for almost every conversation you've seen once, and levels with multiple objectives will start at junctions that require alterations to be made.
Thanks to this, you get to play time detective without having to feel like you're punished for exploring, or wasting your time, and a full playthrough where you see everything took me about 12 hours, most of which were new chapters.
The themes of memory and death is handled well, even if at times it feels a bit in media res what we are supposed to know, suss out or is to remain mystical in regards to world mythology. And the implications of This last one is not really analysed even as it is absolutely a major part of both what gets the plot going and how the ship operates, and in other titles it could easily have been the main driving question asked to characters, players or even devs to answer and ponder.
Even so, it is clear that the devs at StarryStarry has had a lot of time to think about this world and how it works, which is why it might not always have been clear to them what is and isn't explained or explored deeper. A bit like Stranger Things and it's 40-page off-screen lore repository, but there are worse media to be compared to :)
Translation from original Chinese to the English version I played is pretty good! As a non-native speaker I'm not about to give anybody crap for not going for perfect grammar, and having a sometimes strange inflection or word use shine through feels charming and genuine to me. In universe it fit the theme of this otherworld well (Who's to say that's not just how they talk onboard) and on a meta level made me feel cosmopolitan reading a translation of something written so far away. Good feeling. I should probably look for more games from The Middle K.
Rounding out, I left the experience feeling emotionally satisified. A little sad, a little happy, but not really overmuch in either direction. It never strays far from where you might expect the story to go, but executes it hitting all the notes.
I didn't however feel like I'd gotten my fill of puzzles, and as far as gameplay goes there is much to be improved if the devs want to go at it again; which they definitely should.
Not quite the gut-punch of Spiritfarer, that broke everybody's heart back in 20XX, and not a Lucasarts clicker classic, but absolutely a cute gem to play at least once and put in the memory bank!
The dead in this universe gather on a Pratchett-esque ship just before reincarnating, attended to by a supernatural crew not too dissimilar from a normal cruise line staff. All is not well however, as reluctant reincarnees butt heads with security, ambitious middle managers arrange crisis opportunities and slivers of a vaster world makes itself known through the politics of this wierd afterlife's factions.
Through a series of random events, key characters off a lost ship become embroiled in each other's stories and have to puzzle their way to as happy of an ending as the dead can expect!
So it's a bittersweet story about love!
And also a puzzle game!
Said puzzles mostly consist of playing it along until the characters reach unsurmountable impediments, after which point you can go back to a previous level to "rewrite" an event, item placement or the like, for use later on. While this at times is both intuitive and fun enough to really be engaging, it will rarely demand much more from players than a single change per puzzle. As such, especially in the beginning, most puzzles feel like they are mainly about trying to figure out the slightly convoluted interface. After that point it becomes curious fun rather than a challenge.
Sometimes you can feel how an interface is good enough to just define, or for that matter develop, a genre going forward.
The original System Shock's inventory system comes to mind.
The one here isn't that, but it is at the very least unique and fresh and there is value in that!
Stronger than the gameplay, I'd wager the story and artstyle will be the main things that keep people playing. Set during a period of two days, each time of day will coincide with a level to play. Sometimes character timelines occur simultaneously, with the opportunity to intersect storylines, while at other times levels are short intermissions to move the story forward. You can also collect little mementos to unlock backstory for some of the game's characters. There is more here than I expected, alluding to a sort of Culture Revolution-esque exodus event, as well as more personal tragedies in the tough lives led by the cast. Be aware that while all characters can collect these, an item is needed to do so that not all of them get their hands on until different points in the story.
The amount to do per level will vary from level to level from being pretty involved to being basically a little cutscene. You'll also often have to go back and alter an event to fit a character need later on. Much of your time will therefore be spent retracing your steps and replaying levels, which could easily have become incredibly tedious were it not for the game coming with a couple quality of life features to deal with this:
Fast forwarding is available for almost every conversation you've seen once, and levels with multiple objectives will start at junctions that require alterations to be made.
Thanks to this, you get to play time detective without having to feel like you're punished for exploring, or wasting your time, and a full playthrough where you see everything took me about 12 hours, most of which were new chapters.
The themes of memory and death is handled well, even if at times it feels a bit in media res what we are supposed to know, suss out or is to remain mystical in regards to world mythology. And the implications of This last one is not really analysed even as it is absolutely a major part of both what gets the plot going and how the ship operates, and in other titles it could easily have been the main driving question asked to characters, players or even devs to answer and ponder.
Even so, it is clear that the devs at StarryStarry has had a lot of time to think about this world and how it works, which is why it might not always have been clear to them what is and isn't explained or explored deeper. A bit like Stranger Things and it's 40-page off-screen lore repository, but there are worse media to be compared to :)
Translation from original Chinese to the English version I played is pretty good! As a non-native speaker I'm not about to give anybody crap for not going for perfect grammar, and having a sometimes strange inflection or word use shine through feels charming and genuine to me. In universe it fit the theme of this otherworld well (Who's to say that's not just how they talk onboard) and on a meta level made me feel cosmopolitan reading a translation of something written so far away. Good feeling. I should probably look for more games from The Middle K.
Rounding out, I left the experience feeling emotionally satisified. A little sad, a little happy, but not really overmuch in either direction. It never strays far from where you might expect the story to go, but executes it hitting all the notes.
I didn't however feel like I'd gotten my fill of puzzles, and as far as gameplay goes there is much to be improved if the devs want to go at it again; which they definitely should.
Not quite the gut-punch of Spiritfarer, that broke everybody's heart back in 20XX, and not a Lucasarts clicker classic, but absolutely a cute gem to play at least once and put in the memory bank!
11th February 2025
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