(Image credit: Hempuli Oy)

Baba is You is about as cool as puzzle games get, and PC Gamer contributor Philippa Warr agreed, scoring the game an exceptional 90% back when it released. But like most puzzle games, I binged it once with no plans to return until my withering hippocampus had fully lost all the puzzle solutions. To my elation, 2026 is starting with a delightful surprise: a major update to Baba Is You with all sorts of new words, objects and modding tools.

The update is detailed in a Steam community blog post, which reasons "This will most probably be the final large update for BIY." It seems to be primarily targeted at modders, but contains five new words for use in custom levels: become, facedby, hold, happy, and angry.

If you've never played Baba is You, words change the way a given level works as you construct condition-altering sentences. For instance, Baba is Happy would theoretically make the player character happy… what effect that would have on a puzzle, I'm not sure.

There's also a bunch of new sprites, including a fox, a bean, a hot dog, a cactus, and so on. This is all tailor-made for Baba's detailed (and cross-platform!) level editor, which was released back in 2021. If you haven't revisited Baba since then, players have made all sorts of custom levels in the meantime—some of the best ones are accessible from the "featured" section of the game's main menu. Given how mind-bending some of the base game's puzzles are, it's hard to imagine what sort of shenanigans fans have cooked up.

It's not stuffed with new levels like some previous free updates for the game—at least, as far as I can tell—but it's nice to see the game introducing new toys to mess around with so many years after its initial release. Baba is You might sear my neurons with its hardest puzzles, but over half a decade on, I've still never played anything quite like it. That's worth celebrating, even in 2026.

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Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica. Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...