A Guidebook of Babel

A Guidebook of Babel sets you on board the Babel, a strange cruise ship that ferries souls toward the afterlife. The crew's job is mechanical: extract your memories with a special device, fire you out of the cloud cannon, move on to the next passenger. Most travelers complain that there wasn't enough time to say goodbye to anything. The crew doesn't care. Memories are fuel.

The game runs across four chapters, and the central tool is a pen that lets you write into the past. When a character on the ship is stuck — the pilot trapped in a monsoon, the chef out of canned food, the swim-team captain chasing a fugitive, the circus clown looking for his missing daughter — you can trace the chain of events back to a critical moment, edit it, and watch the butterfly effect ripple forward through the present. The puzzle is figuring out which moment to change.

A notebook in the game acts as a reasoning aid: collected clues assemble into a chain of inference that helps you spot exactly where to intervene. The Babel itself is the world — drenched decks, the bustling Central Station, the Memory Factory, the empty Giant Boiler — and exploring it is half of how the stories connect.

The tone moves between cute and melancholic. Each passenger's story complements the others, and the whole thing builds toward a tragicomedy about separation. The game launched in 2022 during the Nintendo Indie World showcase and has been picked up by players who like narrative-first puzzling with no combat in sight.