This is the first game that I'm covering in the collection, so I want to lay a little bit of groundwork— why I'm talking about UFO 50, why I'm reviewing the games separately, and why I'm starting with Barbuta.

I wanted to talk about a concept that I've been thinking about for a while now, the concept of idealized play. It naturally came to mind while I was playing UFO 50 for the first 25 hours or so, and once I managed to put it into words, I thought that it would be better to tackle the games one at a time instead of addressing the collection as a whole. I want my thoughts to flow freely for a little while, and the idea of condensing it all into one awful mega-review was enough to put me off on playing the game entirely for a few months— let alone writing anything about it.

So, this is a review of Barbuta, and it's an analysis of the game through the lens of what I'm going to be calling idealized play.

Idealized play, taken from game theory's concept of perfect play, is a state that assumes the player has played the game before and has achieved a sort of proficiency with the game. It's not the same thing as perfect play, because perfect play is mathematical. It's a system for constructing proofs in perfect-information games.

Idealized play is a system for understanding a player's "progression" in learning and understanding an imperfect-information game. It's not mathematical, but philosophical.

Imagine, for a moment, a player who has access to the total sum of an imperfect-information game. They have the walkthrough; they have the let's play open in another window, they have datamined the game's code and know how everything works. This player is in possession of complete information, so let's call them the complete player.

Additionally, imagine that there is another player who does not have access to that information, but instead learned the game from scratch. They have played the game for thousands of hours; they have mastered the controls, the gameplay, the method to succeed, but they still exist in an imperfect-information state. Let's call them the master player.

In both cases, the player is capable of finishing the game. The complete player takes an approach similar to game theory's perfect play, processing the game as information and taking the exact necessary actions to win. The master player approaches the game like a traditional learning model, brute-forcing success by testing every possible set of actions. In the speedrun space, a Tool Assisted Speedrun (TAS) is usually the combined effort of "complete play" and "mastered play;" a total knowledge of the game combined with machine-level skill and reaction time. In its own way, this is an expression of perfect play— and if I refer to perfect play from here on out, this is what I'm referring to: The culmination of complete play and mastered play to achieve a near-perfect result.

Idealized play, which is what I want to focus on, is not perfect. It is not complete, and it is not mastered. The ideal player, from the perspective of the design of the game, is someone who is willing to engage with the game— to start from a position of no information and no mastery, and approach a position of complete information and total mastery.

A perfect player is the sum of a complete player and a master player; an idealized player is the median of the two.

Barbuta is actually a really fun game.

It's the first in the collection chronologically, and when you boot up UFO 50, it's in the topmost and leftmost position on the screen. Odds are, it's going to be the first game you try. We can conceptualize Barbuta as an introduction to the design space of the collection— the shared language and intent of these games that have been developed to all be part of the same text.

Barbuta is a rage game in the simplest definition of the term. Walk three steps to the right, and you'll be immediately crushed under a stone. Make it past that, and you'll attempt a pathetic jump over the first pit of the entire game, miss the ledge, and go sailing into a pit of spikes. Once those lessons are learned, the real game begins, and the difficulty is scaled back to "just" combat and platforming challenges.

Barbuta wants you to be here— it's not openly hostile like Cat Mario or I Wanna Be the Guy— but it does expect you to fail in a variety of ways. It's also inscrutable, with enormous eggs in place of lives, esoteric items, and a blank featureless map. Considering the developers of the game, Barbuta evokes a very specific design philosophy in relation to difficulty and player skill: Spelunky.

Barbuta is an unrandomized Roguelike.

It's the perfect introduction to idealized play, because Barbuta only rewards the player with game knowledge and game mastery. Everything else is wiped clean, the blank slate passed back to you afterwards.

Like a fixed-seed Roguelike, speed and execution are rewarded, but game knowledge is absolutely necessary. The bulk of experience with Barbuta is solving puzzles, learning the locations of key items, and gaining the technical skill needed to avoid enemies and complete platforming challenges. It's a single, condensed image of how players learn to play games.

To separate it from the context of the collection, to address the game in its own right, I don't agree with the sentiment that Barbuta is a "joke game" or that it was "designed badly on purpose." The design space is clear, and the game is executed well.

Most notably, it's not so long that the player needs to memorize pages of complex information. You can clear Barbuta in a matter of minutes, and the act of exploring the game only takes an hour or two. Additionally, none of the challenges are so tough that they can't be brute-forced with a little bit of trial and error. The game drops you back at the start whenever you fail, and progression is largely effortless. That's why I say that the game isn't hostile— it's an entry-level adventure in a style of game that is normally inhospitable to new players and new ideas.

I like Barbuta because it sets expectations. In the language of idealized play, Barbuta is a design space where unskilled players are asked to become ideal players. It presents a small amount of information that can be easily understood, a simple challenge that can be easily mastered.

Critically, once the player reaches a state of idealized play, they begin to approach the game from new angles, new perspectives. I started aiming for the Cherry Disk— keeping all of the eggs intact— but I also started speedrunning the game once I knew that the game was keeping track of my time. Beating the game flowed so naturally into playing it that I progressed without being told to do so— but the game would just as easily let players ignore it, give up on it halfway, or finish it without mastering it.

The nature of being in a collection means that Barbuta doesn't have to contend with player expectations. A dissatisfied player has the opportunity to leave Barbuta and engage with the rest of the collection— something I assume most players did— without fear of them abandoning the collection in its entirety. It's a comfortable space because both you and the game are under a low amount of pressure to perform to expectations; Barbuta isn't going anywhere, and you can engage with it at your own pace.

And it's that engagement, those expectations, that carry forward into the rest of the collection.