Over the past three months, Simon has taken playing puzzle games to whole a new level: his love for this kind of playful and complex problem solving has led him to meet a new circle of equally mathematically minded friends. Together they discover and scrutinize the architecture of new challenging games and just socialize. “Do you talk about math?” – “No, just anything, but with a mathematical mind”.
Some of the new games Simon has gotten interested in (called I Wanna Lockpick) actually requires pretty advanced math for some of its levels. One of Simon’s friends holds regular math jam sessions where they go through applying some mind-tickling concepts (like, for example, group theory or diophantine equations) to solving the levels.
Some other crazy abstract noggin-knotting puzzle games Simon has been wrapping his head around lately include: Recursed, An Architect’s Adventure (which Simon likes to abbreviate as A-a-a!) and The Witness (ok, this one is far from abstract, too “designed” in Simon’s opinion).
It all started back in December, with Simon coming up with new levels in Baba Is You, a Turing complete problem solving game he is very fond of. He shared his levels with a Twitch streamer who does Baba Is You streams and really enjoyed watching him solve his levels and discussing them in the chat. Sometimes, his levels got “cheesed” (an alternative solution was found), so he had to patch them and resubmit.
If you want to try Simon’s Baba Is You levels, here are his level codes:
Most recent (February 2023): Cramped: 1P66-UTEM; Leap v2: IHPQ-33DP; Leap: WTBQ-P7E9; Jump: PMD2-B7MB;
January 2023: Mean level: RNWE-XD1R; Meaner level: H2FT-28QN;
Totally 100% legit very serious baba level that is in absolutely no way by no means a joke: 8YR4-Y7CP
Not a joke: BDHT-CQ3P; Slightly cleaner: 218M-7UPF; Level version 3: 9F8B-GBEF;
December 2022: ELPK-Z628; 2UCZ-G7V1; 2AH8-PHBW; NJUJ-9M6Q; FR82-7P39; MZBW-W2QW; 28GY-QQ4P;
Geeks out of the box 