Pit of Babel
A downloadable game for Windows
A small and brutal gamejam, made during the night.
Spiral to me, spiral together.
Construct a tower in search of heaven amidst an unforgiving and anatomical world. Grind gentler life to produce blocks of stone to build with. Discover the story of two souls searching for the dregs of a miracle. Babel is destined to collapse.
Pit of Babel was developed by Scottie Supple and Talia bob Mair. Sound Design by Pato Flores and Composed by Daniel Shypilov.
Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/b6Gm7ctKcX
Pit of Babel is a free gamejam available for Windows computers.
Pit of Babel OST:
Youtube
BandCamp
SoundCloud
Download
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Development log
- Pit of Babel v1.9Jun 20, 2023
- Pit of Babel v1.4Oct 10, 2022
- Pit of Babel v1.3Sep 07, 2022
- Pit of Babel v1.2Feb 21, 2022
- Pit of Babel v1.1Sep 26, 2021
- Pit of Babel v1.0.9Mar 22, 2021
- Pit of Babel v1.0.8Jan 11, 2021
- Pit of Babel v1.0.7Jan 04, 2021
Comments
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loved playing this, the mechanics and visuals are very fun and the writings are very interesting. I didnt get to finish it tho, the 'machine' broke after I reached the 4th text segment and didnt know how to continue. Still really enjoyed it, very fun, very unique, great visual design
This hurt in a very special way. Beautifully made with eerie sound effects and unexplainable things. Sad I didn't get to add my name to the tower at the end, but I guess that means I'll remain an individual.
Great game, enjoied the story a lot. Is there any way to get the whole story as one text? (sry for bad english)
What does a secret rotter do
this happened to me once.
actually tho, beautiful and poignant.
What did any of that mean
transgender flag emoji
A game well made!
Great game, I liked the gameplay and storytelling. I also found two secret rotters in the same run.
Game doesn't really work on my PC, do I need an NVIDIA-Card? When I load the Game, the Screen is wwhute, alt-Tabbing bewtween this and the Explorer with it'S Folder does at least render the Screen once. but nothing seems to work in a playable way.
So here's a difficult one to play AND to rate.
Clearly, the ambience and the writing, wow that was something. The narration, just enough details to clearly see what's going on and immerge into what's being said.
But this is not only something written, and I'm quite unsure about how I've experienced the whole. The mechanics seems at first very straightforward, but of course it becomes more and more difficult.
And even though I can see why that was the experience the designers were looking for... I coudln't finish the game. Frustration (and clearly, lack of patience ^^") made me quit. But the intention as art is there (on top of that, the game is originally from a game jam !).
So I personally did not want to "enjoy" or "live" the experience until the end, but I could see where it was going and thanks to youtube, I could have a grasp of the overall experience.
So even though I didn't want this experience, I clearly needed to try it and try to grasp what was going on. In the end, as an unique experience, I believe pit of Babel succeds and is a gem that needs to be tried :D Thanks for this game (and one day, I'll come for you, brutal orchestra !!).
Cool game!
loved it!
pretty nice story and the balancing wasnt too hard haha
YOOO, I am hooked on this game, the concept is so cool, I play this game all the time. I'm really invested in the lore.
Maybe I missed it, but I think this really needs a save feature.
Saving was something we frequently looked into during development but ultimately decided against for a number of factors.
During playtests players quickly became over reliant on reloading saves rather than rebuilding their tower’s base (which was often the source of the problem). This led to their tower collapsing over and over again due to a design flaw made before they saved. This often caused playtesters to assume the game was impossible or rigged. Unexpectedly it was almost always faster for players to rebuild after a collapse than to fiddle with saves.
This is something that many other tower builders with levels that last considerable length have in common with us, either having no ability to save or an unorthodox method with mixed results (World of Goo time flies are an example of this).
The final reason being that the reward for completing Pit of Babel requires real world work on the behalf of Scottie and I, and the ability to save lead to such a wide variety of exploits we would either have to remove the reward from everyone or invest in significantly more infrastructure than is realistic for a game jam.
If there was a clean solution to saving the players progress that did not cause more problems than it solved we would have taken it. Unfortunately no solution seems to have arisen for Pit of Babel or other similar tower builders.
-Maceo
so I don’t know if I totally screwed up, but my grinder is busted. I got stuck in a cutscene at the top, around 5 and I got down and it’s broken...
Fortunately, if you pull blocks from your own tower you can close the final gap. Just be careful not to pull anything too important...
Here are some tips for people struggling to build their towers
1. start with a big base. This is pretty obvious one but it has to be said. having a tower that's only 3 or 4 blocks wide is going to lead to a poor time. My final tower was 7 blocks all the way up, but still had some stability issues. Bigger is better
2. When you let go of a piece that's clipping with another piece, they push at each other until they're separated. Use this to your advantage to push into place any pieces that slide apart or to smooth out any oscillations.
3. Have pieces interlock. When you have pieces that don't overlap each other, it becomes easy for them to separate and cause a bad time. Save yourself some pain and have pieces overlap themselves. using a long piece horizontally is great for that.
4. And the most important one, don't give up! Every time your tower falls, learn from that failure and build it even higher next time. No matter how disheartening it is to rebuild, you will make it to the top.
I endorse this comment.
Pretty cool idea, a fun original take on the Tetris game. Great writing
Really really dig everything about this. Fun, short, atmospheric and an excellent as well as unique story/concept. Fantastic job, the story is gonna stick with me for a long time.
I really enjoyed the eerie atmosphere and the story. I love anything abstract, so the creatures had a little charm to them. The concept feels simple, yet had me just soaked up in it. Got to the last bit of it and the tower fell apart, tried to salvage it, and made it farther, just 1 or 2 blocks away, but it collapsed a second time, the sound of a second collapse did hurt, both collapses did, but it was an enjoyable experience, and if I decide to try again, I have learned what went wrong.
amazing art and animations
Many thanks!
A fun and delightful journey about achieving immortality, so to speak. I like the cryptic writing and existentialism presented by the lore and while I've had a fair share of hiccups creating my own tower, it was worth it by the end. Would recommend to anybody. Here's part one:
I was enjoying the game but then misclicked. A block got placed in the middle of the tower and two hours of work were sent crashing down. That was really upsetting and I don't want to finish the game now. There should be something that prevents players from placing blocks inside of a solid tower or removing blocks farther down in the structure.
This is a really unfortunate situation we knew was possible during development. We looked into a few possible solutions such as having the blocks maintain physics while being moved or not being able to be placed inside the tower like you suggested. We ultimately did not pursue any of these options as all of them came at a cost that greatly impacted the building freedom of all players creating more small frustrations for everyone. However, our final situation can cause rare and large frustrations due to miss-clicks.
If there was a way, we could precisely tell player intention without bogging down average player interaction we would take it in a heartbeat, but as it stands the overall cost to the average players is too high. If it is any consolation, I do genuinely feel really awful that we caused you any upset or frustration.
love the game, started feeling bad when i realized the red creatures squeal when putting them in the machine, but my need for bricks made me get over that pretty fast. lol
its a pretty decent game, not much replayability tho... great lore and philosophy tho! would definetly recommend this to anyone looking for a new kind of tetris.
i liked the artstyle and the soundtrack and sound effects fit nicely with the atmosphere.
i would definetly play a sequal if it were to be made.
What a nice little game. I didn't expect to spend new year's morning playing it but it's 3am now. All the systems play nicely together in a way that's compelling to learn and difficult to master.
linux ?
Doesn't look like there's a native Linux version, but see my comment.
How-To for Linux:
Download Pit of Babel, and extract to a folder of your choice.
Install and run Lutris. Click the + symbol to add a game. Select Wine as the Runner. Select the the Pit of Babel executable. Switch up the version of Wine if need be, and you can pretty much ignore all other options. Save and Play.
aight thanks
Really enjoyed this game. Great writing and atmosphere!
Also a unique take on Tetris, something that seems pretty difficult to achieve.
For anyone else running it on Linux, it ran flawlessly in Lutris using the ge-protonified-nofshack-4.9-x86_64 version of wine.
This game was so cool but confusing at the same time, found a small glitch close to the 5th "checkpoint" that both my right and my left blocks started to lose and gain color in a patern (srry, not native english), the lore was amazing and the sprites of the creatures completely beautiful, especially the ozobs (I think that's how they are called), i spent 30 minutes feeding just one rotter to see if I could find the secret rotter, any hint of how to get it? lovely game and I've made several towers now :)
So glad you enjoyed the game!
What you encountered was actually not an error. Blocks lose their highlight when they are outside of the "Construction Zone" so what likely was happening was your tower was slightly leaning too far. During our trailer you can see blocks lose colour like this as the tower collapses. Often when blocks start unexpectedly going dark it is a sign of imminent collapse...
Loved the style, loved the writing, but I found the physics very frustrating.
I downloaded this yet for some reason my PC identifies this as a virus when I try to open the game
Does this contain anything that could harm my computer?
Pit of Babel (and other games) can be mis-identified as viruses shortly after the release of a new build. This happens because your anti virus does not recognize the software as it is not commonly downloaded at this point. After a few hours/days this should no longer occur.
If you downloaded Pit of Babel from an illegitimate source (Softonic, Google Drive, etc) it may be harmful to your computer as these copies are illegal redistributions.
As long as you downloaded Pit of Babel through itch.io it is completely safe and official even if your antivirus is mis-identifying it.
I loved it. The grubs are delightful in their own creepy way. Love grabbing them to make them squeak.
Story is interesting. Leaves me with a bit of sadness, a bit of hope. Mixed feelings, not in a unpleasant way.
The most unsettling Tetris I've seen. And I'm Russian, they all are unsettling to me.
all of my grubs are gone what must i do
Hey there, one of the devs here.
This seems to happen when the grey creatures eat all the red ones for some folks. There may be a red creature hiding somewhere! Otherwise you may have to start over. Sincerest apologies! We'll try and pinpoint what is causing this and fix it with the next build. Thank you for letting us know!
Can someone explain to me the lore? I'm confused
Back to the literal grind(er) for another run at this! Rad art and music!
Unfortunately not a successful run but I was close!! I absolutely love the aesthetics of your games and this one is no different! I hated it and loved it in equal measure!!