Braid

The Good
The best a review for Braid can do is convince the tiny faction of players who shied away from the superficially simplistic platform style of the game to finally play it. Let me try that by dropping all the fake "objectivity" and be upfront about it: I adore this game. I wholeheartedly agree with its status as the most shining example for "games as art" and see no good reason for anyone to come to a different conclusion. I don't feel like a fanboy, either. It just comes naturally.

Braid is more than a jump & run. It is more than a puzzle game. Even more than a time-rewinding brain teaser. It is a milestone in its decade's game design and development process, the point where the hugely popular mainstream blockbusters and the innovative indie scene (that emerged out of the frustration about the bland landscape of mainstream gaming) merge into one of gaming's first, big "art game". Like a Darren Aronofsky film that, despite being far off the Hollywood mainstream, unites people who would normally never get close to that kind of film with the underground audience of movie-buffs. Simply because it is that good. There is no discussion about taste or personal preferences. Everybody can look at it and agree: If it's not to your taste it's worth changing your taste for it.

I could go on now and describe the artwork and sceneries that, thanks to a vivid use of particle effects and a structure that doesn't follow the boxy tile-set aesthetics of usual platformers, feel like a Van Gogh painting coming to life. I could praise the melancholic violin score that sets the mood and atmosphere so perfectly. I could try to explain the time-rewinding feature that turns this game from an ordinary platformer into an intelligent puzzle game. How it uses even the most obscure applications of the time-bending mechanics to squeeze every last drop of gameplay out of it. But it is all useless anyway, since not even a screenshots or video footage could explain what it feels like to play this game-- most importantly, to play it through. It's a ride.

The cogs in your brain are running hot while trying to solve the most difficult puzzles, yet you can, literally, run through most levels without touching a thing. Time and chronology mean nothing. The game starts in chapter 2, ends in chapter 1, and that is only the easiest route. Just when you're exhausted of gaming-equivalents of Mensa-application tests, the game throws you in an empty room with a number of open books, each containing a passage of what reads like a novelized diary. Personal tales of leaving home, meeting a girl, success and failure. A reality check in a perfect fantasy, like a real-world slap in the face right in the middle of pure, escapist gaming bliss. Of course, the story doesn't come to a conclusion, starts to spin into a violent loop and, even beyond the finale, allows a million ways of interpretation. The game never makes it easier for the player than it absolutely has to, keeping you at your toes from the introduction to the end, somehow without ever getting frustrating.

The Bad
Are there things to criticize? Who am I to tell. I honestly think that Jonathan Blow knows more about what makes a game work than every game reviewer out there combined. Even the ones I like, whose blogs I read and whose opinion I usually value. They can't do more than give it a 10/10 and shake their heads in confusion about what they just experienced. And neither can I.

I can't even say that this would be "the best game" in any category. It isn't. Or at least it would feel cheesy to give it that title. Braid doesn't need that. It doesn't need top-10 or best-of lists. It's beyond that. Smaller, bigger... out of that loop.

The Bottom Line
It seems as if there is a new trend of rediscovering pure, unadulterated gameplay and using it as an inspiration for storytelling. The result is a symbiosis of the two rather than a two-pronged approach.

World of Goo, even Portal could fall into one category with Braid here. All are popular games that take a single idea, put it into a recursive loop until even the last bit of potential gameplay is discovered and then use the new-found gaming mechanics in a metaphorical way to embed them in a surreal story. A story that could not be told in any other medium, a wonderful world of meta: The sign painter in World of Goo, the training levels being turned into story elements in Portal and Braid's ponderings of rewinding time in the real world... it is a new, fresh pattern that rises out of the boring same-old in mainstream gaming and somehow manages to get wide-spread popularity and pop-culture appeal. You find Braid coverage next to Call of Duty 4 ads and previews of World of Warcraft expansion packs. And yet there is no way even the biggest studios out there could mimic this style by throwing expensive decoration on top of uninnovative gameplay.

Braid, for me, is like a "missing link" between mainstream and indie gaming, a chance for the independent to finally make a living and gather well-deserved respect from the masses. The game is just an example for a trend, but what a perfect example it is. If you call yourself a gamer there is no way around it.

The Good
Thinking about the moments I played Braid, mostly late at night, it brings back the range of emotions that went through me. In the dimly lit room, the game took me on a grand voyage of surprise, frustration, victory and sadness. It was a sensation I can only compare to some of the best titles I have played, such as Shadow of the Colossus, the first Monkey Island, Ecstatica or Dreamweb. A large part of my enjoyment of those is because they arrived at the right moment in my life and fit the way past games shaped me as a gamer and my expectations for new experiences. Braid is different however, as it has many layers you need to peel away at first. It is a game with many disguises and your enjoyment will depend on plunging through the different surfaces.

To understand why this game is so different, you need to know more about the author, Jonathan Blow. The past few years, he has been very vocal about the industry and trends, loathing design choices of heralded games such as Half-Life 2 and calling World of Warcraft a treadmill of tedium, a drug, the junk food of gaming. He labels the game "unethical", saying it provides simple rewards for a suffering scheme to keep players in front of their computers. Much as why I am drawn to indie games, he longs for the sense of wonder that pulled him in as a kid. But growing up, expectations change and he feels too few games manage to grow along with a maturing audience.

Secondly, he says games have to find their own voice, in the way music captures through sound, books through words and imagination, and movies through images. Too often games mimic tried concepts of other media. For games, this has to be the game mechanic itself, something inherent to the idea of a game. Blow also loathes cut-scenes as a way to tell a story, it should stem from the gameplay. In that way, Braid is not a game to attract a new audience, it's a gamers' game. While I expected a game such as Heavy Rain to take storytelling one step further, Blow does it through the age-old concept of a platformer. Yes, Braid is just a regular platform game, no different from Super Mario Bros. and nothing in the game design is particularly new. That means that with no instructions available, anyone knows instinctively how to play. You walk, you jump, that's all there is. While exploring the worlds however, accessed through the protagonist's house, further game mechanics are discovered rather accidentally with small hints. You find out you can rewind time, retracing every step you have taken in a level and back as far as you want. Each world uses a variant of time manipulation. The way time is manipulated does not become increasingly complex and difficult. In some worlds you reverse time (and as such you can never die), in others time changes according to your movement, you collaborate with a past version of yourself in a parallel reality or slow down time in a specific area. The platforming is eventually a false sense of familiarity, as Blow uses it as a vehicle to tell his story, twisting the genre into unexplored paths. It does not even matter if you like platformers.

Time manipulation is the only mechanic you need to learn and you use it solve puzzles. Certain objects and items are affected differently through time and you need to distort reality to turn it to your advantage. Almost all worlds can be travelled right away. There are no enemies you absolutely need to kill, you can just walk straight through a world and decide to finish it later, a very meditative experience. Each world holds a number of puzzle pieces that need to be collected and arranged into a frame to reveal a photo. The story about Tim's seemingly simple quest for a princess is carefully mixed into the gameplay, even though Tim never speaks and does not meet anyone directly relevant to the story. He is also very out of place, a tiny man in a suit with his hair neatly brushed in a fantasy world, but this is for the player to discover. The way time is manipulated and puzzles are solved is a part of the storyline itself. Before attempting to grab a puzzle piece, you need to examine the behaviour of enemies and items, imagine how your time manipulation can affect them and devise a strategy. Mostly, you will be solving puzzles by devising a pattern in your mind before even trying. If it does not work, you rewind time, look where you went wrong and adapt your strategy. The puzzle pieces that form pictures resemble Tim pondering his past, trying to fit the pieces. Final clues to the story are provided through a few sentences at the beginning of a world. Very little is revealed and the search for the princess soon becomes a metaphorical quest for something completely different. Like a poem, with so little details, it is profound and deeply moving, yet largely implicit and asks the player to work it out himself. Even more, you can easily ignore the entire story as there are no sequences where you are forced to read or interpret, it is entirely optional. But when you do get to the final world however, the mixed and reversed storytelling leads to a tremendously powerful ending where everything you thought you knew is brought into a very surprising perspective you could not possibly imagine.

The gaming roots also show. The end of a level, “The princess is in another castle”, a sentence burned into the collective gaming history, is given an entirely different meaning in this game. The cheerful graphics will deceive the player how much of a melancholic reminiscing about regret it is, though it is open for interpretation.

The quiet atmosphere is enhanced through fitting music and beautifully drawn graphics. They complement and dearly need each other. The way rewinding time is reflected in visuals and music is stunning. There is also no filler. All puzzles and scenery have a meaning in the game. Even though it can be considered quite short, none of the gameplay seems abundant or meaningless, everything is moulded together with mathematical precision. After finishing the first five worlds, a ladder can be constructed to the attic in the house where a final world brings closure to the story. It is not told in a linear way however. Each sequence reconstructs another memory and your insight into the events constantly needs to be adjusted. Many of the puzzles seem very difficult at first, but there is always a logical solution. They are hardly ever the same and the ingenuity of some will leave you baffled. When you finally figure it out, you feel a great and deserved sense of accomplishment.

The Bad
It is not a game for everyone. If you cling to a certain genre Braid can be disappointing. There is no action without meaning, no dying, and no enemies to defeat without a purpose. You can finish a level without any action at all. Without the background story, as faint as it may seem, this game would not make sense. If you don't grasp all the elements that make up the game world, it doesn't work. On paper it seems poor game design, but Blow is incredibly clever in his presentation. You grow along with the game and it is hard not to be impressed by the maturity carefully crafted into the game design when it fully reveals itself. This game is however a must for anyone who has been playing for many years, as a mosaic that brings together some of the best elements from gaming history (hence the title) with fresh ideas.

The Bottom Line
Braid is a one-of-a-kind experience, a game stronger than anything else released before, because it is not ashamed of being a simple game at the surface. It acknowledges everything that precedes it, but refuses to be influenced by other types of culture. As Blow once said, there will eventually be games you cannot explain or compare. You simply need to have played them to know what they are. Through the humble, yet familiar game mechanics, Braid tells a story that puts almost everything on this site to shame. When it finally comes to full bloom in the end, it stands tall as a masterpiece that mocks every revolution the game industry has been preaching. As such it deserves my humble praise and a hearty recommendation.

The Good
When it was released, Braid surprised the whole videogame world because of its combination of platforms and puzzle genres. We must be clear about that, Braid's not a platform game with some concrete puzzles in some certain places, Braid's just the opposite, a puzzle game with a slight platform feel on its design. Braid's key to congeniality is the concept, unique and new in everything like gameplay, storyline or main design. Braid's programming is incredible, playing with the time as no other game has never done.

Time's the main incentive for this game as well as the main headache for the players. The game is divided in different worlds (well... rooms of the main character's house), and each world has a different use of that feature, like going back as if you were Prince of Persia's main character using the sands of time, or using a strange ring that allows you to slow what's near of it. Each world's different, so, what you've done in previous world will not work in the others.

Braid's gameplay is simple, and you'll use (most of the time) just the jump button, and another one to press switches. You have another button to go back in time if you've done something wrong, which means that you're immortal because you can use it all the times that you want or need it. Anyway, you'll realize soon that "loosing a life" is not the worst thing that could happen here (to start with, there are no lives), you won't even hate your enemies, because the main problem are puzzles. Some of them are as complicated as annoying is the main storyline.

Puzzles are perfect, yes, and the best thing on it is the fact that when you play and face one of the puzzles, you'll think that you'll need a skill (like double jumping or something) taken in the future and then come back to where the puzzle is to solve it. Yes, you're right, you can turn back anytime you want to solve those puzzles that you couldn't solve, but there are no skills along the game, what means that you can complete all the puzzles from the start.

Besides breaking player's brain, Braid is a game with good taste, and it pays tribute to many important games such as Super Mario, Donkey Kong or Ghosts 'N Goblins along the adventure. Graphics aren't the best graphics ever seen, but they're unusual beautiful. This feeling is in the whole game, in every art of it, a nice mix including a melancholic story, green stages with many beautiful details and suitable music with clear Celtic influences.

The Bad
Story's a complete nonsense, complicated and annoying. Even the designer admitted it, something abstract without a meaning. When you finish it there are so many different interpretations for what you've played that you'll start looking for an answer and you'll find out that no official explanation exists, only a few clues but nothing concrete. What you see in the game is beautiful until you reach the ending part. Of course, to like or not the ending is something subjective, but that strange story (which is clearly the biggest headache for the player, much more than the puzzles out there) is so annoying that many players will be disappointed once they've spent a lot of time solving those hard puzzles.

Game's length is a big problem because it's really short. Some puzzles need many time to be solved, but some of them don't. Just a pair of them will need many hours, and we must add that we've lost, partly, that spirit of the old school gamer that would never use a game guide, so, it's probably that if you don't know how to solve a puzzle you'll look for extra help, and that makes the game really short (moral: don't use any guide or external help!).

When most of the puzzles are solved, the credit goes to the player. You won't solve puzzles by chance and it won't even help you a bit, but there's a concrete world in which that could happen because of its confusing way of using the time feature. Well, maybe you won't solve puzzles that way, just by chance, but it's possible that you solve some of them repeating different things until you find the correct one, without knowing exactly what you had to do to solve it.

Forget about taking all the secret stars on the game. We're talking about one of those games where secrets are impossible to find by your own way. You won't even know it by intuition, so, forget it or look directly for a game guide.

The Bottom Line
If your looking for a platform game avoid Braid. If what you want is a game with many different puzzles to get a headache or to be proud of yourself once you've solved them, Braid's your game. The design of the game is beautiful, so beautiful that you'll be attracted to it immediately, but what's inside of the game is what makes this game shine with its own light. Besides its short length and the annoying story, one of the most important independent games released.

The Good
There were plenty of really brilliant moments in the game. Most of them were based on the mechanics of the game. The main mechanic is the ability to rewind time and other mechanics focus around this. The story plays even more brilliantly into these mechanics.

The Bad
There were plenty of frustrating moments. I had to use youtube videos for hints of how to get through plenty of levels and I gotta say that without the opportunity to see how to do I would never have been able to get through those levels. So basically in order to see the brilliancy of the story at least with my limited proficiency required outside help. So it's pretty lucky that this is a game of the youtube age... Even with help some of the puzzles required such a level of pixel perfect precision that it took a LOT of tries to get them.

The Bottom Line
Braid is a puzzle platformer with a twist. You can at any time rewind time meaning that death by monsters or pits are all really not the problem here. The presentation looks hand drawn with watercolor backgrounds.

The Good
When Braid was first released on the Xbox in 2008, it received generous amounts of hype and critical acclaim. It wasn't that it was just a fun game: it was practically hailed as the Second Coming for gaming as a whole, due to it's unique gameplay, pretty graphics, and so-called "art" value as well. And while it looked fun, being Xbox-less at that time meant I would just have to sit it out until a PC version was released. A few days ago, I finally managed to get my hands on the full, complete version of "Braid". Was this the timeless masterpiece it was hailed as being? The short answer is no, but that doesn't make it a bad game at all.

Braid is a puzzle platform game. You control a charming little man in a suit and tie known as Tim. Like a certain, far more famous plumber, he is searching for the princess, and he will travel through field, rain, snow, and fire to get to her. While you can run, jump, climb, and bounce on enemies' heads, that will not help you progress. Instead, what you must do is collect puzzle pieces, which are scattered throughout the levels. However, your normal skills will not net you these pieces- this is where the uniqueness of Braid comes into play.

For you see, Tim has the ability to re-wind time backwards. The first time you fall into spikes or make contact with an enemy, the game will stop and tell you that you'll need to press the "shift" key in order to rewind time. Rewinding time is what allows you to solve the puzzles in the game. Miss a jump and fail to bounce off of the enemy properly to grab the piece? No problemo, just rewind and try it again. Need to reach a gate that is quickly closing? You can rewind it and do it again. You can never die in Braid, and because of this, the focus is put strictly on the game's challenging puzzles.

In each stage of the game, a new wrinkle is introduced. In one world, Tim's horizontal position reflects the flow of time. Running forwards will more it forward, stopping will stop it, and moving back will move it back. In another, much more frustrating area, when Tim rewinds, he makes a "recording" of himself that is able to do exactly what he just did. Figuring out how to use these powers effectively forms the core of the game.

Graphics and sounds are nice, if not particularly notable. The game is entirely in 2-D, with a sort of hand-painted look that is pleasant. The music has a vaguely Celtic or folksy feel about it. It's not exactly hummable, but playing the game for prolonged periods of time will make it stick, nonetheless. The sound , like the music, is pleasant, but not very distinctive or outstanding. You might chuckle when you hear the sounds get warped as you control time, but it gets old rather quickly.

The Bad
While Braid is fundamentally sound, I still feel that it is overrated. You see, a lot of critics and people who played this game felt that it should be judged as an artistic experience, and that it tells a metaphorical story. The "story" is nothing more than a bunch of books which you can read before entering the levels. In these books are little blubs of text which try to sound verbose and serious when it comes across as nothing but pure pretentiousness. I'm here for the fun, not for "deeper meanings". The ending has been called one of the greatest of all time, so I was all amped up about it. What I got was, to be honest, a massive letdown, but a lot of people think that it makes the game "deep". There are some interesting interpretations of this game out there on the internet, but if that's really all you're interested in, you could probably skip playing the game and just go look them all up. Apparently, this makes Braid worthy of a 9-10 when in my book it's more of a 7-8. I just don't see that, however.

The Bottom Line
Don't get me wrong, I think that Braid is a FUN game. I think that it is worth playing, and you will be surprised just how clever some of the puzzles are. You might even enjoy the graphics and the music at times. But if you are expecting to be "blown away" by it, I think you should temper your expectations a little.

The Good
Cool characters. Tim is a short guy that looks mature and wears suits and a tie. The way he looks is symbolic of an old soul trapped in a young/infantile body. It is itself a paradox of time. The main characters, however, are a bunch of lions that Tim jumps on in order to gain access to higher ground. The basic obstacles are similar to Metroidvania games. You can only jump so high, so figure out a way to jump higher. You can't crawl through narrow passages, and you can't morph into a ball. The lions can get there and get the items for you.

Visually fascinating. While the gameplay itself is almost zero fun, I kept playing due to the beautiful graphics, and the following reason.

Deep thoughts and sophisticated views about life, the universe, and existence. I'm touched by World 3 and World 5 especially. In World 5 you create a parallel universe version of yourself, and work with that alter-ego to accomplish a goal together. It makes you ponder upon the choices you have made in life, and how things may have turned out differently. In World 3 a type of glowing objects is introduced that isn't affected by time. It's a symbol of eternity, The Constant, the things in life that never change no matter what happens, such as family, such as There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.

You can't die. It's a game with an undo button that can undo everything you have done. Obviously inspired by the game/software development process itself, as you can type something, change a line of code and then undo. This is a very, very cool and useful feature, that would have been very helpful in a lot of other games.

The Bad
However, Braid doesn't feel any more user-friendly with this unlimited undo feature. You can't die. But you can't solve the puzzle either. About 20% of the puzzles can be solved by a normal person. About 20% more can be solved if you think really hard. The rest of the puzzles are too difficult. Braid really could have been 500% better, if it had just included a hint system. Give me three hints to each puzzle piece. I have to do things to earn the hints. That'll make the gameplay fun. But right now, it's not fun at all, and you constantly have to read a guide just to complete the level.

After reading the guides, it seems that each puzzle has only one, unique solution. How can a game that covers a topic so broad and deep, be so narrow-minded at the same time?

How about this: Let's summon Tim right now and rewind back to the day Braid was released, and surround Jonathan Blow, the project manager, with a bunch of lions and rabbits that are immune to everything ever. The lions and rabbits will not go away until Jonathan Blow give us three hints to each puzzle.

The Bottom Line
Unless you have the ability to manipulate time, and then manipulate Johnathan Blow, there really isn't any fun in Braid. It's probably not meant for that either. A game that aims to provide not fun, but deep questions, and eternal answers.

The Good
The backgrounds in this game are very beautiful, every single one of them is hand-drawn and the aesthetic is very original. Braid focuses mostly on looking beautiful and I'll be damned if it doesn't pull that off very well. The art-style for the backgrounds also fits really well with the level-design and the style is consistently present, while also varying enough to stay interesting.

Likewise, the spriting is also done very excellently. I want you to jump on one of the basic enemies and then slowly reverse time, you will see the expression on the sprite change slowly instead of an instant-transition, that's pretty cool. Like with the backgrounds, the sprites fit really well with the overall aesthetic and this all creates a sense of atmosphere that I personally found quite endearing.

Like with "Banjo & Tooie" this game has you assembling puzzles, this time around in order to finish a level off entirely. I actually really enjoy this, I like making puzzles and when done virtually I don't end up with a million boxes and missing pieces.

The Bad
The story in this game is very poorly implemented, to the point of it been a few steps back in video game storytelling. Remember how I said that in "Bastion" the gameplay and story are perfectly put together? Braid does the complete opposite and gameplay and story are kept miles away from each other. Before you start each level there are a few books on pedestals that you can read, each containing an entire paragraph of ambiguous text that is supposed to form the story. Some call this poetry, but I call it retarded. I am not saying that a 2D platformer can't have a story, but when we have to go out of our way to read a load of text before we get to play, then that is clearly a failure. As for the content: I am underwhelmed. Every level just turns around the same thing: Tim is a whiny idiot, he is looking for a princess and the game can't go for a single level without referencing the atomic bomb.

On the gameplay side of things there is nothing groundbreaking to be found either, in fact, the gameplay feels very out of place. The story and atmosphere set the game up as a very dark or at least a dramatic experience, but once gameplay starts you are jumping around with cute creatures while cheerful music plays in the background. At first glance the first level appears to be doing a Mario reference, but you quickly realize that the entire game is a Mario reference. Every single level uses the piranha plants coming out of green pipes, goomba-like enemies walking straightforward until they hit something and weird-looking creatures at the end of levels telling you the princess is somewhere else. The entire game is like this, so I consider myself justified in saying that it's just Super Mario with puzzles and artsy bullcrap thrown into the mix.

Unlike what the creators claim, the puzzles in this game border on the horrendous. Their official strategy guide says that all the puzzles are fair and never involve guessing, but in the very first level I was confronted with a puzzle that demanded that I grew bored and started fucking around with the scenery (turned out you could move the picture frame, thanks for hinting at that, that clearly didn't leave me guessing for random solutions). There are plenty of examples all around and one of the most mind-bending of them is a puzzle where there are two doors and only one key, one door opens and the other breaks the key and forces you to repeat the entire stage. That is a returning puzzle, ladies and gentlemen!

In fact, there are quite a lot of stages that demand you reset everything if you make even one mistake. One annoying example was early on in a level where certain elements were immune to your time-reversing abilities. The only puzzle here was that two platforms were moving towards each other at exactly the right timing, but one was immune and the other wasn't, so in order to prevent a conflict I just had to wait... next to three enemies with varying attack patterns.

Also unfair about the puzzles is that they are incredibly overwhelming. Many stages contain various dynamic objects that start working the second you enter, this creates the problem that the player can never get his bearings before diving into the actual puzzle. Imagine if you're playing Banjo & Kazooie and once you enter Mumbo's mountain you don't start off on top of that hill without enemies, but next to that monkey throwing fruit at you and with no way to escape. As the game is normally, you can observe the monkey from a distance, but in this scenario (which is what Braid does) you are just going to run around in circles because you can't grasp what is happening around you. What Braid does can be done right, like in Ocarina of Time where you enter that icy room with the timer, it gives you a quick adrenaline-kick and forces you to think faster than usual, but when the entire game is like that...

The Bottom Line
Many people praise Braid because it shows that "games are mature" and "games are art", but personally I can only see a poorly-assembled mess of a game. I do believe that some games are mature and I most certainly believe that games art, however I also believe that you don't need to throw in pointless references or ambiguous paragraphs of text to achieve it. I think Bastion is a piece of art, the same can be said about The Path, "art" is not some kind of official stamp that government employees hold meetings over, it's an opinion that varies from person to person. I think Psychonauts is a piece of art, but on the other side I don't care for modern paintings.

If you hang out on websites like The Escapist were any game that a reviewer calls art is immediately consider to be 100% flawless, then this title should definitely be on your to-play list. Besides that, I can only recommend this game to the so-called "hipsters".