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
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.