Braid

The Short


Pros
- Beautiful visuals
- Unique puzzle-platformer with no dead time and genuinely ingenious brainteasers
- Time reversing mechanic is done in a way not seen before
- Music is incredible
- Story is captivating
- Has probably the single greatest ending level in any video game, except perhaps Portal 2


Cons
- While the story is good, it takes the fast train to pretentious town pretty quick
- On that same note, its attempt at "deep" ambiguousness just makes it seem silly
- While the 3-4 hours of gameplay are fantastic, they left me wanting more
- No replay value whatsoever. Once you beat it, you are finished with it.

Braid is one pretty game. 

The Long

What if you had the ability to do things over? Yes, like Prince of Persia, now that I think about it. But it's this idea of being able to redo mistakes that the game Braid centers around, both with its gameplay and story. Braid is a puzzle platformer about time manipulation, an indie game by the extra-pretentious Jonathan Blow. This game received a lot of acclaim when it came out, only to be countered a few months later by people deciding they didn't like it anymore. I don't know why this game got such a massive amount of internet backlash (maybe it's because Blow is kind of a jackass), but regardless of how its creator is or even how pretentious its story tries to be, Braid is still awesome. If I were to ask it to cut all story elements out entirely and stand just on its puzzle gameplay and graphics, Braid would still be a very good game. Part of my favorite games ever? Maybe not. But we'll get to that later. 

Braid gives homage to a lot of other classic platformers. 

At it's core, Braid is simple. You start with one ability: hold X to reverse time. You have no limit to how long you can reverse time (you can erase your progress over an entire level if you want), there are no limitations, nothing. This obviously means death isn't an issue, since you can always back it up if necessary. From these simple beginnings the game becomes more and more complex. You find items that are immune to your time-reversal, meaning if you open doors and then back time up, the doors will stay open rather than close again. There is a world where walking to the right moves time forward, while walking left moves it back, and standing still causes all time to freeze. There's a world where, after backing up time, a shadowy doppleganger will redo the last thing you did. And there's the final world where you are given a ring that puts up a "slow time" bubble, which slows not just your enemies but you as well.

Forgive me if that was a spoiler or something, but that is actually the entire game. You have five worlds filled with puzzles, each employing a unique twist on the basic "time reversal" mechanic. If that sounds a bit sparse it's because it is: Braid can be beaten in probably 3-4 hours on a first run without looking up puzzle solutions on YouTube. What matters, however, is how good those 3-4 hours are.

If you have a nice HDTV, this is a great game to show it off. 

Braid has no filler. Before each world there are a collection of books that fill in the "story" (more on that later), but you can completely breeze by them if you like and get straight to the puzzles. There is little exploration or even traversal, meaning it's essentially going from one puzzle to another until you are finished. No filler, no fluff, no padding. So those 3-4 hours I mentioned above? You will be actively engaged the entire time. Backing time up, slowing time down, all that stuff will quickly become your plaything as you master the mechanics of each world. And just when you have it down perfectly, the world is over and you are given a new toy to play with. It's perfectly paced and painless throughout, making it an excellent game for both "hardcore" gamers as well as the slow-learning "casual" crowd.

Every puzzle in this game is masterfully designed. Like how each level in Super Meat Boy was meticulously created to be perfect, Braid's puzzles are fun, paced well, and offer just enough mental strain to avoid being frustrating. It's that perfect balance Portal had, only as a time-reversing platformer. Great stuff.

Each level has a graphical color scheme to it, making them all the more memorable. 

Now we have the elephant in the room: Braid's story. After its release people went all loony trying to fully decipher it, whether it was a metaphor or meant to be taken literally, or if it was about a princess or the making of the atomic bomb or what the hell what is going on in this story?! Since I've come to the conclusion that overanalyzing this batch of supposed nonsense is just buying in to Jonathan Blow's ambiguous pretentiousness, I'm going to take this story at complete face value because that's what works the best. You are Tim, a dapper looking gentleman who runs around in a full suit and tie (and has red hair! Bonus!). He was apparently in an relationship with the "Princess," and the situation of this relationship isn't fully explored until the very end of the game. During this time, Tim made a mistake, and now he is off trying to recover her (just like our dear friend Mario). He starts oddly enough on World 2 rather than World 1, though without spoiling too much I will say that distinction is pretty damn important since World 1 is actually the last world you unlock in the game.

What the hell does that even mean?

So the whole story is built up that Tim is chasing his Princess, wishing he could somehow reverse time (like he does in the game) to undo his many mistakes that ruined his relationship. Simple, clever incorporation of story into gameplay, I like it. It does take about three times as many words as necessary to get to that point, but whatever; you can purple prose your way around if it means integrating game mechanics into the story, because nobody ever does that and I think it's what makes the medium unique and more people need to do it.

Then you get to that last level.

That beautiful, incredible, insanely clever final level. 

Yes, I'm going to gush, shut up. 

So as I hinted a few paragraphs up there, one of my biggest problem with gaming as a medium is I don't think they are using their potential to its fullest, especially with their stories. You have a medium that does a rare thing: allows for interaction while still being able to present a powerful audio/visual experience. So you can get personal investment with gameplay by sheer fact of interaction, while still guiding that investment via the visual/audio means. And I just now realized what I just said sounds like the wordy pretentious text in Braid, so I'll hurry it up.

The point is, developers treat game stories and gameplay as two very distinct spheres. Story just sort of fills up in-between the gameplay bits, tying it together but never actually interacting. It's a waste (something Nier fixed with its final twist) because they could be doing so much more. You could use a mechanic that quickly becomes so second nature the player almost forgets about how special it is, incorporating it into every aspect of your game and dropping hints about it in your story. Then, when you hit a final reveal, you could use that mechanic in a way to actually tell the ending in a way that involved player interaction and still based it around what they'd learned the entire time. Then you have a seamless integration of gameplay into the story, and you've created a well-knit experience. Like Nier, or the Portal games. 

Braid does this better than any game I've ever seen.

Har, Mario reference. GAMES AS ART. 

Without spoiling much, let's just say the final bit of Braid does everything I said above, and mixes it with a clever twist that actually pieces the whole game together quite nicely. It then tries to completely ruin this with its retarded epilogue (though the final scene, which again I won't spoil, is extremely well done), but it doesn't change the fact that the final World is one of the cleverest fusions of story and gameplay I've ever seen. Yeah, I might be buying into the pretentious bulls*** that is this game's story, but I loved the ending. And even if people love hating this game, I still can't deny that the ending does something few games do, and more games should.

The game has some excellent music. 

Graphically, Braid is beautiful. If you've been looking at the shots you know it's PURDY, but as an added bonus they all look even better in motion. It's like a living watercolor painting, dripping and flowing across your screen. Each world looks unique, and they all look quite fantastic. Kudos to whomever did the visual stuff for this game, because it looks great. 

The music is also awesome, a fantastic mellow mix that consists of only about four or five tracks, but still provides the right evocative atmosphere. The song during the final level is also perfect, though I won't spoil the reasons as to why. 

This game looks astoundingly good. 

So anyway, that's Braid. An excellent puzzle platformer (albeit only 3-4 hours long, at most) with beautiful graphics and music, and a story that is good if you don't think too hard about it, but do think about that ending level because it is good. This game is like $10 on XBLA and probably loads cheaper on Steam (it goes on sale like every other week), so you have no excuse to not pick it up. If you enjoyed Portal, you'll enjoy Braid. If you enjoy platformers, you'll enjoy Braid. And if you enjoy sipping espressos from china cups while writing poetry on your Macbook and wearing a beret and tsking about how games are ART, then you'll enjoy Braid.

My point is you should at least play this game once, so get to it. And if you want to be pretentious about it you can, and if you want to just enjoy the puzzles you can, but as it stands its still one of my favorite games ever and that's the point. 

Five out of five stars.