Braid Reviews

Classic.

so much pretty

Jumping is too floaty.

After seeing the constant perspective shifts both mechanically and narratively within Braid, and after several hours of thoroughly enjoying The Witness for the first time, I can’t help but make a connection between Jonathan Blow’s work and that of the Cubist painters of the early 1900s. Cubism is an artistic movement that's interested in showing all perspectives of a three dimensional figure onto a two dimensional space at the same time. (Two dimensional with regards to Cubist painting.) A way to transcend our conceptions of time and space and create a porthole into an extra dimensional perception of a subject, that with our limited human faculties, we only ever see one side of at a time. This is an internal frustration explicitly touched upon in the games epilogue: “Ghostly, she stood in front of him and looked into his eyes. ‘I am here,’ she said. ‘I am here. I want to touch you.’ She pleaded: ‘Look at me!’ But he would not see her; he only knew how to look at the outsides of things." Enemies and Objects you interact with in-game function differently as circumstances and the environment changes. Recognizing how enemies react and change as each new power or influence is introduced, is the most important throughline to navigating the world of Braid and interfacing with its challenges. Each level silently teaches you, and builds upon, the many ways that the roles of people and environment can very naturally and immediately change under influence. I am one person; that takes on different personas when my role in a social situation changes. I act differently with coworkers vs when I’m out with friends vs when I spend time with my partner. I feel different at work and my relationship to time and space is different when I’m there too. Mechanically, your main tools for navigating the world and solving problems take the form of manipulating time and space. Slowing down or manipulating objects to make successive events happen in different orders. Mixing things up is both literal and metaphorical here. Although sometimes its characterization is done maybe too bluntly during puzzle-downtime, by just having you read the story of the main character, Tim, literally in books, to get context for his journey. (The epilogue being particularly revelatory to its more central themes.) It's very Cubist interest in examining and approaching the multiplicity of space and the subjects within, are so interwoven into its puzzle design, its time-manipulation mechanics and its description of Tim’s attitude towards life, that even its simple and stratified text-then-puzzle-repeated format still delivers cohesive messaging and is meaningful and deliberate. Both as a game and a text. Do not let its more neo impressionistically styled visuals (thanks to the phenomenal, surrealistic brushwork provided by artist David Hellman) convince you its atmosphere is solely concerned with mood. The hard, clashing edges and solid colors reminiscent of a classic Picasso, lie within the game itself: the structural, the systemic, the kinetic and the philosophical. These design choices not only capture a silhouette of the subject through play but additionally render them expressionistically. Each new mechanic is given the context of a shift in Tim’s life as to build a more multi-layered picture of the man he was and would become. The layering, each aspect of the multi-dimensional, delicately placed one on top of another. Each layer as a picture of Tim and the collection of images transposed also represent one image of him as well. I was talking with a friend about playing Braid the other night. She wondered if I thought it was really worth it for her to go back and play it as well. I had completely finished each world and only just reached the door of World 1, the final full-series of levels, before this conversation. At the time I said I couldn't know for sure if my feelings on the game were final since I hadn’t completed it. But I had mostly made my assessment that it was an overall engaging experience and a beautiful, indulgent thought experiment. More than a tech demo but mostly a novelty with a Bioshock-esque twist ending, a correlation that dates the game even more unfavorably. And that it was for a good reason, that its legacy was mostly wrapped up in arriving at an opportune time for independently made video games, like it, to be successful. It had cool ideas but only expanded on them long enough for them to work and make sense to the average player. So, play it only if you really want to. This assessment was made with only having remembered the princess escape-sequence, back when I first played it, seventeen years ago, in 2008. And unknowingly to me at the time of this casual conversation with my friend, as I was about to enter said escape-sequence and the games epilogue, that the just-scratching-the-surface attitude of its mechanical application is extremely intentional and central to the games core beliefs. Its breakneck pacing and seeming hesitation towards complexity are so much more thematic than I first had thought. More about our limited abilities as people to perceive the material world, rather than the scope of the designer's ability or imaginative curiosity around creating more intricate puzzles. Its challenge is to push away the desire to have already found our respective Princess versus articulating and appreciating the very human process of learning how to walk by falling over and over again. Provoking us to pay attention and ask questions. That not knowing is the prerequisite for knowing. An appreciation for the multiplicity of everyone and everything in our lives and the tremendous, quiet impact that that has on all of us. Braid has a reputation for being a very subjective game thematically and I believe it is so generative of interpretation because its entire premise is predicated on the idea that: the only way to get an answer, or to even know if there is an answer at all, is through the act of asking a question. Its level design is a gracious and thorough teacher that nurtures you to ask questions as you play. A typical playthrough is a cohesive examination of the questions you can begin to ask in the spaces that Braid wants to play in. These revelations were laid bare during my time in the epilogue. And the entirety of the experience ouroboros-made its way around to meet me at that final castle, in the final moments of the game. In the vein of an artistic continuity with 20th century Cubist painters, mechanically and thematically, Braid's perspectives are now all reflected at once, when the final layer is laid down.

Great puzzle platformer ! The puzzles are fun to solve.(Some puzzles require strong platforming skills or you're have to try multiple times to get the right timing.) The sound track is great. The visuals are interesting. I didn't get the story, to be honest, but I enjoyed the game anyway. Recommended!

the idea is interesting the gameplay has no pleasurable moment in it (except maybe the puzzle)

This game is interesting and original, but doesn't have a very fun flow. It's all based on your rewind button, I don't really like holding the rewind button. However, it might be worth a try if you have more patience for this kind of a thing.