Tim - character of the year.
Breathtaking.
To be able to write a review on Braid is like trying to describe those moments in life where you tell your friends that “I guess you just had to be there.” They don’t get it and they move on. Braid, in a nutshell, is exactly that situation. Based off of screenshots, Braid looks nothing more than a generic platforming clone. You run, you jump on things, you collect puzzle pieces, you fight boss, save princess. And then, you actually play Braid.
The best way to start the review is to describe all of Braid’s flaws before I can gush over Braid’s positive merits. For one, yes, Braid is $15 dollars, which makes it one of the more expensive Xbox Live Arcade games out there. Braid is also short. You will beat Braid in 5 hours, tops, making it a rather short game. You will not compare this game graphically to Metal Gear Solid 4, seeing as it is a 2-D platformer.
Braid, however, will make you think. Braid, however, will make you feel emotions that video game never has before. Braid is brilliant.
At the heart of the game is a platformer with a time mechanic. In Braid, you play as a man in a business suit named Tim. Tim is searching for “The Princess,” which again, at the surface, seems like your typical platformer game. However, The Princess is metaphorical as well as literal, and the story hints that The Princess may not even exist. The references in the nonlinear story make The Princess seem as if you can apply it to anything: dreams, ambitions, your own past relationships. We are always chasing our own Princess, and with a clever homage to Super Mario Brothers, the Princess is always in another castle. You will think of your own life as Braid directly asks you questions, such as “What if we could rewind and start all over again? Why do our mistakes have nothing but punishments? Why can’t they just be lessons learned?” These questions are the kindergarten stuff that the game asks (forums are going crazy about how to interpret certain parts of the game.) Braid’s story is a massive psychological mind game into not only the characters life, but your own. The story is a significant part of the reason that Braid will pay you back tenfold whatever you invest in it.
I need to dedicate a paragraph to the ending of the game, which, I promise, I will not spoil. The ending of Braid is hands down one of the best endings I have ever seen. I have been playing games for almost 19 years, ever since I was able to beat my older brothers at Gradius at the age of 1. I was emotionally hit by the death of Aeris in FFVII, the magnitude and epicness of Chrono Trigger, and experienced the amazing story of the Metal Gear series. The ending of Braid will forever be in my mind as in the same league as those games. You honestly will not know what to think when it hits you. Everything clicks in the ending, and yet, there's tons of room for interpretation.
As Tim, you cannot die. You cannot fail. You can just rewind your mistakes and start over as far back as possible. “But wait, didn’t Prince Of Persia and Blinx do the same thing?” Yes, they did, but they used it more as a gimmick - if you failed, you rewound and started again. Sounds similar, right? Braid sets itself out by making it the core game mechanic. Certain items in the game are illuminated green, which means that if you grab it and rewind, you carry it with you. So, let’s say there is a pit with a key. Jump down and grab it, but wait, you can’t jump back up! Well, just rewind with the key in your hand and you’re set (and yes, this is the most basic puzzle.) In one world, when you walk to the right, time moves forward. Walk to the left, and time moves backward. Another world creates a doppelganger when you rewind that performs your last action before the rewind. Each of these unique ideas play into all of the puzzles in each of the worlds.
The game itself is non-linear, which really helps out on the difficulty. Can’t beat a puzzle? Come back to it later. Each world is entered by going to a different room inside a house. The puzzles in the game have a puzzle piece at the end of them. Each world has 12 puzzle pieces that you put together to form one big puzzle, and once you put together said puzzle, a section of a ladder appears inside the house. There are six worlds in the entire game, but you must complete the five in the lower portion of the house before the ladder is completed, which takes you up to the attic to the last world, which is the epilogue of the game.
Braid’s puzzles are frustrating, but rewarding in a sense of self-accomplishment. There are times where I thought that completing a certain puzzle was impossible. After giving it some thought and looking it over, I tried new ideas, and eventually was able to break down each puzzle and put it together to get a solution. No game in recent history gives you the satisfaction of completing puzzles like Braid does. None of them are trial and error puzzles. They all have solutions that make sense once you complete them. None of them put the wool over your eyes – they are simple, yet the solutions are hidden enough that with enough work, you will figure out what to do.
Donkey Kong reference for the win.
My review does no justification to this game. Look at Metacritic (a collection of various reviews around the internet combined into one score) if you need any more proof, where Braid is sitting at the 10th highest rated 360 game as well as the top Xbox Live Arcade game with a 92%. I loved Geometry Wars 2 and I think I made that pretty obvious in my last review, but games like Braid do not come often. You will be sorry for missing one of the best games in a long time if you pass this up. Braid is this years Portal – creative, cheap, and a game that will set the standards for others in the genre. Where Portal rewrote the rules to first person shooters by infusing it with a puzzle element and keeping it under 4 hours long, Braid rewrites the emotional experience and time mechanic for games to be benchmarked by.
If the $15 dollar issue is a hurdle for you to get this game, then let me bring up a point that someone made that really struck me as a good thought. Consider that Jonathan Blow, Braid’s creator, did not want to make a standard Xbox Live Arcade game – a $10 game that is usually a hack at a remake or a cheap little thrill. Consider that he wanted to make a great game. The $15 dollar price tag seems much lower in that sense already. As Penny Arcade said, people spend $15 on shirts with ridiculously dumb jokes and overpriced meals. Yet, when a game that matters comes along, all of the sudden $15 is the antichrist of videogames (forget the fact that people spend $60 on games that don’t even get close to what Braid accomplishes.) Jonathan spent three years developing this game, fine tuning every aspect to make it as perfect as possible. He didn’t send out a cheapened game like most developers for Xbox Live do.
The result: Braid is about as close as a game can get to being perfect.
(For those who have played the game, I’d love to discuss your thoughts, especially on all of the metaphorical parts of the game, interpretations of the story, etc. And yes, if you're one of my close friends, I am willing to let you borrow my 360 to play this. I want everyone to experience this game. That means you Brandon and Chris.)
