On its initial release on the 360, Braid was one of the most critically adored, controversial and successful indie games of the year. I’m going to do an impressions post more than a traditional review, because I still haven’t finished the bally thing, but there’s stuff worth saying with it coming to the PC. The inclusion of a level editor is great. Having to use JoyToKey to play with a non-360 controller less so. But really, what’s important is to sort of reset newcomers expectation. The debate has confused things.
You’ll have seen this:
What people people missed in the widespread giggles at groundbreaking New Games Journalist Soulja Boy’s take on Braid was he totally got Braid.
He got Braid far more than people who – say – got hung up on its plot, as interesting as it is. Braid is fundamentally about the absolute sheer joy in seeing reality re-made before your eyes. The ability to rewind time is the least of it, the first step on increasingly twisted roads. The first time you play is about the joy of discovery. While I’m told some people worked their way through the game, solving each puzzle, I can hardly believe it. I rushed past ones which I couldn’t master immediately, pressing on to see whatever Blow had worked out to happen on the next world. Clones of previous selves. Rings of time-distortion like an emo-fied Planetary character. Best of all, turning reality into a clockwork mechanism so heading left or right makes the universe flick along. And when you actually dig into the tunnels, there’s a staggering lack of fat in the endeavor. You beat a challenge, you really don’t see it again. You may think you do for a second, but Blow’s formalist leanings takes great joy in creating a situation that looks almost identical to a previous one – or an iconic one in another game – but how the changes of the rules render it fundamentally different. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Braid is how a game that reinvents it so constantly, with such a radically different play-set, manages to actually teach – and challenge – the gamer so much. It’s exquisitely designed.
It’s also – to stress the point – incredibly original. Comparisons to Prince of Persia are asinine. Comparisons to XBox-curio Blinx are like claiming Lamarckism should get the credit instead of Darwinism. If it doesn’t work, you’re just an amusing historical footnote.
My biggest problem with Braid aren’t really problems at all – they’re preferences. They’re the reason why I voted for World of Goo ahead of Braid in the Eurogamer end of year awards. It’s a clock-work perfect game, and that leaves the game feeling somewhat stiff. There’s really just one solution to a problem. You look and experiment with this intricate crystal structure until you find it. World of Goo is about physicality, about wrestling with this object and its slight unpredictableness the entire point. Braid is the opposite. Braid is a game about ideas. It is a platform game as pure thought. That leaves it feeling a trifle cold. It’s not a game which allows you to really play. Unless you follow the Soulja route and get stoned, which isn’t the worst of ideas. Better than dropping acid and playing through System Shock 2, anyway.
God, okay – let’s go nitpicks. The puzzles where a key shatters on a door for a reason I’ve never worked out. I’ve got past them without ever knowing why the key shattered, which is a hole in the game’s pure-puzzle remit. In World of Goo, accidents were part of its chaotic design. In the pure-thought Braid, accidental elements annoy. It’s a game about perfection. “Knowing why” is fundamental. And… oh, God, you’ll do it in the threads. I have no heart in this nitpicks. Really, this is lovely stuff. It’s a masterclass in design, in theory, in games, a clockwork tin-man with a heart of gold. Its time is now. Don’t turn back.
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The game’s pretty cool!
However, I’m going to have to go be in favour of World of Goo, which I still need to get. :>
Skye: yeh I also found that I enjoyed figuring out how to solve puzzles more in Braid than I did actually solving them in WoG. The 2 doors 1 key thing though is still annoying as there’s no reason why it can’t just be one door on the left. The right door was simply not needed, even if how it broke the key made sense.
“Better than dropping acid and playing through System Shock 2, anyway.”
I would die.
Agreed, Braid has had a bigger impact on me that World of Goo, although saying which is better is like choosing between your children. Braid is re-defining, WoG is inspiring, both are excellent.
Bah, choosing between children is easy, I choose the one who looks less like the mailman.
Oh while I’m bitching about stuff, the box stacking and epilogue section of WoG can fuck right off, espcially the one where you have to lift a truss with balloons across DEATHCHASMS onto spires that fecking deforms under weight! I know what I have to do but your spastic physics engine won’t let me do it!!1 /nerd rage
“There’s really just one solution to a problem. You look and experiment with this intricate crystal structure until you find it. World of Goo is about physicality, about wrestling with this object and its slight unpredictableness the entire point. Braid is the opposite. Braid is a game about ideas. It is a platform game as pure thought. That leaves it feeling a trifle cold. It’s not a game which allows you to really play.”
Exactly my thoughts, but in my opinion this makes Braid FAR inferior to World of Goo.
Neut: Well, I feel that the second door was placed as a red herring and a test of our understanding of the rules. Because it was much closer to the pickup location of the key, just about everyone probably failed that test!
If I recall correctly, it’s the first time in the left-right world that the player has the opportunity to interact with an object in the environment more significantly than stomping a goomba, so I really enjoyed it for demonstrating the implications of the “clockwork” mechanic, even if it might seem a little mean.
Skye: true but the entire point of one of the worlds and probably the game as well was learning from a mistake without suffering the consequences, and all of a sudden you had to restart an entire section. Plus I never even realized why the second door didn’t open until I read the comments above, as the obvious next step was to try the other door, so I didn’t even learn from the mistake. And at no other point was this test or variation of it used later on so it served no long term purpose. All we’re left with is an annoying moment of walking into a brick wall and restarting and walking around it.
I suppose that’s a fair perspective. It deepened my appreciation for the rules at work, but it simply didn’t work for you. Nothing to be done about that.
Ahhh, but is playing it worth the abysmal writing?
Hey at least someone got it, judging by the amount of complaints about it I thought it was just another dick move. Good to see there was a point to it.
Still a dick move though :p
@Heliocentric, you are a genius for merely mentioning my four favourite gaming obsessions. And recommending a state to play two of them in.
@Eric: I did that exact puzzle today. It’s the only broken one in the game, I think (though I’m still trying to get my head around the ladders/sparkly platforms/slowing ring one)
@Eric: I didn’t have any trouble with that puzzle, but I really struggled with that puzzle in world 2 involving the jigsaw. It was my only missing piece, and the game never teachs you how to get it.
“However, at that point I had never learned that you could head-butt a goomba from below and survive, so the solution never occurred to me.”
Ah, but you can’t. Your former self doesn’t survive the collision. I think what you mean is that you hadn’t noticed that the goomba survives, as it would have to in order for your subsequent self to bounce off it. And, when you come to it, you don’t have much basis for observing this until the shadow levels: usually, when a goomba hits you from above, your immediate death limits your ability to observe what comes next. Only the shadow lets you observe a goomba’s behavior after it kills you.
Braid’s greatest success and downfalls is the key breaking on the door that you mentioned.
There were so many times in the game where I thought that the rules weren’t being communicated to me and that things weren’t operating in the ways logic would dictate. But in each case it turned out that I hadn’t fully realized the implications of the time mechanic. It’s so devilishly complicated that often once you figure out *how* it works, you still haven’t figured out *why*. And that feels like the game is cheating you even when it isn’t.
I loved this game. It’ll be fun to buy it again and try for the stars this time.
“Emo” is a word that I would probably wish out of existence if I could. It meant something back in my high school days when it referred to a genre of music and accompanying aesthetic. You could play a band and say “this is emo”, and even though you would feel a trifle embarassed that you had to use one of the worst genre names ever, people would know what you were talking about. The way people use it now encompasses music, style, and aesthetic strains that often have more differences than similarities, and that’s when they’re using it as something other than a straight insult (the popularity of the latter usage being due, I suspect, to people wanting to call something “gay” without looking like a bigot). You could replace “emo” with “teal” in most sentences and it would hardly change the meaning. If you’re trying to say that something is overwrought or melodramatic or unsubtle, why not say it with words that have clearer meanings than repurposed genre names? It directs the reader to think about your point instead of inviting an argument of definitions.
One thing I’ve been trying to understand since Braid was released is this charge of it being “emo”. It seemed rather emotionally reserved to me. Consider: you get a story outlined in a relatively small amount of text about miscommunications and regrets and such that gets shaded in with the gameplay and aesthetics. The text is presented in magical books on podia sitting on pleasant fluffy clouds. The protagonist’s flaw that drives the story seems to have a lot to do with being too reserved and isolated. At what point is this supposed to remind one of a guy in glasses with thick plastic frames screeching at the very top of his lungs?
The key shatters in the door because you’re moving to the left, hence time in the world is going backward. The key unlocks the door, but then the door moves back in time to before it’s unlocked. So you have to open the door which unlocks while you’re moving to the right.
This is pretty funny.
Played the demo a couple times through. The first I mostly ignored the pieces I couldn’t easily get to thinking that I needed some different time power, then went back to it after peeking at a solution and hearing that you can get every piece in the demo. I didn’t think the puzzles or platforming was noteworthy. They’re clever but not especially rewarding to figure out. They were either easy to spot and required some trial and error, or so cryptic they end up frustrating.
It just felt like a compilation of a dozen different flash games about time manipulation with profession art, music and production values. The story seemed nice in a What Dreams May Come sort of way but nothing that will change my life or herald in a revolution in the way video game stories are told.
I’d buy it for $5, otherwise I don’t see what’s the big deal. But I’ve got this obsession with Serious Sam right now so I’m eschewing the greater ambitions of gaming left and right.
The thing about the goofy writing…
It’s not really about what it says it is.
Right at the end when Tim achieves his goal there’s a phrase “Now we are all sons of bitches”.
Which is a what Bainbridge said to Oppenheimer after the trinity test.
So the princess isn’t a literal princess with all the warnings against finding her.
But fuck all that it’s a nice game; bit short though.
Ah Braid, I’m still torn over whether the game is a heartbreaking work of genius, or the single most pretentious game every made.
Most of the problems I have with the game relate to its story, which admittedly I’ve already talked about on my personal blog, but I’ll summarize here.
You see, I heard in advance that the story was a little crazy, so I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out as I played the game.
I pored over the books in the lobby areas, trying to piece together Tim’s relationship with the Princess, and whether or not it was real. I studied the puzzle pictures and tried to figure out their context.
When I got to the last level of the game, I was completely blown away by the revelation of the Princess. I thought right then that Braid was going to make it to my short list of best story video game stories. Then I got to the epilogue and completely changed my mind.
I won’t go into spoiler territory, but I will say that the revelations in the epilogue completely divorced the story from the game. I couldn’t even come up with metaphorical reason to tie it all back together.
It was like getting to the end of a murder mystery and finding out that not only is the person you suspect a red herring, but the actual murderer was only introduced five pages ago, and the detective solves the case with previously unmentioned evidence.
It’s the sort of thing that might be funny once, but only once, and this feeling makes me hesitant in playing the game again.
What I was able to play of Braid was fun, but the recent patch that Steam so helpfully downloaded did something that makes game to crash as soon as it starts up. :(
i’ve played the game in the french version. but the storyline text (from the books) is awful. you don’t really know if it is plain pretentious rhetorics or simply a bad translation. does the text seem odd too in english ?
(Thanks for those who pointed the key thing out, which does make sense – point being, you don’t need to figure it out. You just fail the first time you do it, and then never touch that door again. And since you can’t rewind time to get the key back, it’s turned a mistake into actual trial and error.)
KG
This game is much too hyped for what the player gets. It’s incredibly boring and samey troughout. The only good part was the music, in my opinion.
Shoulda been a free game, this way it will just get pirated to death.
It will get pirated to death because it’s shit? Damn, pirates are more stupid than I thought.
@Captain Awesome [irony?] what’s a game worth to you?
The thing with Braid is that the imagery and techniques it uses reminds you of other games which at first seems bland but what it does with those conceits is entirely new and repeatedly very fresh.
Braid is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. It is better than you.
It’s not just the silly breaking keys, incidentally – there’s a section of really, moronically stupid design about half way through, when not being fast enough completely breaks the puzzles, forcing a restart. What was he thinking?!
There’s a timed puzzle in Braid? How could they?
Great art direction.
Silly story.
Some bits of neat gameplay, separated by some bits of meh trial and error gameplay.
I don’t know, maybe the gameplay was just ruined for me by playing this several months ago (I found the idea much more fun):
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Scarybug/chronotron
Superb game, favorite game of ‘08 for me, now that I know about it, thou I really don’t get the criticism it get’s, that one key for instance… really now? in a normal game I run over ten’s of stupid moments like that that make no sense, except in this on it makes sense, yes you have to restart the level, and no, it does not go against the theme of the game, it’s not a game about undoing mistakes, a fact witch becomes painfully obvious on the last level.
The one puzzle witch I think WAS ridiculous was the head-butting the goomba in the shadow self world, but other then that, superbly constructed puzzles, finished the entire game (except that one damn puzzle) without a walkthrough, even if I was stuck one or two times, if I came back to the game after a brake, the solution always became painfully obvious, also, maybe it was just me, but I never noticed the timed puzzles, even if the difficulty might have been steep for some, well, it was by no means impossible (no harder then most games even).
Now, the story, am I the only one who actually liked not having a boring (95% percent of game story’s are boring, fact :p) story shoved down my throat, it’s interpretable, sure, that’s the bloody point, nobody complains about a book or an artsy movie for being complex, but the moment a game has a story with a sub-text witch you can’t grasp in less then 10 seconds it’s ridiculed for being “pretencios”.
Not all the books can be interpreted using the same underlying idea, some of them are about the bomb, some of them are about a failed relashionship, some of them maybe are even about the gamer, as he explores and unfolds the mechanisms of the game (”he examined an apple as it fell”, etc.), the underlying theme I noticed in all of them is obsession, but maybe that’s just me, maybe some people will see… bunny rabbits.
Anyway, superb game, good story, with great music and superb artistic direction (better then the cliche that was world of goo anyway)
@AndrewC
The worst offender is a level called Irreversible. What irks me most is that the name suggests Blow thought this was a good idea. As soon as the level starts, a door begins to slide down to block an essential platform, and if you don’t get to the controls in time – which involves bouncing about four Goombas in difficult positions – it’s blocked for good. This then happens later in the level as well.
For me, Braid isn’t about its platforming stuff at all, and the focus on this precision in certain areas feels totally wrong. It’s ordinarily so slow-paced and thoughtful, and then suddenly throws a speed-run at you. A bit silly. And fortunately over quickly.
@mister_k: Time Slip!!! That was amazing. Like the Shadow Self world from Braid, only with a lot more past-yous. Great.
@teo: It’s the very last one in the Shadow Self realm. Is there another solution to it that everyone else used that I’m not aware of, or something?
@everyone comp-laining about timed puzzles: I found all of the ones where you had to do something then run somewhere else in a time limit was actually pretty easy once you’d got the trick… and I’m not that good at 2D platformers….
@dr_demento:
The last puzzel in the shadow realm with the two green doors and the green key? How about this solution: Try to open the first door without the key, that is run into it. Then grab the key and rewind before trying to open the door without the key. Due to the green nature of the key, the shadow does have a key when he tries to open the door, so the first door is opened. You then open the second one.
@AndrewC
I have played Braid many times, and I don’t recall there having been a ‘timed puzzle’.
@Lewis:
I think you missed the point of that puzzle.
All you have to do to reach that piece of the puzzle is *not* rewind time. The moment you do, one sliding bar blocks another and you have to restart the level.
It’s a splendid bit of Jonathan Blow’s screwing with you: after having encouraged you to rewind time at every opportunity, he throws in a puzzle where it’s the one thing you mustn’t do.
It’s the old bait-and-switch. Braid does this sort of thing several times.
How long took you guys to figure out the different rewinding speeds?
Why is hidden? Is it a good thing to make players guess the inputs?
@Meat Circus
Yeah, I didn’t explain it very well at all there. What I meant was that the minute you slip up in any way in terms of the platforming, you’re fucked. Calling it a “speed run” was misleading. I should probably go check my review to make sure I didn’t say the same thing there…
It would also seem I actually completely forgot what happened in that particular puzzle. Shit. My point still stands though – it was a bit of a stupid piece of design, for me.
I should play it again. I think the game is really kind of amazing.
I’m afraid i’m finding the very real level of resistance to the game from a lot of people quite amusing. When the game is frustrating it is always being scrupulously, ruthlessly fair.
That said, I’m always slightly sympathetic to those reacting negatively to hype – as no thing can ever live up to being called the best thing ever. Isn’t that right, Meat.
@AndrewC:
It’s not the best thing ever. It was the best game of 2008 IMNSHO, but it’s still not as good as Planescape: Torment, which is, of course, objectively the Best Game Ever.
I tried the demo but everything was black and could only see text and the escape menu. What’s going on there? Shame really, I enjoyed the xbox trial. I’ve also heard you need a ludicrously high-end PC for this game. Anyone confirm that?
I went back to Planescape at the end of last year and found it morbidly irritating. I still love it, but it’s one for the history books methinks.
MetalCircus:
Not at all.
Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® XP / Vista / 7
Processor: 1.4GHz or faster
Memory: 768 MB or more
Hard Disk Space: 200 MB or more
Video Card: tbd
DirectX® Version: DirectX® 9.0c
Controller Support: Microsoft Xbox 360 Controller for Windows
Oh, clearly ignore the video card bit, this is from before release. I doubt it’s that ferociously high, though.
Ah, fair enough. I doubt there’s any complex shaders either, my card doesnt support Shader Model 3.0, could be why im just seeing blackness when running the game but i’m not sure.
I think it’s time everybody had SM3.0 in their graphics cards.
Anything else is an affectation.
You must finish the game now. The last level is truly the work of a genius.
To state it in the parlance of Soulja Boy’s culture; Braid is the shit!