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.
Related Stories:
MetalCircus: I would imagine that’s your problem, yes. Definitely time for an upgrade. You can pick up a GeForce 7900 dead cheap these days, or cough up a little bit more for something a bit swankier. My 8600 cost me about £100 last year, probably less now…
@dr_demento
—–SPOILERS—–
The last one is ‘fragile companion’. All you need to do is walk up to the door before you have the key, then get the key and reverse time which will make your shadow walk up to the door with the key in hand
I have read the whole comment sections here and on tigsource and I wanted to mention that the level of discourse here doesn’t make me want to kill myself. So good job people that didn’t like Braid as much as I did, for conveying your points of view well.
I have my small problems with Braid but I don’t even feel they’re worth mentioning when I realized how highly designed this game is… and how the vast majority of what’s out there is not. It’s one of these times where I feel that nitpicks should have to wait for until when the video game design paradigm has climbed up a few levels closer to it.
@Lewis, mostly:
Wow. Irreversible was my favorite in that World. As Meat Circus explained, all you have to do is not rewind time so that the rewind-immune wall does not slide in front of the rewind-affected wall. And this, like everything else, is both logical and communicated visually.
So what happens if you mess up? Rewind, press down three times, and you’ll be back at the door within half a second. Another attempt to jump and climb properly through the enemies takes less than fifteen seconds. If you are so impatient that acting out this puzzle frustrates you to the point where you cannot enjoy its clever play upon the game’s now-familiar featured mechanic, then I don’t know what the hell you’re doing playing games.
It sounds like you didn’t actually understand the puzzle. After Meat Circus corrected you, you changed your language, but prior you described the player’s needed performance as fast enough and called it necessary speed-running. That’s just blatantly inaccurate, as you can take your sweet time getting through those enemies. Even worse, you can just stand in one place and wait for the two walls to slide past one another before attempting to get through the enemies, at which point you can rewind (far enough to retry) without consequence.
The second half of the room contains a related idea in which the player must show restraint by not rewinding after the use of one key within a sequence. Again, all it takes is a careful thought about the time-immunity properties of objects. It’s elegant. This room is everything that I am loving about Braid (I am in World 5 right now, so I am still enjoying my first playthrough–and so far I have not found anything that needs to be done especially quickly). I’m just flabbergasted that the game is being faulted for the very thing that makes it great.
The same goes for the shattered key. When that happens to you, your reaction should be: “Shit! Wait… what? Oh! I was moving left! Causality moves backwards towards the left–I can’t open a door that way! Ha ha, that’s awesome. I have a deeper appreciation of the elegance in this left-right clockwork idea. Okay; rewind superfast to the start, out the door then in, and spend twenty seconds getting back to the key. This time, the other door, from left to right.”
It’s one thing if you don’t get it and never figure out why you had to use the other door, but if you do get it but feel frustrated that you need to spend another twenty seconds returning to that key, then I don’t know exactly what your problem is but I honestly hope you’re not going out there and spreading your opinions to people who don’t know better without first consulting a very good psychiatrist.
I think one of the problems Braid faces is that PC games have trained us to think that any seemingly unexplainable behaviour is ‘a bug’ and the fault of the game designers. In Braid seemingly inexplicable behaviour is 99% of the time just a failure between keyboard and chair to understand the consistent logic of the game. This combined that people consistently dislike feeling a bit dim is going to rub a lot of people up the wrong way.
Braid really is that smart and sometimes the player is not. If you are calling it pretentious there is a pretty good chance that it is your critical faculties that are at fault :)
Also Kieron, you really need to finish the bally game – your chief objection to the game is partly the point of it. If that makes any sense. The idea of the puzzles as pure thought – brains over soul if you will ties directly into the themes of the game. The mechanics are in tune with the meaning, its something very few games achieve.
Skye: The problem with the door puzzle is that you totally don’t need to understand it to beat it. Well done for getting it, but my puzzle count looks just the same as you. Why should I try to think about it when there’s no need for me to? The vast majority of its puzzles rely on *necessarily* understanding why you’ve won. That one doesn’t, which is why it’s a weaker puzzle than most of the rest.
KG
Thats not an especially good argument against a puzzle Kieron, ther are a lots of very good puzzles where I can just guess the answer but they are still good. The joy of a puzzle is in working it out; the knowing why.
A better way to look at that puzzle is to notice that there are two doors and only one key right off and think; ‘Why are there two doors?’.
Well, the headbutt one and the painting one are far worse in my opinion because they use mechanics that are never explained. The painting one in particular. The game gives you a set of tools and asks you to solve a problem, but you can’t solve it with those tools and you have to look for other tools. It breaks its own logic and it’s not good design regardless of how ‘clever’ people might think it is
I actually thought the painting puzzle was the first genuinely magical moment of the game. Of course, another example of a puzzle you have to get to solve.
EDIT: Puzzles that you have to get to solve are better than those you don’t because solving them is *necessarily* enjoyable. The click of pleasure from getting something is part of them.
KG
Hmmm, I don’t think people are referring to the puzzles when claiming the game is pretentious, if only because that doesn’t make any sense. How can a puzzle be pretentious? “I can’t figure out 5 down, this crossword is so pretentious!”
Personally, I think all those who use the p word to describe this game are all secretly rapists.
@BigRocks
I wasn’t intending to refer to the puzzles with my jab at the pretention name callers. I think folks who are refering to the game as pretentious because of the game’s meaning are failing to grasp it or failing to grasp what pretentiousness is all about.
@Kieron
Maybe the presentation of the puzzle in a game is better for a wider audience if it forces everyone to ‘get it’ to proceed. I think though we can agree that if there is a math problem with an answer box underneath it and I happen to write in the correct answer that hasn’t suddenly made the math problem better or worse. Would forcing you to get the puzzle to proceed start to hamper people’s progress through the game? After all you can get to the end of Braid without grasping the games inner meaning and therby lose something. Is it necessary to force all players to get everything that is contained within a work of art or does the act of coercion begin to undermine the work?
Why should you think about it when there’s no need to? Why should you play the game when there’s no need to? (Well, given your profession, that may not be a very good argument.) I dunno; it seems to me that if you try the right-side door and break your key, then the second time as you travel around to the other dooreverything moving in reverse as you goit ought to just intuitively occur to you. If it doesn’t, you should think about it because the satisfaction ought to lie for you in the understanding, not in the attainment of another puzzle piece.
I believe that the growth that comes from a game’s challengewhether that means learning its rules through the position of questions or mastering its mechanics and systems by developing skillis where play is meaningful. Progress through accident, however delightful, is unsatisfying when consistent; moving forward in this context without understanding strikes me as senseless busy-work.
In a puzzle game where each situation is a unique, carefully designed challenge, the player who accidentally stumbles through should feel compelled to try and duplicate the solution until s/he understands why it worked. The click of pleasure should come not from getting something but from earning something. However, Kieron, given what you said about Soulja Boy and just playing around, it seems like you enjoy Braid for different reasons than I do. While I certainly enjoy manipulating the game in the most immediate waysespecially thanks to the lovely aesthetic effects of reversed music, color dimming and over-saturation, and VHS-styled video squeak lineswhere I really appreciate the game is in the serious play of understanding its rules and becoming capable of solving its puzzles.
I concede regarding the painting puzzle, although I figured it out almost right away because of where the painting is located and because part of it looks exactly like a platformthat visual language makes it fair enough if you ask me. But it is a little outside the course of gameplay. I can understand that annoying some players.
Wow. Sorry about that post; I was trying to use em dashes and misappropriated the html tags, I guess. At the risk of being obnoxious, here is it again without being illegible, hopefully:
Why should you think about it when there’s no need to? Why should you play the game when there’s no need to? (Well, given your profession, that may not be a very good argument.) I dunno; it seems to me that if you try the right-side door and break your key, then the second time as you travel around to the other door–everything moving in reverse as you go–it ought to just intuitively occur to you. If it doesn’t, you should think about it because the satisfaction ought to lie for you in the understanding, not in the attainment of another puzzle piece.
I believe that the growth that comes from a game’s challenge–whether that means learning its rules through the position of questions or mastering its mechanics and systems by developing skill–is where play is meaningful. Progress through accident, however delightful, is unsatisfying when consistent; moving forward in this context without understanding strikes me as senseless busy-work.
In a puzzle game where each situation is a unique, carefully designed challenge, the player who accidentally stumbles through should feel compelled to try and duplicate the solution until s/he understands why it worked. The click of pleasure should come not from getting something but from earning something. However, Kieron, given what you said about Soulja Boy and just playing around, it seems like you enjoy Braid for different reasons than I do. While I certainly enjoy manipulating the game in the most immediate ways–especially thanks to the lovely aesthetic effects of reversed music, color dimming and over-saturation, and VHS-styled video squeak lines–where I really appreciate the game is in the serious play of understanding its rules and becoming capable of solving its puzzles.
I concede regarding the painting puzzle, although I figured it out almost right away because of where the painting is located and because part of it looks exactly like a platform–that visual language makes it fair enough if you ask me. But it is a little outside the course of gameplay. I can understand that annoying some players.
@Dan if you study math after highschool you’ll find that the answer is totally uninteresting most of the time and just writing the answer wouldn’t give you any points at all
He’s not saying you should have to understand the puzzle to proceed, but that you should have to understand it to get the puzzle piece. That’s how the majority of the puzzles in the game are designed
Also, after finishing World 4, I was writing up some impressions and found that, when I moved the cursor to the left to insert new text, I felt really, really weird about it. Like it’s not possible to go left. I kept aborting prematurely and just backspacing a whole line instead to redo it. I think that Portal is absolutely the right game to talk about in relation to Braid because they are the only two games to ever affect my perspective in this way. I suppose it’s similar to how some people talk about dreaming and seeing the world in terms of Tetris. It’s incredible and precious and rare for a game to fundamentally alter your way of seeing the world. I just cannot believe that people can complain that $15 is too much to ask for such an experience.
@Skye the puzzle piece you need isn’t there when you first get there though. You have to backtrack, which is another problem with it since that’s the only puzzle in the game that can’t be solved right away
Minor point but I believe thats the same thing in Braid, you have to get all the puzzle pieces to finish the game. I take what you are saying in the sense that Braid gives a reward in the form of the puzzle piece even if you didn’t understand how you got it. I agree that it does that, then again so does life, sometimes you get rewarded for being lucky.
Teo: I’m sorry; which puzzle piece do you mean? I don’t remember any puzzle piece not being somewhere and then appearing when you come back. I find that hard to believe.
Well like Kieran and I have said since that puzzle can be solved without any understanding of how and why there’s no incentive for the player to try to understand especially as no variation of it occurs again. You can literally forget completely about it and it won’t make a difference. Fair play to you for getting it but as all the other puzzles required an understanding before a solution was possible it just stands out like the maths problem where working out the answer through brute force is easier than figuring it out, particularly as the punishment for failure was so much harsher than the rest of the game.
@Skye you need to use a puzzle piece inside of the picture frame but that piece is found in a later level
I hate to bring simplicity to all this high-minded debate, but the question of whether you will enjoy Braid or not seems to hinge on one single point – do you enjoy repeating the same actions over and over and over again until you get them pixel perfect?
I’m just not finding this game any fun. It might have a lot of interesting ideas and design elements but if you’re going to sell a game – particularly for this amount of money – it needs to have some gameplay as well. This is more like a pretty chore.
@Brulleks:
Braid doesn’t really need pixel-perfection. If you think it does, you probably just haven’t figured out the puzzle yet.
Ah, the blind fanboy brigade is out again today.
Like I said in the last Braid thread, I thought it came across as pretentious to new players. I still have only played the demo, so I can’t speak for the full game, but upon reading about the game, it’s hard not to get the impression that it’s trying desperately to impress viewers with how amazingly innovative and artsy it is. Which is pretentious because it doesn’t really do much to support these claims.
And the demo unfortunately doesn’t improve matters. I’ve seen enough people rave about the amazing story to believe them. I believe that if and when I play the game, I will, at the end, agree that the story was good. But from what you see in the demo, it is *horrible*. Badly written and uninteresting, and presented stiffly as wallsoftext outside the actual gameplay. There may be a reason for this, or there may be enough pluses to outweigh these negatives, but the story becomes a liability in the demo.
The demo also does not do much to “expand my mind” as the game’s description promised. It really seems as a series of assorted and unconnected platformer/puzzle levels with a few time-related gimmicks thrown in. If a game’s website promises a “mind-expanding experience”, then a demo had better give at least the *hint* of said experience. Because if it simply gives me puzzles that look like something out of a mid-90’s PC platformer (Bitmap Brothers or similar), and throw in a new gameplay gimmick, then calling it pretentious comes naturally.
Again, because I know the fanboys are going to lynch me for writing this, remember that I am not talking about the actual full game. I am talking about how it presents itself to newcomers, through the description on the game’s website, and through what is visible in the demo. The full game may well be the best thing since sliced game, it’s just a shame that Blow hides it so well, that the game seemingly tries hard to turn away newcomers and only loosens up and shows the good bits once you buy it.
Getting the STARS is freaking difficult, however, it’s awesome.
Loved every minute of the game btw.
@jalf well the problem with that is, the mind-expanding parts come around worlds 4,5, maybe even 3, but if they threw parts of those into the demo, I think the difficulty increase would be enough to put players off, just like a Portal demo with the 1st, then the 3rd, and then the 14th wouldn’t work
And the story isn’t separated from the gameplay, you forget about the dinosaur :p
Jalf: Again a lot of bile for someone who’s spent nothing and has only played the demo. Out of curiousity, how much of the demo have you played and solved?
“Which is pretentious because it doesn’t really do much to support these claims.”
Ironically you’re not really doing much to support your claims either. ;)
Kieron: I see what you mean. I guess I was lucky I got the puzzle the instant I did it wrong the first time.
As to those of you complaining it’s used only once, it isn’t. Get your facts straight. The very same puzzle appears in a later level in that world (the one with the conveyor belt of clouds). Just you must learned your lesson and immediately ignored that second door.
jalf: You’re an idiot. You’re arguing over something as trivial as whether a game is pretentious or not. Shut up and enjoy the game. Hell, ignore the story if you want to.
Eric: Odd. I thought the game seemed to introduce the mechanic pretty well at numerous points. 1st was in the ladder in the last level of world 2 (don’t tell me you got up that withOUT getting hit on the head). Then again in world 4 on the Donkey Kong referencing level, when one of the monsters is places specially to land on you if you take a specific route. I suspect it appears elsewhere in the game as well. Hell, I mean, even Soljia Boy saw it in action in his “review” at the end.
Dr_demento: The left door is the correct one yes. When you open that, time is moving forwards. I was talking about when using the door on the right.
Also, Fragile Friend (two doors, one key) was a horrible puzzle. However, what you posted was not, in fact, the solution. It’s possible you solved it by accident and didn’t see what you really did. (I know I did)
*spoilers*
What you have to do is move Tim next to the door, as if you were opening it, THEN pick up the green key and then go back in time before you touched the door. Your shadow now has the key, opens the first door for you leaving the second door available to pry open giving you the puzzle piece.
This comment is WAY too long.
Thanks everyone for pointing out how to actually do that puzzle! The way me & all my friends did it was by exploiting the fact that Tim’s Shadow Self is about 3px to the right of Tim, so if you get the key and stand right next to the door but not quite touching it then rewind time, it will eventually glitch and unlock the door with him and leave you with the key and one door to open.
Your solution is much better. :D
I love Braid, it is a perfect game for other games to model themselves on! Three or four hours long, brilliantly clever, low-budget, and (relatively) cheap. Much like Portal – now we just need one of the big publishers to say “Hey, the Orange Box was a shockingly huge success, why don’t we try releasing a four-in-one pack like that?”. Or just keep putting them on XBLA/PSN etc.
People claiming this game is pretentious almost certainly have some form of inferiority complex.
I mean christ, if you think this is bad you must have wanted to beat a group of arts students to death after playing Deus Ex.
@RabidZombie when a gooba lands on your head you die and time stops, you never really see it bounce anywhere so you’re not going to notice it, and it’s hardly the thing you’re paying attention to anyway
Why? Deus Ex didn’t promise a “mind expanding experience”, did it? I don’t really see the connection.
So you didn’t actually read my post, is what you’re saying? I did support my claims. I explained exactly what problems I had with the demo and with the way the game presents itself to potential buyers on its website. There was no “bile” involved
RabidZombie: No, I’m not arguing over whether the game is pretentious. Like I said, I haven’t played the entire game, I can’t speak for the whole thing. I simply explained why it *seems* that way to a newcomer whose only experience of it is what the website says, and what the demo shows. I’m sorry for trying to explain my reasoning. Apparently this thread is only for saying OMGOMGOMG, BRAID IS TEH AWESOMZ!
You are such great advocates for the game. I really can’t wait to become like you. If I play it, will I be tie my identity so closely to a game that the merest *hint* of, well, not even criticism, but *discussion* of the game threatens me to the extent it apparently does to you?
If so, I think I’ll pass IF you want to support this game, the best you can do is try to appear as if you’re still sane, even after you played it Is that such a great challenge?
I did not say the game sucked. I did not even say the game was pretentious. I simply said that it presents itself that way, that it could do more to draw in customers. That a game that only becomes awesome after you’ve played through half of it is doing itself a disservice.
Quite simply, to someone going “Hmm, I’ve heard about this Braid thing, I should check it out to see if it’s worth buying”, it really undersells itself. By all accounts, from people who’ve played the whole thing, it’s a great game. It just doesn’t *look* that way to the person who really matters, the one considering whether to pay for the game.
Get a grip.
Well dude, it’s pretty pointless to hop in a comment thread about the game and start writing long posts of what you think the game seems like based on the demo. Put that in the comment thread to the post about the demo
I don’t think anyone would take issue with you personally thinking the game is pretentious but if you want to talk about things like that then just play the game. If you’re not interested then don’t play it, but don’t sit here and write comments about what you think the game is going to be like when you play it.
The demo just gives you a taste of the mechanics, it saves the interesting puzzles and the great finale.
Finished world 1 and 2 without a walkthrough now, and most of world 3, but I can’t figure out the “Hunt” level on that one. GAH.
Brilliant game so far.
unclelou: try some “creative bouncing.”
I really, really like Braid. I think it’s excellent.
jalf: Feel free to talk about a game. Just don’t be an ass about it. I think you’ve crossed that line when you said “Ah, the blind fanboy brigade is out again today.” to be honest.
I have been enjoying this game, and had hoped that perhaps the freshman creative writing class level of prose would somehow open to a larger plot. I guess not.
For a game that keeps it simple, but similarly uses inter-level text to weave a story (and does it way better than Braid), try Immortal Defense. It’s $5 now:
http://www.direct2drive.com/7807/product/Buy-Immortal-Defense-Download
Yes, it’s a defense game. Yes, production values are low. But man…what a game.
Its a PUZZLE game of course its going to be a “mind expanding experience”.
@unclelou:
Left to right.
graphics/gameplay look way too much like an enhanced super mario world … even with all the puzzle elements/reality distortion stuff and what not, it still seems to be a platformer/jump n’ run thing, and those things are evil and I’ll cherish the day when they hopefully die forever. (which will unfortunately probably be never) whatever works for you guys i guess …
Not only does it not look like MSW at all, it’s as much a jump and run game as Portal is a first-person shooter.
I’ve moaned about the technical issues (and they’re neither excusable nor trivial) on my blog.
Kieron has completely nailed the description of the actual game. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube, or Super Monkey Ball, or one of those fairground wiggly wire games, but with no failure condition except the limits of your patience. It’s cold and clinical, but I guess that adds to the uneasy mood.
I’m glad it was made and had so much thought put into it, even if I don’t personally enjoy it anywhere near as much as World of Goo or, well, most things.
WoG impressed me more because at no point did I have any idea of what it was going to do next. It managed to get more character out of some wonky shapes with eyes than Braid’s thirty thousand layers of swirling paint daubs.
Incidentally, Braid is the only game I can think of where the main disincentive to dying is the sheer hideousness of the main character’s death animation.
Overall, I’m really enjoying Braid. Art direction is beautiful, sound track is awesome, and gameplay is largely pretty awesome. But it’s not perfect, and I think I enjoyed World of Goo quite a bit more.
I’m currently stuck on a puzzle half way through in World 6 (involving sneaking goomba guys past plants). Last puzzle piece before the attic as a matter of fact.
I typically judge the quality of a puzzle by my response upon determining the solution. If I mentally respond with “Oh yeah, that’s pretty awesome”, it’s a good puzzle. If I respond with “You have the fucking shitting me!”, then there might be something wrong (typically a completely illogical solution: see 90%+ of adventure games [I love them anyway, but seriously, what the hell The Longest Journey?]).
This particular puzzle falls under the second. Determining what the solution is took me, maybe a minute. Actually executing the solution… well, I’ve wasted probably over an hour at this point. Watching a couple walkthroughs on Youtube and checking an FAQ on gamefaqs confirms that I have the correct solution in mind but it has a very difficult execution.
The root of the problem is that it requires extensive precision but without the benefit of time-rewind (goombas are time resistant). Time-rewind in Braid is used both a tool for the player and as a gameplay element, and it used brilliantly in both. Letting a player undo mistakes is a difficult problem in game design and has lead to a number of (mostly poor) solutions, such as Prey’s Spirit World and BioShock’s Vita-Chambers. Time-rewind solves this problem with flying colors, allowing players to revert death and other errors with minimal repetition and without the difficulty curve flatting problems of Bioshock and Prey.
So you have to understand my irritation at Braid for introduction an excellent tool in the time-rewind, but then arbitrarly breaking it, apparently for the sake of being ‘clever’ on a couple puzzles.
Robin: “Incidentally, Braid is the only game I can think of where the main disincentive to dying is the sheer hideousness of the main character’s death animation.”
Really? I think the first Tomb Raider is the winner of that one. I remember my girlfriend watching in abject terror as I neared the top of some precarious edifice, hoping against hope I wouldn’t screw up and initiate once again a seemingly endless stream of hideous hopeless screams terminating finally with a sickening thump. Or spikes. Braid didn’t seem nearly as bad as THAT. Not the demo, anyway.
I can hardly wait to buy Braid — it looks great. When a computer game has generated as much heated debate as it has, it’s a foregone conclusion that it has merit. At least for me! Long threads on RPS pique my interest far more than advertisements or glowing write-ups!
SirNuke:
YES! Exactly. That is exactly my issue with it. It totally breaks the flow. The rest of the rule re-writing is introduced in an excellent manner. But the decision to just make your time-manipulation not only useless, but to have it break the puzzle, just doesn’t sit at all well for me.
I can see why these puzzles are there, in the context of what the game’s trying to say. But still: a big design “no.”
Inexplicably, I posted that under your name instead of my own. Wtf?
@SirNuke
I couldn’t manage that 3 plant puzzle either.
There is a slightly cheaty way of doing it: Get the plants in sync using the ring, then press shift, followed by up and down. If you keep shift held down, then time passes at 0x and the greeny goombas all make it past the plants – allowing you to do your multi-bounce.
If someone has figured out a better way – please tell me!
@IcyBee
You don’t even need to use the ring to get the two goombas out, just judicious use of mini-rewinds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaOCv6-e8sM
IcyBee,
Work on each plant at a time until all the plants sync up to let every goomba pass every time. The trick is where to drop the ring. To slow the first plant, drop the ring directly under it. Drop the ring for, say, a couple of seconds at a time until it lets everything pass in its own time. To manipulate the second plant, you want to drop the ring nearer the third, so the first plant isn’t affected by the time-slowing. Then, to manipulate the third plant, drop the ring under the platform with the puzzle piece on so the time-slowing only affects that one plant. Shouldnt’ take long at all to get all the plants moving how you need.