Braid Review (XBLA)

I was told not to submit this review unless I had something different to say. Braid has already received tons of awards and critical acclaim, after all. But I do have something different to say: Braid is an amazing example of how game design can go in completely unexpected directions and offer very new ideas, it’s a fantastic experience and well worth the price, and... it has some very real flaws.

Braid looks like a basic side-scrolling platformer at first, but it has one major trick going for it: Most stages are actually puzzles that require you to think not only in terms of positioning, but also time. Your character, the unassuming-looking Tim, can actually control time. In the first few levels this is mostly limited to letting you correct mistakes; if you screw up, just rewind time and you can try again. Later on you’ll find that some enemies, stage terrain, and items are unaffected by your time control... but others are, leading to a series of puzzles where you have to think about several factors all at once and bring them together to pick up the puzzle pieces needed to complete the stage. This is absolutely brilliant, and it requires the player to develop a whole new skill-set to go with what we would normally expect a puzzle platformer to require. You simply cannot beat the game with linear thought.

The problem with this is that there are a few cases where it’s not at all clear what sort of thoughts you should be having. Some stages just have no way you’ll figure them out on your own short of an unusual amount of trial and error, and I freely admit I had to look in a guide for the solution to some of them. A few other stages are laid out very badly; even if you do know the solution, you have to have almost pixel-perfect precision in carrying out your plan, leading to cases where you’ll have to rewind time over and over until you get it exactly right. Worse, some of the game’s secrets are very poorly thought out; one of them requires you to wait around two hours (in real-world time!) to obtain, and that’s just ridiculous. ...Granted, some might suggest Jonathan Blow, the developer, was making some kind of clever commentary this way. I’m not sure I agree, but it’s possible.