Thankfully, those stages are in the minority. Most of the game’s puzzles can eventually be figured out with a reasonable amount of thought or experimentation, and it’s rare for the player to mess up in such a way that they have to restart the whole puzzle. So while the game is tough, it’s mostly fair. Having good controls helps out a lot with this, making the game mostly a matter of pitting your mind against each puzzle rather than struggling to keep your character’s movements in order.

A lot of people compare Braid to Portal. This seems fair to me; both games are mostly about making the player expand the ways they think. You learn to consider problems in completely new perspectives and ’dimensions’, and the end result is that Braid is more of a fascinating experience than a conventional game. Even the plot, which initially seems tacked on, becomes interesting once you get further in. Jonathan Blow has succeeded in showing us all kinds of directions that game design can go, and that’s very much to his credit.

Braid is asking for a lot, given it costs 1200 points ($15 US). In terms of numerical content, it doesn’t quite hold its ground against other games... you can get through it fairly quickly. But Braid simply isn’t like most other games, and really has very few peers. While a few of its puzzles require unfair amounts of precision from the player, it is overall a fascinating look at how games can be designed in ways we normally wouldn’t consider. And it’s pretty fun, too. For these reasons I was able to mostly forgive Braid its problems and felt it was worth my money. Don’t let my 7.5 rating fool you; I’m not being passive-aggressive or suggesting it’s a bad game, but rather that it does have some real problems. GDN’s review scale states that a game scoring 7 or above is worth its full original price, and that’s very much the case with Braid.