Braid - Review
(for the PC)



I'll go ahead and admit this off the top: I broke down about twenty minutes into Braid and was absolutely desperate to find a solution to a particularly annoying puzzle, and I went looking for a quick fix in a walkthrough. I got sidetracked while on the internet (as most people do), and instead of turning to one of my usual sources for help, I found my way onto the official site, and discovered they actually offered a walkthrough there (check it out). If you checked it out as the bracketed text did encourage you to, you'll have seen it was a cute little phony. Page one asks you to begin level one, then page two asks you to figure out the puzzles for yourself.

After reading that page filled with encouragement spilled straight from the heart of Braid's creator, telling me to persist and that I am fully capable of solving every problem in the game, I went back to have another look at the puzzle I was absolutely stumped with. And, well, I didn't figure it out. So instead of harping on it, I moved on, finished other parts of the game. In a completely out of order way. Eventually, I came back to the first level. Worked with it more, moved things around... and the solution to my first big problem dawned on me in a way it couldn't have before. I felt like the smartest damn guy on the face of the earth.

That's really the creative magic driving Braid. A fair few of the puzzles in that game that you'll encounter, will seem utterly impossible in every way. There's no way you could do these things with the given limitations. But, you can do them all, right away, if you know how. With that in mind, some puzzles you'll spend almost no time at all before solving them; you'll breeze right through and wonder how anyone could spend any more than two minutes on it. But no matter what, some challenges will bring you to think in ways that you don't usually think in. It's mental exercise, and unlike the brain ages or the big academies of the casual genre, this mental exercise is actually exceedingly fun to play.

There's no real punishment for getting things wrong - there's a time rewind button so in any instance, you can simply rewind to the beginning of a level and just start over; or rewind a few seconds. There's no limit on how often you do this, so you can perfect certain areas as much as you like. Or, you can try other areas. Braid isn't linear; it's very haphazard and you can play it however you like.

I keep speaking in second-person future tense like this because I believe you need to play this game as soon as you can. You can grab it for mac or PC, at the very least, or on Ps3 or XBLM if you're so inclined, for the equivalent of about 5 Canadian dollars on every one of those places. If it makes you feel better to think of it as a Mario game on some kind of time warp drugs, then go right ahead; that is not an inaccurate comparison. But it's such audio/visual candy and it's so intelligently put together from a puzzle standpoint that it's absolutely worth playing, even if for a little while.

So, welcome back to me after a month of hiatus there. It's been busy but I have many games I'd like to talk about, and will hopefully talk about very soon. Hit up that RSS to hear about what I'll be raving about next.