Braid distinguishes itself right from the start. As soon as the game loads, you are controlling your character, a surprisingly rare trait for a game–no initial menus, no options. Just your silhouetted avatar up above a hand-painted cityscape saturated in deep reds and oranges, with the game’s title writ in flame.

Even had you not been aware of the building anticipation for Jonathan Blow’s Braid–at least within the game industry and in the immediate periphery, where Blow has long been a proponent of experimental gameplay–and many gamers likely were not, the game wastes no time in painting itself as something unique.

There seems to be a mini-trend of recent games that play like examinations of various physical properties: Valve’s Portal is suit of puzzles largely constructed around momentum, while Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy, to a less dedicated degree, is a celebration of gravitation.

Braid, then, is an exploration of time. This kind of analogy is trite on its face–after all, these games succeed for a multitude of reasons beyond this arguably link I propose.

But it’s worth making the comparison, because Braid’s participation in that prestigious puzzle/platformer pantheon is particularly unique. Our brains have an instinctive grasp of things like momentum and gravity, even while they are being depicted in fantastic ways, in part because we have largely conquered them in ways our ancestors could hardly have imagined. Time, on the other hand, despite theoretical hypotheses, remains to us so fundamentally linear, so unyieldingly constant, that Braid’s unrelenting abuse of it presents a kind of challenge which at times eclipses its constant impartation of delighted challenge with genuine intimidation.

The game’s hook is manipulation of time, with the one ability constant throughout the game being the ability to rewind, as far back as to reset the stage to the state in which it existed when you first entered.

This starts out mainly as a way to correct mistakes, as in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (or as in Prince of Persia designer Jordan Mechner’s tragically overlooked 1997 game The Last Express), but new abilities and temporal qualities crop up across the game’s various worlds. In one, as a minor spoiler for the sake of illustration, the flow of time is mapped to your character’s horizontal movement; as you move left, time reverses, and vice versa–while the rewind function continues to operate on top of that rule.

Blow’s brain is apparently not chronologically constrained in that same way the rest of ours are.

Though I completed Braid in a reasonable amount of time, as I suspect will most people, and despite solving all its puzzles and comprehending all the rules that governed them (often only in retrospect), I cannot even begin to imagine the design process that led to the conception and completion of this entire game.

This is not just because of the nature of its gameplay, but also because of the deftness with which it manages its own internal laws as well as, perhaps most impressively, the absurd variety of challenges it contains.

In Portal, as in many games, the player is taught gameplay “building blocks,” small solutions which can eventually be chained together to perform more impressive solutions to more impressive puzzles. Once you have internalized a fun mechanic, you can usually expect to be able to deploy it a number of additional times over the course of the game.

Braid essentially eschews that entire design philosophy. It does not so much feature a difficulty curve as much as it forces your brain into a competency curve. You aren’t being taught basic gameplay concepts one at a time, then asked to combine them, you are expected to figure out a new type of solution for just about every puzzle, because each puzzle is unique.

That’s not to say there isn’t internal consistency. Particularly within each world, stages all share the same laws of time, and learning those laws does indeed provide necessary context for solving that world’s puzzles. But the game weaves quickly between easily-digested tasks and counfoundingly brutal challenges.

This makes Braid not a particularly finely-paced experience (unlike the aforementioned Portal), but structurally it was designed with that in mind: you can effectively reach all the stages quite easily, even without fully completing them, and can leave particularly tough bits for later if you wish.

The variety and loose structure parallel the game’s story, which is mainly told in a series of vaguely-written pages that bookend the worlds. That structure works for the puzzle-driven nature of the game, whose content is something of a miracle of game design. But it doesn’t do any favors for the already-fragmented prose, which seems to want to be treated like a puzzle in and of itself, but whose adolescent diary-esque vagaries did not compel me to delve too deep into the solving.

No doubt there are more Deep Things to be found than I uncovered in this part-fantasy, part-reality, part-metaphor story about a man and his would-be princess, but they are too effective in muddying themselves.

Still, the narrative paves the way for a big reveal near the end of the game, a moment that occurs entirely during the gameplay and which is wonderfully, heartbreakingly clever. That spine-tingling revelation is unfortunately dampened by a chaser of more diary prose. The bogged-down denoument after a brilliant climax drives home the fact that Braid is by far and away at its most effective when relying on simple elegance–which underscores all of its puzzles, and quite often manifests itself in the player as sudden moments of pleasing, self-satisfied realization.

This gripe hardly detracts from Braid’s overall experience, especially because the game’s most gut-level emotional impact remains intact even if you don’t read through the excerpts of its many tomes. Part of this is because the fundamental thrust of the narrative is present regardless, part of it is due to David Hellman’s unbelievably gorgeous artwork, and mainly it is thanks to the overall strength and coherence of Blow’s overall vision for the project.

(I have not spent many words on Hellman’s considerable contributions, largely because it feels unnecessary in text. Simply seek out screenshots of the game; it looks just as wonderful, if not better, in real-time.)

In the end, as the game’s opening scene presages, Braid is a singular experience. It is an occasionally disjointed experience, but it is one that quite clearly flowed with deliberation and purpose from a single designer’s mind, ably assisted by an excellent artist who seems comfortable with that small hierarchy.

So I may not be enthralled with much of Braid’s writing. But it is rare in this industry to see such a daring-yet-eminently-presentable game appear at all, let alone one whose designer fully intends to let it remain a self-contained experience rather than commoditize it into an “intellectual property,” and I can’t help but feel that its crystalline identity might not have been quite as preserved if the game had had a higher number of more discipline-specialized creators pitching in.

If this is the kind of thing that results from Jonathan Blow being able to execute this kind of eye-opening game design in a finished gamer-ready work, then please, bring it on.

[Braid, by Jonathan Blow of Number None and with artwork by David Hellman, is available through Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 Microsoft Points ($15), and is planned for a PC release soon.]

8/12 Update: Since writing this post, I have seen explanations from various gamers as to how to obtain additional collectible items and uncover additional story elements. The solutions to some of these achievements seeming absolutely insane. On the backs of those with more temerity and wherewithal than I, I’ve seen more narrative elements that do indeed pull the whole thing together much better than I would otherwise have been aware—and I’m now hugely impressed by the narrative underpinnings of the thing.

That said, I think it’s kind of a shame that most people who play the game will probably never see those things; while I appreciate the fact that the complete narrative is in itself something of a puzzle, I still take issue with what is actually required to solve it (sorry for the vagueness, I’m trying to avoid spoilers here). Maybe that’s a deliberate point as well, but it’s still one I’m not crazy about.

So while certain opinions about the implementation of certain narrative elements has not changed, I must admit I am quite taken by what Blow is representing—I just wish it weren’t so difficult to find without resorting to Consulting The Internet.

Tags: braid, ifg, jonathan blow, pc games, reviews, xbox live arcade

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