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Braid: brilliant, brainy, and off the mark
Braid is an absolutely brilliant game and quite possibly a work of genius. I don't like it one bit.
Read the review of this fiendishly smart and subversive 2D platformer after the jump.
First, a disclaimer: I haven't finished Braid, and I have no intention of doing so. I ambled through to the end of the fifth world, and along the way, I grabbed some of the puzzle pieces you need to finish the game. I've gone back and worked through a few more of the puzzle pieces, and I've talked to others about the solutions to even more. Perhaps most importantly, I've heard developer Jonathan Blow give a talk in which he explained the ending, which is one of the most brilliant computer game endings I've ever seen. I guess you could say I've experienced most of Braid's content, just not the way Braid intended.
I want to like Braid. I really do. I envy the people who like it. Partly because I think people who like Braid enough to finish it are pretty smart (this isn't necessarily true of people who finished Portal, a similarly brilliant and economic work of genius, but one that so leads its players by the nose that any retard can finish it and think he's pretty smart and then go online to make "the cake is a lie" references).
Braid is a true test. It doesn't come to you. It sits there as indifferent as a cat leaving you with nothing to do but sit and stare until you wise up or quit out. Or cheat like a chump by looking up the solution online. Braid is like having a really smart guy throw a brain teaser at you, and this really smart guy isn't going to just let you say 'I give up' and then tell you the answer. Which I'd find pretty annoying, but some people would totally be into. Braid doesn't exist to entertain you. It exists to challenge you.
Furthermore, Braid exists to subvert. My brother once pressed on me his copy of Watchmen. I tried to read it. I failed. I realized that a deconstruction of comic books didn't mean much to me since I wasn't a comic book fan. Similarly, Braid's deconstruction of old-school Mario-style 2D platformers doesn't mean much to me since I'm not a fan of old-school Mario-style 2D platformers. Whereas I adored Killer 7, which was a deconstruction of, well, a lot of stuff that I was a fan of.
But I don't mean to lapse into hoity-toity talk about deconstruction. Braid's adoring reviewers are doing all that stuff just fine. So I'll just say that once I realized I had to precisely time when I jumped onto a little monster's head to the exact nano-second and the exact pixel, I promptly lost interest and quit out to play more Geometry Wars, Too Human, and Civ IV. For all its cleverness, the gameplay of Braid doesn't talk to me.
Which is a shame, since the message does. Here is a game about things that games aren't about: regret, loss, time, selfishness, betrayal, revelation. Why couldn't developer Jonathan Blow have made a shooter, or an RTS, or an RPG, or a Peggle clone? Or why couldn't the incentive to keep playing appealed more directly to my lizard brain instead of counting on the completionist's mindset that I've spent so many years taming? At the end of every challenge in Portal or N+ or Mario Galaxy, there is a door to a new challenge. The door is the reward. But Braid doesn't care about doors, which are little more than a formality. Braid is about collecting pieces of puzzles, and it's ultimately only the piece that completes the puzzle -- the final piece in every instance (funny how that works) -- that matters. Everything else is just an obstacle on the way to the full picture.
I most liked Braid with friends. There were four of us. We would stare at an elusive puzzle piece and then puzzle out how to get it. As anyone who's played an adventure game collaboratively (Zak & Wiki for the Nintendo Wii being the best recent example) can tell you, this is the best way through brain teasers.
But even then, the conceptual shifts required by Braid are staggering. With three other people in the room, barking out suggestions, one of us charging ahead on the gamepad, it was often like the solution at the end of a murder mystery: the events are sometimes pieced together faster than you can keep up and while you're still processing the information, suddenly the detective fingers the murderer. You just sort of think, 'Oh, well, that's who did it, so I don't really need to fuss with the particulars any more'. It was the same thing as four of us sat in the room and worked out the puzzles and snatched the pieces from their impossible places. 'Oh, well, there it is, so I don't really need to fuss with the particulars any more...'
If I ever do finish Braid, it won't be alone. And I probably won't be driving the gamepad either. The precise jump I mentioned before took my friend three tries. I'd failed probably twenty times. The bottom line is that Braid isn't for me. I hope you're more fortunate.
By wrshamilton at 8:17 AM ON 08/13/08
Yeah but 23 attempts at the jump is gonna take you like a minute and a half.
By salwon at 9:21 AM ON 08/13/08
Which doesn't change how tedious it is. The other puzzles are great though.
By jeffk at 9:24 AM ON 08/13/08
Yeah, precisely timed jumps are kind of unavoidable in a genre whose defining mechanic is the precisely timed jump. Even though Braid is more of a puzzle game, it's got enough platforming in it to frustrate people who aren't into that kind of gameplay.
As challenging as the game is, I appreciate the fact that it doesn't really punish you for mistakes or poor timing, since you can instantly rewind and try again. I haven't finished the game yet, but I'm enjoying it just fine so far. Based on the first four worlds, I'm not sure what all the critical fawning is about, but I'll hang in there and see how things come together.
By obonicus at 9:53 AM ON 08/13/08
The platforming is the weakest aspect of the game. The controls just aren't tight enough for that sort of tight control. If the game were an actual platformer, it'd be slammed for it, but the rewind mechanism makes this flaw tolerable, though honestly, still not acceptable. It just feels cheap: if you have puzzles that the gameplay doesn't quite support, either you change the puzzle or up the gameplay. Otherwise it's just pixel-bitching.
What's embarrassing for the press, though, is how quickly they trip over themselves whenever something innovative comes out. Actually, scratch that. Not innovative: something not stupid. The defense the press uses when someone expects a proper 'consumer report' job from them is that they're closer to movie critics. But here is an opportunity to deliver a proper critique and they have, for the most part, failed at that too. But then [url=http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=207073]failure [/url] is a pretty common affair at even the most hallowed of gaming publications.
By obonicus at 10:00 AM ON 08/13/08
Just to amend, I don't think it's a poor game. It's very good. It's not flawless, and the press' treating it like a flawless masterpiece is doing everyone a disservice.
By steve at 12:30 PM ON 08/13/08
If you're finding that a puzzle requires that kind of precise timing you're talking about, you're probably doing it wrong.
By somedude at 1:51 PM ON 08/13/08
Whether or not the puzzle could be done without 23 jumps (ie he's doing it wrong), the point that Braid beats you down mentally and psychologically may not be. Failing 23 times in a row is pretty depressing.
By Benjamin Barker at 2:50 PM ON 08/13/08
Off-topic, but since you cracked the seal: That's sad what you said about Watchmen. I'm in the same boat as you when it comes to never being into superhero comics, but Watchmen transcended that for me (The Dark Knight Returns, another "Classic Graphic Novel" from the same era didn't-- I realized I never cared about Batman enough to take it all that seriously). Alan Moore is just a really good writer; I remember the pirate comic parts were some of my favorites, for example, and that doesn't have anything to do with superhero references. I was going to say you only have so much time to try again before the questionable movie version comes out, but whatever-- the book will always stand up.
By jeffk at 5:53 PM ON 08/13/08
Okay, I finished the game a couple hours ago (three cheers for home offices). As a whole work, the game is really interesting, and the final level is just phenomenal - maybe even genius. I feel like I need to replay the game now, just to pay attention to more of the themes and details now that I know how the puzzles work.
It's probably not as good as some critics would have you believe, but it's a great little game, and it gets points for dealing with some complex themes, and for being gutsy enough to keep things kind of ambiguous and untidy.
By Nick Halme at 5:56 AM ON 08/15/08
I'm going to be honest and say that I've never been a fan of your work, not for any snide or righteous reason -- your perspective just always seemed a bit pretentious.
But I have to say that this is, for lack of a more subtle word, brilliant; if a review of a work can be called that(I think it can). What I imagined was going to be a 'look-at-me-I-disagree' slamming of the game turned out to be a lauding; all the more genuine since you didn't enjoy playing it.
By Tom Chick at 7:46 AM ON 08/15/08
Nick, in all seriousness, that's very cool of you to say. Thanks for the comment.
By Andy Bates at 12:52 PM ON 08/15/08
Put me in the “I can’t believe you didn’t like it” camp. Sure, I enjoy twitch games as much as the next guy, but I also loved the scratchy rhythm of replaying the same jump over and over again just to get it right. Thankfully, the parts that require precise timing are relatively infrequent, but the game is so short, I suppose it’s difficult to tell.
But beyond that, I’m finding the game affecting my normal life. We’ve all played Burnout and found ourselves taking a corner a little too quickly in the Corolla; that’s nothing new. But I found myself walking down to my bedroom, thinking, “If I could just rewind time here, I could go back and pick up my socks before I left the living room.” When a walk through the house becomes a mental re-creation of the game world, I know the game has taken hold. Plus, I figured out one of the puzzles the next day, just my thinking about it. How often does that happen?
Andy Bates:
Put me in the “I can’t believe you didn’t like it” camp. Sure, I enjoy twitch games as much as the next guy, but I ...More »