There are a lot of people online debating over whether or not Braid – the newly-released Xbox Live Arcade game by Jonathan Blow – is art or not. Upon completion of the game, however, it’s hard to imagine anybody not seeing the game in an artistic light. Although calling it a gorgeous-looking game about solving very clever puzzles would warrant most to give it a look, Braid is a bigger picture than that. The game is – in and of itself – a puzzle, one that slowly gets deeper, more melancholy, and more brilliant as you work your way toward its unforgettable conclusion.
You play as a young looking, blazer and tie sporting man named Tim. As we learn in the game’s opening text, he’s looking for a princess, and he’s made a mistake to lose her. Placed into a 2D platformer – or so it seems – the opening minutes of Braid seem a bit like Mario Brothers with a conscience. Indeed, the game’s first world is almost entirely focused on running around and jumping in ways that will be fairly familiar to anyone who’s played a Mario game before.
Tim has the ability to rewind time, although it’s not a power-up or special ability, per se. Instead, you may use the ability as much and as often as you’d like to undo your mistakes. If you miss a jump or fall into a deadly spike pit, no harm, no foul. Just rewind and try again. This no-pressure approach works very well for Braid, especially because the game does not remain simple for very long.
As you progress through the game’s six worlds, you’ll find each one has a different rule to the rewinding that will completely change how the game plays. Some are more pronounced than others and change the world more fundamentally; perhaps you’ll be able to perform an action, rewind, and have your doppelganger repeat it while you go and manipulate something else. Or maybe time will move forward only when you’re moving right, and reverse once you start moving left.
The rules work great and lead to some seriously mind-bending puzzles with incredibly elegant solutions, some of which are fiendishly difficult (I’m certainly guilty of looking at a few puzzle solutions online). Although Braid is not a very lengthy game, the puzzles are so rewarding and the different rules that govern the time are so fun to figure out, that it doesn’t really matter; every moment of the game is tightly constructed to be thought-provoking, either in the puzzles themselves or the bittersweet tale that gets told in between.
What really makes Braid so special though, isn’t its great gameplay or its fairy-tale visuals or its awesome soundtrack. At least, no one thing on its own influences the game completely. It’s when you’ve traversed the game’s six worlds, collected all the puzzle pieces you’re after, and have opened the game’s final chapter that things really come together. Just like an individual conundrum within Braid, this final world clicks everything into place, and in the game’s final minutes, it becomes elevated to something above simply being a great game. It becomes art. What’s more, it becomes art that could only be told as effectively as it is through a game.
Check out the trial version of Braid if you want to, but it doesn’t really offer much. This is a game that – while great throughout – becomes much better when it’s viewed as a complete picture, a sentiment that rings throughout the game as you collect puzzle pieces and snap together tableaus from Tim’s past. Whether you’re expecting it or not, this is a game that makes you think, and not just about the challenges it presents you when the controller is in your hand. If you have any appreciation for great games or great stories, this is a game well worth the fifteen dollars it’s selling for.