Time and Time Again
Braid has finally arrived on the PlayStation Network. Grab some Excedrin and get to temporal experimentin'.
Published: December 29, 2009
For all the early problems the PlayStation 3 experienced as it came into its own, the decision to court and foster the independent developer has been perhaps the most fruitful. Games like Comet Crash, Shatter and Flower likely never would have seen success on a previous Sony console. It's turned small-time operations like thatgamecompany and solo acts such as Jonathan Mack into founts of creative, imaginative takes on an environment dominated by massive hundred-person teams and budgets stretching into the tens of millions of dollars.
But Sony hasn't been alone in their pursuit of the indie game developer. A year or so ago, Microsoft enticed Jonathan Blow to release Braid on Live Arcade before hitting the PC, and the result was one of the most warmly-received independent releases on the platform. Hearing the cries for the mind-bending experience to get a PS3 port, the folks at Hothead Games (the same folks behind the awesome Penny Arcade Adventures episodes) took up the task of readying something for the PSN and Mac.
Time, fittingly, hasn't dulled the experience one iota in its long, round-about journey to the PlayStation 3. Braid is still a staggeringly brilliant experience, one that continually introduces concepts that piggyback off the lessons in previous "worlds" in a way that makes them seem logical when by their very nature they're bending and sometimes turning traditional game logic on its head. One could be forgiven for rolling their eyes at some of the borderline pretention present in the story, but there's no denying that the underlying gameplay is so unique, so brain-meltingly complex and simple at the same time that whatever story is there for those that choose to look a little deeper can be gleaned without interfering with the rest of the experience.
If that sounds like a balancing act that would be difficult for an entire team of experienced developers, imagine how impressive it is to have everything come from the mind of more or less one guy (Blow had help with some amazingly fitting string music and the game's artwork, but the design was his). At its most basic, all one must do is make it from one door to the next, hopefully puzzling their way through increasingly complex means of finding keys to unlock doors that hide puzzle pieces or stomping on enemies to clear a path.
In actual execution, though, things are rarely that simple. Suit-and-tie protagonist Tim is about as far removed from normal platforming mascots as his attire would suggest, and his control over the flow of time is the stuff of mental gymnastics. Each of the worlds tweaks the basic fundamental idea of being able to reverse time -- all the way back to the start of the level if needed. At first, you can simply reverse. Slowly, the ideas of platforms, switches and enemies that exist outside of time are introduced, then the ability to record an action and play back this "shadow" version of things while doing something else then drop a bubble that slows the actions inside more powerfully toward the middle.
But Sony hasn't been alone in their pursuit of the indie game developer. A year or so ago, Microsoft enticed Jonathan Blow to release Braid on Live Arcade before hitting the PC, and the result was one of the most warmly-received independent releases on the platform. Hearing the cries for the mind-bending experience to get a PS3 port, the folks at Hothead Games (the same folks behind the awesome Penny Arcade Adventures episodes) took up the task of readying something for the PSN and Mac.
Time, fittingly, hasn't dulled the experience one iota in its long, round-about journey to the PlayStation 3. Braid is still a staggeringly brilliant experience, one that continually introduces concepts that piggyback off the lessons in previous "worlds" in a way that makes them seem logical when by their very nature they're bending and sometimes turning traditional game logic on its head. One could be forgiven for rolling their eyes at some of the borderline pretention present in the story, but there's no denying that the underlying gameplay is so unique, so brain-meltingly complex and simple at the same time that whatever story is there for those that choose to look a little deeper can be gleaned without interfering with the rest of the experience.
If that sounds like a balancing act that would be difficult for an entire team of experienced developers, imagine how impressive it is to have everything come from the mind of more or less one guy (Blow had help with some amazingly fitting string music and the game's artwork, but the design was his). At its most basic, all one must do is make it from one door to the next, hopefully puzzling their way through increasingly complex means of finding keys to unlock doors that hide puzzle pieces or stomping on enemies to clear a path.
In actual execution, though, things are rarely that simple. Suit-and-tie protagonist Tim is about as far removed from normal platforming mascots as his attire would suggest, and his control over the flow of time is the stuff of mental gymnastics. Each of the worlds tweaks the basic fundamental idea of being able to reverse time -- all the way back to the start of the level if needed. At first, you can simply reverse. Slowly, the ideas of platforms, switches and enemies that exist outside of time are introduced, then the ability to record an action and play back this "shadow" version of things while doing something else then drop a bubble that slows the actions inside more powerfully toward the middle.
