Time and Time Again
Braid has finally arrived on the PlayStation Network. Grab some Excedrin and get to temporal experimentin'.
Published: December 29, 2009
Tucked into the middle and end of these little lessons are worlds where time itself is completely broken free from the normal flow. In one, time only moves forward when you're moving to the right, and reverses when moving left. In the final level of the game, everything is going in reverse and your normal power instead moves everything forward. It's really quite impossible to convey just how impressive the challenges are in each of the world. You're rarely (arguably never) forced to complete a challenge to get to the end of a level that requires more than a tiny bit of thought (move right, reach end, win). While that'll get you through a world, it won't actually complete it. To do that, you'll have to find all the puzzle pieces, and toward the end, the amount of layering of actions and forethought can mean the smallish levels can take hours of trial and error.
Rather than being frustrating, though, it feels ingenious; the sense of accomplishment when figuring out the few steps after banging one's head against a wall is the same kind of "ohhhhhhhhhhhh!" moment you get when working through any riddle. Though some of the "bonus" collectibles are utterly, completely impossible to figure out without a guide (obviously I'm being a little hyperbolic since someone had to do it before there was a guide), there's still a careful balance between feeling challenging without actually being annoying or overwhelming. Again, that's a tightrope act that most big-time developers haven't yet been able to pull off this well, and when taken as a "complete" experience, Braid ends up being a fantastic few hours of temporal tinkering.
David Hellman's art, a sort of oil painting in constant flux, is absolutely breathtaking at times, mainly because so much of the background and worlds are influenced by the time manipulation aspect; rain falls upwards, the embers of the initial starting backdrop pulsate and layer atop each other. Grass shimmers, snow flits to the ground (or back up to the sky) and everything has a sense of awe and wonder about it that perfectly sells the kind of brain-melting experience you're about to go on.
Even after an hour of trying to figure a particular world's mechanics out, the game never really seems to lose its magic, and much of that comes down to the confluence of the art style and the game's music, which somehow manages to perfectly toe that line between being downright depressing and offering a kind of hopeful exuberance. The simple, orchestral themes, like the backgrounds, are subjected to the rigors of Tim's time meddling, creating bursts of languid or spastic aural accompaniment that somehow manages to be fitting even at tempos well outside the normal intended speed. That, or I'm just crazy, but Braid certainly made me that way, and I'm more appreciative of the music because of it.
It's rare that a game manages to be as continually rewarding and head-scratchingly smart all the way through, but Braid does it, and with aplomb. If you can actually make it through the whole experience without a guide, I tip my hat to you (I finally broke down toward the end and may actually watch some of the speed runs to get the last few Trophies), but regardless of whether or not you let the game get the best of you, the price of entry alone will be paid once you get a handle on the basic rules for each of the worlds. It's fun to try to figure things out, and regardless of how much you dig the story, Braid itself is nothing short of a massive achievement in game design.
