Tech: Braid

The platformer-puzzle game has a long history. Back when processors weren't fast enough to render complicated action scenes and 3D spaces, the only way to make a platformer that was interesting to play was to include puzzle elements that the player had to figure out in order to progress.

You can see this in early games like "Solomon's Key" and "Adventures of Lolo" - all the action takes place on a single screen that must be "solved" in order to progress to the next screen. With the release of "Super Mario Brothers," however, it became apparent that smooth fast-scrolling action would dominate platformer design for years to come. "Braid" is a platformer-puzzle game designed by Jonathan Blow that bucks that trend:



"Braid" is a platformer that revolves around manipulating time. The initial mechanic is pretty familiar to gamers by now - you have the ability to rewind the flow of time, to go back to the past. At first you use this to rectify mistakes: a missed jump or botched dodge. But the puzzles quickly ramp up, requiring you to proactively rewind time. Each world features a different mechanic to master - one level features a ring that slows down time to a crawl, another has shadow versions that can reenact, in forward motion, what happened when you rewound time.

There's a story here, too, told in sometimes pretentious bits of text that your character comes across on his journey. The storyline is "ambiguous" in that you could assign any number of meanings to the semi-coherent snippets that appear in the books you read. It's definitely a strange mix - "Braid" has tight gameplay ideas but scattershot writing - but if you don't want to delve into the story, you don't need to.

As a whole, the game is really well-designed. The frustration factor of the puzzles is low since you can skip nearly every puzzle if you're stuck, there are never any "gotcha!" puzzles that require pure trial and error to succeed, and each puzzle concept has a fairly clear solution that might require some lateral thinking. The only shortcoming here is that "Braid" is only a 4-5 hour affair, with limited replayability unless you want to speedrun the game.

Rating: 85/100