Review: Braid
A game that I have been wanting to play for quite a while now but didn’t because of the price point, so I managed to get it on Impulse a week or so ago now. I was feeling a little bit cheap because one of my biggest complaints about World of Goo was the fact that despite that game being fairly awesome, it to me felt a tad overpriced. So thankfully I did buy it on discount otherwise I would feel even worse than I did back then because Braid despite it’s widespread acclaim wasn’t really as much fun to play.
So Braid is a puzzle platformer that was released on XBLA a quite a while ago and made it to the PC a couple of months ago. So in classic platforming style you run, jump and land on enemies to kill stuff, but really the game at heart is a puzzle game and its wonderful time mechanic. It starts off fairly simply in that reversing time is a good way to undo your mistakes or to help your timing in order to get to hard to reach puzzle pieces, but it ramps up with objects that are immune to your time manipulation so while every other object on screen is going back in time that one just continues on going. So it’s a very interesting use of time and it works very well.
Attack of the Bunny
So each world has its own different twist on time so you get to drop an item that creates a time slow down in a small circle, the ability to create a shadow clone of yourself but for the most part these ones that just aren’t straight up time tend to not be quite as fun and the puzzles in these later worlds fall into the annoying category more often than the challenging. But there are more good puzzles than bad ones overall so if you’re willing to get past a certain amount of insanity then you’ll be fine.
I suppose the one of the biggest thing that some folk have praised is the ending of the game and I’m not going to spoil anything if you haven’t played it but it’s one of those things that you can see what was going on conceptually and if you take it at face value it is kind of neat. But in reality it ends up looking kind of janky.
Shadow Tim, What will happen when he faces his true self?
The music and art style is something that I’m not going to complain about, because Braid is a beautiful sounding and looking game. But in the end Braid is a game that is hampered by just having a couple of puzzles that are not very good, in that the solution to them don’t logically follow on from what the game tries to teach you, to a certain extent I think this may just be a side effect of having 5 worlds each having their own specific world mechanic and it ends up being interesting but not necessarily always fun to play.