Braid: A bug-ridden nominee for Game Of The Year
I’ve not really played Braid. I have, however, watched my better-half attempt it, and occasionally chimed in with helpful advice* or briefly taken the controller to perform a particularly tricky jump or sequence (she’s pretty cack-handed).
Being a girl and all, I imagine the initial draw lay in the pastoral graphics, pleasant music and the fact that it features a jigsaw puzzle. It’s easy to be fooled by Braid’s gentle demeanour, but at its heart is a series of truly fiendish platform-cum-puzzle levels, which explore relatively simple gameplay concepts to ends which can leave you utterly, utterly perplexed. It’s never unfair, though, and once you’ve determined the underlying mechanics of the level, the solution is logical if rarely immediately apparent.
A central theme to Braid is the manipulation of time, though it doesn’t always work in your favour. One especially devious set of levels ties your movement to the forward/backward passage of time, which leads to some unique puzzles. Despite the originality of the emerging gameplay, it may still feel oddly familiar to anyone who’s dabbled in homebrew game making. I, for one, have lost many an hour trying to track down a rogue bit of code which altered the time when it was meant to change position. If only I’d had Jonathan Blow’s foresight to regard it as a feature rather than a bug! From there all I’d have needed was the massive amount of creativity to do all the stunning level design and raw talent to draw all the brilliant artwork and compose the gorgeous soundtrack. That’s how close I was to having a true classic on my hands…
*My better half’s complete inability to disentangle Braid’s notions of time and space has been the source of constant amusement on my part, though it really shouldn’t have surprised me: I’ve watched her countless times fail to disentangle left from right. But relentless mocking makes the heart grow fonder, right? Like Portal before it, Braid has been a real test of our relationship.
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