Braid

If (braidFanboi) goto A

This is a hard game for me to tackle. On one hand, it’s an indy game, low budget, sidescroller, and quite frankly the only reason I even played it was because Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation gave it a good review. On the other hand, I hated this game, about halfway through world 4 I stopped trying to pick up the puzzle pieces all together because I didn’t even care, and if you ignore the puzzle pieces, the game takes all of 20 minutes to beat.

So, here’s what I did, I consorted to a walkthrough before I went to the ending. It’s a side scrolling platformer, so the levels are the definition of linear, there are no choices or really influencing your progression in any way other than getting to the door in the next level. So, I figured the puzzle pieces that I’d been ignoring would probably determine whether I ended up finding the princess, or she was imaginary, or I’m actually the anti-christ having a bad dream. To tell you the truth, I still don’t know. I’ve heard someone say there’s multiple endings, so the pieces must affect it somehow, but the ending was so dumb that…

You know what, I’m going to go beat the game picking up as little puzzle pieces as possible… brb.

Uh, okay so my game keeps crashing. I furiously held down my power button, and pressed it again with great commitment in mind… but it was crashing again… gotta reinstall or something, I dunno. So I consorted to the interwebs! And it was generally unhelpful. It does seem that I was utterly misinformed and, even though I probably could have beaten the game in the time it took me to google this shit… the puzzle pieces are pointless. And here I was thinking I didn’t like the game 5 minutes ago… moving right along… So this is the new Braid in a nutshell: Braid is a 2d sidescroller game with particularly bad graphics that takes about 20 minutes to beat because there’s only one ending and there’s no point in doing any of the puzzles in the game.

(A)

Okay, I’m done being quite so condescending.

After snooping on the internet for a while about the ending of the game, people kept bringing up the plot that you’re exposed to throughout the rest of the game… this makes sense I guess. The problem is the ending is vague, unfulfilling, and dumb… the plot up to that point is also vague and dumb (can’t really be unfulfilling just yet). I urge you to take those sentences with a grain of salt though, because, quite frankly, the plot in this game is utterly stupid and fucking pointless. If you can get over that fact, you will actually enjoy the game more (at least I did).

When good plots go bad.

So, you are probably wondering, if you have somehow made it this far, ‘Holy flying testicles Z, why would I ever buy this piece of shit?’ And that would be a valid argument. The biggest flaw in the game that I can say after having both played it, and forced an unsuspecting friend to play it, is that it literally drives you away from its strengths. Some of the puzzles are absolutely, mind bogglingly gloriously designed. But when you play through you’ll probably jump a couple times, realize you can’t get it, and go on. I played the game almost the whole way through assuming the beginning puzzles were so damn hard because I had to use my later abilities to solve them. There’s no obvious incentives to get the puzzle pieces, and when you do get to the point that you’ve completed a whole puzzle (I think my first one was world 5)… you get nothing but a completed freaking puzzle. It’s just a picture, and you’ve probably already figured out what it is from all the obvious pieces along the way, that there is no need to get the others at all. But as I began, this is where the game defeats itself.

If you take a step back, and look at the pieces not so much as a part of the game (er?), or a piece of the plot, and just as a challenge before you… oh dear, it’s a new world. These puzzles are hard. Really hard. As I said before I ended up using a walkthrough more than once. But quite frankly, I was almost to the end of the game, and I still had no idea what it was actually expecting from me on half of this shit. Once I used a walkthrough on a puzzle or two, I began to get the feel for it, and that is where the game stopped being a chore and started being a lot of fun. I won’t post any real spoilers, I’ll just say this, on the Official Walkthrough it says:

And that’s really a load of horseshit in my mind… but hey maybe that’s just me. The sense of accomplishment I felt when I finally figured out how to jump 3 millimeters higher than the game allowed me was not greater than the disappointment I felt when I realized I’d just spent an hour and 20 minutes trying to figure that out.

That being said, maybe I went about this the wrong way. Maybe this is a game you’re supposed to play in chunks, go to work and ponder on it, get some great realization, come home, beat a puzzle, find the next and repeat. I wouldn’t know, I don’t have a job. I plowed through this game, like I tend to, and once I figured out a good number of the puzzles, I realized that they were solved due to game mechanics that I was never told! And some people might think it’s a gorgeous use of their time to figure out exactly how much they weren’t told in a video game, I’m not. I value my time more than that, and, as previously established, my time is worthless.

So, at the end of the day, yeah, I actually did have fun with it. The learning curve is retarded, the tutorials (though well presented in the first oh… level or two are good) are practically non-existent for anything that matters. But the puzzles are pretty genius, just in a “Hey, if you’re not the developer than you better start thinking like him” kind of way. So like I said at the beginning… I’m torn. I honestly can’t recommend this to anyone unless they hate their free time or find double fisting Rubik’s Cubes while blindfolded fun (in which case, you probably hate you free time anyway)… but some of the puzzles are genuinely fun. And even though the plot could die in a fire fueled by virgin souls and I probably wouldn’t notice, the last segment with the princess is very, very well done.

Braid tries, even harder than most mainstream games, to be something that it’s not. It’s like there were two people working on the game, a level designer, and an artwork / story designer. The latter is a douche, and the former is some kind of super genius that hates you.

BAH!

Okay, so I haven’t made a recommendation yet. It’s not a cheap game. In hindsight, a bottle of vodka would have entertained me for about 3x as long as this game did. So no, I can’t recommend this game, even though I really… almost… want to. Maybe if you’re better off than my jobless ass.

So close, and yet so far!

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