Source: videogamesblogger.com
Braid is a puzzle-platformer, drawn in a painterly style, where the player manipulates the flow of time in strange and unusual ways. From a house in the city, journey to a series of worlds and solve puzzles to rescue an abducted princess. In each world, you have a different power to affect the way time behaves, and it is time’s strangeness that creates the puzzles. The time behaviors include: the ability to rewind, objects that are immune to being rewound, time that is tied to space, parallel realities, time dilation, and perhaps more. Braid treats your time and attention as precious; there is no filler in this game. Every puzzle shows you something new and interesting about the game world.
Braid is a 2-D platform game where you can never die and never lose. Despite this, Braid is challenging, but the challenge is about solving puzzles, rather than forcing you to replay tricky jumps. Travel through a series of worlds searching for puzzle pieces, then solving puzzles by manipulating time: rewinding, creating parallel universes, setting up pockets of dilated time. The gameplay feels fresh and new; the puzzles are meant to inspire new ways of thinking.
More than just a video review, it’s also an interview with Jonathan Blow and David Hellman about their Xbox Live Arcade title. Developer Number None Inc. brings the action platform title Braid to the Xbox 360 on Xbox Live.
Click on the bottom-right corner arrow to view it fullscreen.
To quote the video review: “Braid isn’t afraid to make you feel like an idiot with its puzzles, but the eventual solutions are all the more satisfying for it. The designs are both head-slappingly simple and astonishingly complex; the more devious puzzles flex rarely used mental muscles, with straightforward platforming as a canvas to work from. Aesthetically inseparable from its time and place, Braid’s good looks juxtapose old-school design sensibilities with impressionist backdrops and lovingly hand-painted environments. The surreal watercolor worlds evoke simple joys and disconsolate dreams as they change palettes and shift in tone, complemented in kind by a soothing score of classical and folk arrangements.
Like Portal, Braid’s short length can be disregarded in the face of its unique approach to storytelling and expansive ideas. Excellent but intellectually limited as a puzzle-platformer, Braid is made truly divine with emotional depth and a bittersweet humanity.”
Overall — 10
