This review contains spoilers
I can't think about Braid without thinking about the fight my parents had during the Spring Break of my senior year of high school. I'll refrain from getting into too many details here, in part because they sometimes read these, and they'll be pissed that I'm even mentioning this. Anyway, the specifics have no relation whatsoever to the topic at hand. What is relevant is that this was - to my knowledge - the closest they ever came to splitting up. I'm talking "car screeching into the driveway", "pulling clothes out of the closet", "driving away to spend the evening with parents" sort-of fight. They did sort it out, and a couple hours later, late that night, we were the three of us standing in the kitchen, hugging and crying and resolving to work together towards the future. But for a good chunk of the day, I was in this numbed fugue state, just going through motions trying to feel something while it seemed like my world was collapsing around me.
It is in this state that I first played Braid, a game ultimately about a man who chases his lady love away and falls into a place of deep denial endlessly reliving his past.
(or it ain't mean shit, if you're Soujla Boy)
(or it's a metaphor for the atomic bomb, if you're an insane person who waited around for literal hours just to get those stars. But I trust you'll understand when I say I've always resonated with that first read)
Braid was part of the vanguard for the indie game revolution we saw in the late 00s. It very much embodies the spirit you'd get out of indie games at this time, of games taking simple genres (in this case, a 2D platformer) and zhuzhing it up with presentation and core gimmicks. Braid's visuals are painterly (I've always thought of French Impressionism, but then I don't know a lot of different eras of art), and its core gimmicks are both clever and easy to wrap your head around. There really is something captivating to seeing how player character Tim interacts with the game world, particularly the amount of depth the game gets out of its simplistic puzzles paired with its various time-futzing mechanics. Helps as well that the game is as short as it is; Steam places my playthrough at just over 5 hours, most of which would've gone into puzzling out the puzzles and replaying stuff. For an art game, this is extremely approachable.
...if pretentious. I have always found the game to be pretentious. Well, okay, maybe not on that first day I was playing it; at that point, I was probably lucky just to find it to be a video game. But when I was at the point of being able to analyze the game, it felt pretentious in the sheer amount of text the game presents at the end of each world, and especially how cagey official media was with giving away anything. For the longest time, the game's website had an official walkthrough that cut out on the first puzzle saying "You'll get more out of this game if you figure it out for yourself". Which, like, fair enough, I'm generally inclined to agree. But there's something weirdly unconfident about presenting an official walkthrough that says "figure it out" rather than just having a disclaimer to that effect that doesn't masquerade as a walkthrough. Then to pair this with an ending that is clearly hinting towards one of two thematic conclusions but the official stance is "oooo it's up to interpretation", as though there's a logical binary between wife-beating and the Manhattan Project... I dunno. To quote that one Family Guy bit - "It insists upon itself."
I do like Braid, though that's largely fondness for it existing when I did play it. It exists in a weird place for me, where I think it's worth anyone's time, maybe even as important as its reputation was on release, but I don't find it to be an amazing title myself. I don't hate it or anything, certainly not on the same level that I used to hate LIMBO. But I'm also not interested in replaying it or looking into that 16th-anniversary rerelease with its developer commentary. I guess take this as a tepid recommendation if you haven't played it or a milquetoast endorsement if you have.
It is in this state that I first played Braid, a game ultimately about a man who chases his lady love away and falls into a place of deep denial endlessly reliving his past.
(or it ain't mean shit, if you're Soujla Boy)
(or it's a metaphor for the atomic bomb, if you're an insane person who waited around for literal hours just to get those stars. But I trust you'll understand when I say I've always resonated with that first read)
Braid was part of the vanguard for the indie game revolution we saw in the late 00s. It very much embodies the spirit you'd get out of indie games at this time, of games taking simple genres (in this case, a 2D platformer) and zhuzhing it up with presentation and core gimmicks. Braid's visuals are painterly (I've always thought of French Impressionism, but then I don't know a lot of different eras of art), and its core gimmicks are both clever and easy to wrap your head around. There really is something captivating to seeing how player character Tim interacts with the game world, particularly the amount of depth the game gets out of its simplistic puzzles paired with its various time-futzing mechanics. Helps as well that the game is as short as it is; Steam places my playthrough at just over 5 hours, most of which would've gone into puzzling out the puzzles and replaying stuff. For an art game, this is extremely approachable.
...if pretentious. I have always found the game to be pretentious. Well, okay, maybe not on that first day I was playing it; at that point, I was probably lucky just to find it to be a video game. But when I was at the point of being able to analyze the game, it felt pretentious in the sheer amount of text the game presents at the end of each world, and especially how cagey official media was with giving away anything. For the longest time, the game's website had an official walkthrough that cut out on the first puzzle saying "You'll get more out of this game if you figure it out for yourself". Which, like, fair enough, I'm generally inclined to agree. But there's something weirdly unconfident about presenting an official walkthrough that says "figure it out" rather than just having a disclaimer to that effect that doesn't masquerade as a walkthrough. Then to pair this with an ending that is clearly hinting towards one of two thematic conclusions but the official stance is "oooo it's up to interpretation", as though there's a logical binary between wife-beating and the Manhattan Project... I dunno. To quote that one Family Guy bit - "It insists upon itself."
I do like Braid, though that's largely fondness for it existing when I did play it. It exists in a weird place for me, where I think it's worth anyone's time, maybe even as important as its reputation was on release, but I don't find it to be an amazing title myself. I don't hate it or anything, certainly not on the same level that I used to hate LIMBO. But I'm also not interested in replaying it or looking into that 16th-anniversary rerelease with its developer commentary. I guess take this as a tepid recommendation if you haven't played it or a milquetoast endorsement if you have.