Braid (PS3, 2009)
As I'm trying to start writing this I don't remember if I first played Braid in 2009 when it came out or in 2011 when I first got a trophy in it. Before checking I felt as if I played it soon after it was available, but I found it hard to believe that I managed to not even finish the first world. Then again, I'm useless at puzzle games now, so it's not hard to believe I would have been that useless nine years ago.
Braid is a 2D puzzle platforming time controlling game which might be the most pretentious thing I've ever played. It was something of a landmark in indie games at the time it was made with regards to its development, which you can see various videos about on youtube. There's a good IGN one about its creator Jonathan Blow, and wikipedia tells me a film was made about it. It was one of the first really popular ones on the Xbox Live marketplace and when you consider the sort of things you see for sale there and the PS Store and Steam nowadays, there's a decent debate to be had about the merits and the drawbacks. There's a no doubt viable alternative to AAA gaming which gets worse in various ways every year, but there's a lot less quality assurance and services like PlayStation Plus and Games With Gold or whatever the Xbox equivalent is called can lead to snobbery in people who don't want to play shitty little indie games, as you can see on the internet when each month's free games are announced.
That's an argument for people with more knowledge on the subject than I to have however, so here we are. I remember being excited to play Braid originally because I'd seen it mentioned in the classic Games Are Art debate and thought ah, I'll be dead clever if I play this. Cut to some puzzles with planes of thinking I'm not capable of which aren't really explained in any great deal and what can I say, I felt underwhelmed. Fast forward to the present and with a slightly greater capacity for logical thought and a trusty youtube tab open and waiting, and it's not so bad. I even managed some of the puzzles myself. Some.
The game is split into five worlds (or five and a half, the last one's weird and doesn't count) all built around a central mechanic of altering time somehow. Time might only move when you do, or you can interact with objects which don't move if you rewind time. Thinking about it now it's interesting how subtle changes between what you're actually doing can feel so pronounced. You need a completely different way of playing the game to get past each level in each world, so there's certainly a lot of variety. This is good, because when you know what you're doing you can technically finish the game in about 45 minutes, so variation in the gameplay is essential. As you go through the levels you collect jigsaw pieces, using them to create a picture at the end of each world which complements the text introductions for the story.
Braid is very good looking. It's got a half-drawn, half rendered art style which is bright and vivid. It's everything you want in a 2D puzzle game. The backgrounds are one thing I never tired of as I was playing. The music seems to be another object of praise but I just found it annoying. The art style on its own is fine, but when it combined with the music and the story (which I'll come to soon) there was something strange and off-putting to me. The music seems to make the game feel... posh. Snooty. Like it's been chosen or made specifically to make it seem like some sort of high culture. I didn't like it.
While that sound a bit facile, there's a reason for it. The game is supposed to subvert established video gaming tropes. The story is centred around your suited man there Tim, who's trying to get a Princess back. So far, so familiar. But take a look at one of the bits of text leading into a level:
There's one in particular I can't find on the internet that's even wordier and more pretentious. That's the word I'd use to sum up Braid though. Pretentious. I'm quite happy with something that subverts genre expectations - my love of BioShock and Spec Ops: The Line attest to this - but there's a sense in Braid that it's being done in a manner that thinks it's better than video games. I don't want to speak for the people involved in the game's creation but it's as if they took it too far. They tried to be clever and ended up being too clever for their own good. This seems to be one interpretation of the game I've found online, that the characters in the game went through this, so maybe it's life imitating art.
To me though, games like Limbo, The Swapper, even Entwined, all attempt the same kind of existential whataboutery in an atmospheric way but manage it much more convincingly. Maybe it's a concept which needed time to be refined, maybe The Witness (2016) is much better than this, I don't know. The only thing I can say for some of this stuff is that it goes beyond feeling like a reward for the amount of effort you need to put into it.
