Braid

Sometimes there’s a new idea that changes the world because it fulfills a desire that nobody knew they had. And sometimes a new idea is powerful because it fulfills a desire that everybody has always, always known they’ve had, but they’ve felt like a pussy for asking for it.

Any video game you’ve played, you’ve wished you could take back a mistimed jump or a brush with a touch-of-death enemy, but errors like that are where the challenge comes from, right? How can you make a game where errors are instantly and easily reversible, but still gives players a challenge?

Well, that’s Braid. And Braid’s greatest triumph is not its graceful weaving of story and gameplay, or its gorgeous artwork, or even its clever and logical puzzles. It’s the way it fulfills our desire for forgiveness in our games (forgiveness is, in fact, the theme of the first world, which introduces the time-reversal mechanic). Braid encourages you to learn how its world works, and lets you learn in the best possible way: by making as many mistakes as you need to. Braid pays homage to Super Mario Bros. in more ways than I care to list, but rejects, in the strongest possible terms, its unforgiving gameplay(granted, the Super Mario series, and the industry in general, had already rejected it). Where Super Mario Bros, and countless other early platformers, demanded hours and hours of your life, honing reflexes and restarting levels, Braid wants you to reach the end as quickly as your brain can take you there.

Of course, the wind of game design had long ago turned toward forgiveness, as a consequence of the gaming market expanding to include people without infinite free time. We have FPS’s where your health regenerates, action games where you reach a checkpoint after every accomplishment, and platformers where extra lives are in arbitrarily large supply. Braid is not a revolution in that sense, but it does represent a high point on the “challenge versus forgiveness” graph.

The official website of Braid will tell you that its puzzles are “reasonable,” and that is no empty boast. The world of Braid is logical, and made of small, easy-to-grasp pieces. Once you’ve beaten World 3 (the second world), the environment practically has no new surprises for you, just familiar elements arranged in a different and challenging way. There’s only a couple puzzles that I would consider a logical stretch. I’m reminded of Telltale Games’ Sam and Max series, which are absolutely the best point-and-click adventure games I’ve played, because they do away with the sort of “use spatula on tiger” nonsense that adds artificial, hair-pulling-out difficulty to some of the genre’s older offerings. Granted, Sam and Max’s approach to logic is a bit more madcap than Braid’s chrono-logic, but both games understand that real challenge comes only from a game that makes sense and communicates clearly with the player.



Story’s a little tricky to address, with Braid. It’s less a game of story and more a game of themes: case in point the aforementioned “theme” of forgiveness in the first world. Each world is preceded by brief text passages that tie an emotional state to the prevailing game mechanic of that world. Before World 4, where time runs forwards and backwards as you run forwards and backwards through the level, you will read (or ignore) passages on how different places evoke different times and different memories. After that, the levels themselves contain no text, no ruminations, no sense of a story. But the theme sticks in your mind, and lets you do the thinking for yourself. In an interactive medium, game designers are constantly trying to figure out how to better tell a story without taking too much time and control away from the player. The way Braid manages it is a hell of a trick, if you can pull it off. The last level in particular is a wonderful and surprising – but logical – merging of gameplay and story.

I’m a firm believer that, limitations aside, an interactive narrative has tremendous potential to be personally meaningful, even without trying to script out twenty different endings or create a world of perfect freedom. Braid succeeds because it has something to say, says it, and gets out of the player’s way.