Once in a while a game comes along that just bends your mind in ways you didn’t know it could bend, changing, in some small way, the way you think forever. What Super Mario Galaxy did for gravity mechanics, Braid does for time mechanics; in the same way your mind folded in new ways when Mario jumped from planet to planet, only to soon internalise the ideas, revel in their originality and creatively solve problems with your new-found understanding, so it does when Braid approaches time in completely new ways. If only for this, I cannot recommend Braid enough, especially to jaded gamers who’ve seen it all before.

Braid takes the form of an old school platformer, those ones that we used to play on the Commodore 64 or the Apple ][. Stages, for the most part don’t scroll on forever like in Super Mario Bros, but are usually only a screen or two, with the artists taking advantage of today’s big high-definition TV’s to great effect, with beautiful high resolution 2D sprites and lush backgrounds. Each stage has one or more puzzle pieces to collect, and it is in the puzzling out how to get each piece that the game shines. I should say rather, that it is in the figuring out how to use the special behaviour of time in the world that you’re in to reach the puzzle piece that the game truly shines.

Time Tricks to Turn Things Topsy-turvy

The first time trick to learn is the rewind and fast-forward buttons. These are not new concepts to gamers after Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and more recently, GRID, so they’re not strikingly original. Being applied to the platforming genre, it does make the somewhat ridiculously old-school stages (that is, hard, timing-wise) far easier and keeps the gameplay about figuring out what to do rather than executing it flawlessly. What is immediately clever once you reach World 2, is that some objects are impervious to time tricks - for example, after unlocking a door, you might rewind time and expect the door to re-lock, but if that door is impervious to time (indicated by a glowing green tinge), when you rewind the door will remain open despite your action of unlocking it being rewound. Usually, when you use a key it becomes used up, but if you rewind time you un-use it and can use it again. Sometimes the doors are impervious to time altering, sometimes the keys are, sometimes certain areas of the stage are. It’s brilliant right?

But wait, wait until you get to the world where time goes forward if you’re walking to the right and backwards if you’re walking to the left. Now try rewinding and your left-walking with time going backwards becomes right-walking with time going forwards. Now try throwing in objects that replay what happened to them as you move left and right - every object has its own timeline. Now throw in objects impervious to time! It’s a recipe for bending your mind on top of itself until it collapses in a heap of sheer incredulity at the brain that can think this stuff up. There’s also the world where your actions are replayed by a shadow of yourself after you rewind, and the one where you have a special ring that slows time down, but only in the area around the ring.

Fresh challenges right to the end

This is one of those games where every new puzzle brings in some new element, which is why I can’t help likening it to Super Mario Galaxy. Of course, it’s not on the same scale as that phenomenal game, but it captures the spirit of always delighting the gamer for as long as it lasts, not rinsing and repeating a puzzle over and over but instead challenging the player in unique ways at every turn, right down to the very last moment. I can’t comment very much on the story because it is told in text form which isn’t conducive to a group puzzle-solving session - this is a game that benefits from a bunch of minds being thrown at the problems instead of one (which is likely a recipe for controller destruction as some of these puzzles are fiendish). The atmosphere in games is always more important than the actual plot, and the moods created by the art and music in Braid are wistful and dreamy. There is an extremely clever and unexpected ending, and homage is paid (or is it critical irony?) to the plot of every Super Mario Bros. game at the end of each stage.

Braid is a remarkable achievement - a strikingly original game with beautiful production values and polish that was developed on a small budget by seemingly just one designer/developer, two artists and some licensed music. It is worth every cent that it sells for on the XBLA, and there really isn’t anything like it on the Xbox 360, or any other console for that matter.

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