Braid

 
Developer: Number None
Steam Release: Apr 2009
Hours Played: 5.7
Similar To: Black Hole / Escape Goat / Eversion / Misadventures of PB Winterbottom
Rating: 3/5 Parsnips




GAMEPLAY
There is a reason why Braid is revered so much and considered the benchmark of platform-puzzlers. The artwork is lush and beautiful, the controls and movement are silky smooth, the worlds are uniquely designed and it's an overall pleasure to explore. What’s more, the unique gameplay mechanic is a breath of fresh air. You control a smartly dressed young man with a huge head and a shock of wavy-red hair. On entering the first world you see a series of doors taking you to tutorial-type screens teaching you the basics. It begins promisingly; you traverse the landscape by jumping, climbing and bouncing on the heads of monsters. If you die, you press the time-reversal button rewinding your game and placing your character where you want him to be before you had your accident.

 
BALANCE & PACE
Along the way, you collect jigsaw-puzzle pieces which must be arranged into a picture shown at the World-Select screen. The challenge obviously gets tougher. Soon, you'll need to use that time-reversal button regularly to manipulate items in the environment. Some objects, both animate and inanimate, are affected by the time-reversal button and some are not... and this is where the difficulty spike just may become a game-breaker for some. Limbo, Nightsky, Thomas Was Alone, Toki Tori, Unmechanical... all classics and all beaten by yours truly - but Braid? This one has me beat. I absolutely loved the game up until about the end of World 1 but after this I found the game to be unfathomable and far too much like hard work.
 


PRESENTATION & DESIGN
Despite its brutal difficulty, Braid shines like a sparkling diamond in the sound and graphics department. The soundtrack, for one, is absolutely beautiful consisting of a tasteful classical score giving it that added class it's known for. Sound effects are few but again this adds to the subtle nature of the game. All this in conjunction with the quirky hand-drawn environments gives the game that distinctive and dignified air. In this respect the game is a masterpiece. The only purpose to the home page is either to quit or explore the meagre Help & Options menu. This gives you  few options to change things like sound and music (at the Settings menu) while the How To Play option similarly gives you minimal instructions extending nowhere beyond telling you how to jump, that you can bounce on the monsters' heads and that you collect puzzle pieces. 

 
PROGRESS SYSTEM
When starting the game you are taken to the World-Select / Level-Select Screen so you'll need to hit the Escape key to take you to the main menu screen. To highlight progress you'll refer to the World Select screen that you begin with when you start the game. This screen, which is the side-view of the plan of a house, consists of about seven or eight darkened rooms that become illuminated as you complete the game. In the first two worlds the rooms are lit with the picture of the jigsaw that you are supposed to complete as you go. I'm not sure if this is the case with the other rooms/worlds. When you open the door to each of these worlds you enter a kind of cloud room which has a lot of cryptic nonsense that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Within this room are further doors to enter further levels.


CONCLUSION
With all the encouraging signs that it has going for it, I can't help but feel that the sum of its parts doesn't quite add up to the classic it's regarded to be. Solutions may have been tricky at first but I still managed to figure out most of the conundrums without assistance and looked forward to continuing my journey. Unfortunately World 2 totally flummoxed me to the point where I needed help every few minutes and, of course, this killed immersion and my joy of the game. Like Puzzle Dimension I liken this process to studying maths at school where the early promise of experiencing joy in numbers is soon squashed by quadratic equations and trigonometry. Although World 1 has such splendid moments, its harsh later difficulty means I can't quite be fully on board with this one.