Last Friday night, I headed to Justin’s house as usual. I arrived to his house only to find that it was vacant. I decided to wait outside, and shortly, Justin arrived accompanied by Wyatt. The three of us happily decided to spend the rest of the evening playing Braid. This is where our journey began in a completely bizarre environment where we were forced to think in ways with which we were not accustomed.
Braid can be described as a futuristic version of Mario on the surface. The story (again, on the surface) follows the cliche of the hero trying to save the princess from the grasps of the evil monster. You will soon learn however that the story is nothing like you would expect. By the end of the story, you will be so confused that you will immediately venture onto the Internet and try to find out what it all means. Then you will proceed to read a 20 page plot analysis on the Internet. Unfortunately, you will still be very much in the dark as to the meaning of the story as a whole.
To complement a very deep and interesting story line, the game takes advantage of some very creative gameplay mechanics. The game is about time travel. However, time travel is done as perfectly as I have ever seen it before. The time travel is made the way you would expect it to happen. Everything in the world moves backwards when the time travel takes place. The characters across the screen go backwards. The background music rewinds. The rain that has been dripping down will immediately start to fall upwards. The puzzles in the game are then only solvable by utilizing time travel in some of the most creative ways.
The game may seem short, but each puzzle takes a rather significant amount of thinking to solve. At each level, the player is presented with a new special concept in time travel. This ranges from time travel allowing the player to create a shadow clone of himself or being able to warp time to slow the movement of objects.
Overall, the game ended that night at 3:00 AM by which point I was suffering from a raging headache that lasted all throughout the next day. All in all, this game is one that I recommend to anybody who is looking for some thinking in a game that has creativity, beautiful art, and an astonishingly involved story line. What is most impressive is that this game was independently developed by only one person over the span of 3 years.
