Glad To Be Wrong
Braid came out, and despite my earlier cynicism, it is indeed garnering tons of critical praise and appears to be selling pretty OK, at least for an XBLA game. Shows what I know, I guess.
My Braid experience was similar to my Portal experience: almost immediately after release, all in one sitting, cover-to-cover so to speak. They both took about the same length of time. Portal is probably the more “entertaining” game, what with the humour and toyetic nature of the portal gun. Braid, on the other hand, I found significantly more rewarding to play, both in the nuts-and-bolts puzzling of the game, as well as in the overall story/theme/whatever.
It’s not simply a matter of Braid’s puzzles being more difficult than Portal’s, though that helps. Not that “harder” equates with “better” in a puzzle game, but as I’ve said before I found Portal to be rather trivial as far as brainpower required to play. In Portal, I always knew what to do, it was just a matter of execution of the proper jumps, or, at worst, exploration to find the proper surfaces to portal or buttons to push. In comparison, I solved most puzzles in Braid are solved through reflection and logic. So, if you are actually looking for an actual puzzle game, Braid is much more worth your time whereas Portal ironically makes the better “platformer”.
Braid is also a bit more interesting in the story department, if you can tolerate a game that takes itself pretty seriously. My charitable view is that the game is ambitious. Others may prefer to describe the game as pretentious. I think the second viewpoint, which crops up even in many of the positive reviews, is pretty misguided. It’s pretty much the most modest story I’ve seen in a game, a story ruminating on how we spend our time, a story on the scope of a Lost In Translation, whereas most any other “story” game in existence doesn’t dare venture anywhere outside of the comfort zone of sci-fi and fantasy.
The two biggest things I could say against this aspect of the game would be that the prose itself can be a little twee (but it doesn’t bother me so much when taken as part of the bigger picture) and that it’s pretty obtuse for the sake of obtuseness. If you don’t care for the kind of writing that, on the face of it, “doesn’t make sense” and requires you to do some extra parsing on your own, then this game will probably annoy you.
The danger in this sort of thing is that people can slip into the whole “genius through obscurity” mindset, where we misattribute grand things to someone who is just vague enough to hide an empty work from prying eyes. (As an aside, I think it’s funny, how much we often worry about overrating works of art. Like it is a great tragedy if society treats something as being greater than some hidden objective goodness value handed down by the gods or something.) I don’t think that Braid is guilty of that, but I could be wrong. In the end, though, it’s been several days now and I’m still turning Braid around in my mind and thinking about what it is saying.
I really liked the puzzles in Braid. I did find the story to be a little obtuse. I really liked the stuff in the Attic. I think that I didn’t play this in one sitting maybe contributed to not liking it as much. I will say that I was pretty pleased when I finally conquered it.
I think this is a game, more than any I’ve ever played, that can take the Games as Art argument and actually win people over. People say that about games all the time but usually I think they’re grasping at straws. This game was visually stunning, the music was wonderful, the gameplay inventive, and the story vastly different than anything else in gaming in general.
Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool.
My 2 Cents.
Comment by Mike — August 14, 2008 @ 12:20 pmJust tried it for the first time last night, actually. Played World 2 & World 3 to completion. Excellent music/art, and although I was initially disappointed at how easy I found the puzzles to be, I quickly regretted that when I spent over 1/2 an hour figuring out how to get the last two puzzle pieces on the cloud bridge stage.
I was convinced it had something to do with a solitary cloud drifting painfully slowly towards where it might be usable, but I got frustrated and left to get the other puzzle pieces I’d missed on my first pass. Needless to say, those other missing puzzle pieces were essential to that particular puzzle’s ingenious solution. I was grinning from ear to ear when I figured it out.
Comment by Jordan — August 15, 2008 @ 10:05 amOh, and I see no reason that it can’t be described as both ambitious and pretentious. We are talking about Jonathon Blow here. Those qualities are both kind of his thing. There was one of the greek book entries in particular that struck me, when I was trying to parse it, as both the most impentrable and pretentious sentense that I’d ever read.
Comment by Jordan — August 15, 2008 @ 10:08 am*looks for edit button* er, greek = green, sentense = sentence. You’re text entry box bleeds of the side of the page in my IE so I can’t see everything I’m writing.
Comment by Jordan — August 15, 2008 @ 10:09 amYou’re = Your. of = off. Bah! I hereby quit the internet forever to take up whittling.
Comment by Jordan — August 15, 2008 @ 10:10 amIt’s funny, I hear a lot of complaints about that World 2 puzzle as being a bit unfair and creating false impressions for the rest of the game. (Not to spoil anything, but you never need to backtrack ever again for the remainder of the game.)
Comment by Nathan — August 18, 2008 @ 8:11 am