You Knew This Was Coming
While Braid is a fine puzzle game, I still gotta give the edge to DROD as far as pure puzzle satisfaction goes. Not that it’s really appropriate to compare them.
With Braid, my experience was (for the most part) that of studying the network of platforms leading to some puzzle piece, determining how that world’s special power helps you get there, then executing. Each puzzle is very unique: rarely do you use the same trick twice. This is pretty explicitly by design, by all accounts I’ve read. Most every interesting consequence of each world’s unique “rules” is used, more or less, exactly once in a puzzle.
Solving a DROD room (well, I guess I should say, “solving a DROD”) is a much more iterative, interactive experience. A lot more experimenting is involved, as you dig your way halfway through a room only to discover that you’ve painted yourself into a corner, revert back to a checkpoint, and repeat. It’s remarkably fast paced for something that is “turn-based”, and it feels a lot more like “playing” a game than Braid did, as much of my time in Braid was spent staring and contemplating. If I’m merely staring and contemplating in DROD, it usually means I’m well and truly stumped.
At the same time, I’m glad that Braid is pretty serious about actually providing a challenging puzzle experience. As a kind of faint echo of the critical reaction I had been expecting, a lot of the negative reactions are dwelling on the game basically being too hard. Of course, this complaint mostly danced around so as not to sound too petulant. The puzzles are unfair because I have to read the designer’s mind! The platforming requires pixel perfect timing! It’s enough to make me want to bust out one of those facepalm.gif things that the kids all seem to like these days.
There’s also just a lot more variety to DROD, as well as a lot more quantity. Of course, it’s had years and years to build this up, and it is also much more focused on brain twisters than Braid is for the most part. (Though I will defend DROD’s “story” not only for its humour, but whatever seriousness there is to it as well.) All the same, Braid falls short of the “Best Puzzle Game of all time” award. It’s pretty high up there, though, duking it out with the Lost Vikings and the Incredible Machine. Maybe some others, I can’t recall at the moment.
It’s therefore pretty interesting to see what the DROD players thought of Braid: http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=26430
Comment by Merus — August 19, 2008 @ 5:23 amWow. Braid officially makes me feel inadequate, and I’m not talking about it puzzles, although I did find some of them rather challenging. No, I’m talking about its story.
Vern and I played through the Epilogue a couple of times. Only on our second trip did we discover the second set of books revealed be interacting with the scenery. But, even then, we were kind of at a loss piecing together the plot. So, we sat for a few minutes, tried to piece together what we could internally, then gave up and decided to check GameFAQs to see if we’d missed anything.
I’ll refrain from spoilers, but when I told Vern what the game’s story was actually about, she thought I was lying. I guess it’s not essential that we figure out what it is about in order to enjoy it, but it really made me feel as if I was too stupid for it. Are we the only ones? If anyone’s finished the game and isn’t certain what it was about, I encourage you to look online and see if you’re as blown away as I was. <– Apologies for the joke.
Not to mention the “stars”. Did either of you (Mike & Nathan) know that there’s a complete second set of 8 collectables? The requirements for getting them are crazy. They remind me of the skulls in Halo 2. I read how to get some of them, and officially decided that I want no part of it. I gather that they only provide one extra scene for gathering them all, and I’ve read what it is, so I can do without.
Comment by Jordan — August 19, 2008 @ 7:13 pmIf you are referring to the theory which has originated here: http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=190136 (which I am guessing based on your pun) you should take solace in the fact that said theory is quite emphatically not at all “official”. I’ve been following Braid threads on NeoGAF and QuarterToThree (where Blow himself posts occasionally) and the above link is, as far as I can tell, the original source of the theory.
Blow has since mentioned that there are several themes and elements of the story and art that haven’t really been picked up on[citation needed]; I haven’t come across any comments specifically w.r.t. the theory above, however.
Spoilers below. Of course, now that both Jordan and Mike have completed this there’s kind of not many readers left to spoil, now is there?
I think the “its about nukes” theory is both overthinking things (in that it tries too hard to find something succinct, treating the story like some elaborate code to be deciphered) and underthinking things (in that it latches on to the most obvious textual reference (I mean, it’s footnoted for crying out loud) but ignores other references, allusions, and just seems to punt on 90% of the text as being an elaborate smoke screen.)
Frankly, if it is indeed the “real” meaning, the game is worse off for it. I’m quite confident it is not, however, as it runs pretty much 100% counter to my reading of most anything Blow has said on the topic of game design.
More later, running late. In the meantime, fun fact about that World 2 puzzle that people either love or hate:
Comment by Nathan — August 19, 2008 @ 10:05 pmhttp://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=1441176&postcount=155