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.