·:[ Smiling Politely ]:·
• • • • •

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.

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.

When I first acquired my 360, I quickly hopped onto the Xbox Live Arcade train and snapped up a handful of titles, all of which have treated me well more or less. I probably would have traded Puzzle Quest for something different as it wore out its welcome after some time, but the killer duo of Pac-man CE and Space Giraffe has had serious staying power, and Castlevania: SOTN is a classic I wouldn’t be playing if it weren’t for XBLA.

In recent months, however, I’d mostly been kind of curtailing the XBLA spending despite a few notable temptations like Rez HD and Ikaruga. This summer though, I think I’m going to have a hard time because there appears to be a ton of good stuff on the way.

Of course, the one game I absolutely must get as soon as it is released is Braid. I’ve mentioned my excitement for this game before, and it has been kind of a long time coming. I suspect this game, being a puzzle game on a non-portable system, is going to tank. This prediction would have been a no-brainer a year ago, but the surprising success of Portal makes it a bit less of a forgone conclusion these.

My charitable, polite explanation as to why I think Braid will fail where Portal succeeded is: “I dunno, just a gut feeling.” My less charitable, contrarian explanation relates to my beliefs that Portal is an overrated game. I think Portal succeeded despite being a puzzle game because: a) people were all buying Orange Box anyway, b) it was an easy puzzle game, c) it was funny, and d) it had a ton of good press because it fit into a very pleasant media narrative that was repeated on every gaming site in existance and probably took up 25% of every single review text out there. (The narrative being: college kids make cool school project, get bought by Valve, steal the Orange Box show.)

Now I’m not quite sure yet if Braid is going to be easy or not, but it doesn’t look to be particularly funny, seems to be trying to appeal to the games-as-art crowd rather than the “hurr hurr the cake is a lie!” internet meme crowd, and the developer basically alienates every game designer and journalist out there every time he gives a talk. If the game does turn out to be challenging at all, it’s gonna get a bunch of middling reviews with the executive summary “innovative, but too challenging for all but the most hardcore players, 7/10.”

Oh well, it’s coming out and I’ll be buying it so what do I care how well it does? It does have a pile of competition this summer though. Castle Crashers looks pretty fun, Geometry Wars 2 is tempting (less so since learning the co-op mode is local only), the Bionic Commando remake I didn’t initially care about has been gathering good buzz. Oh, and Galaga Legions I would normally not be overly excited about, only it’s by the Pac-man: CE team apparently, and as I mentioned above that game is definitely one of the best ones I’ve seen on the service. Oh oh, and Mega Man 9, of course.

And on top of all of that, soon the fruits of the XNA community are going to start appearing! Man, I should get in on that. Who wants to help me develop my sidescrolling Metroidvania roguelike?