Braid

[MarketTantrik]

 

BRAID

 

Developer: Number None Inc.

Publisher: Microsoft

Genre: Xbox LIVE Arcade Platformer

Release Date: 8/6/2008

Console: Xbox 360 [Xbox Live Arcade]

Players : 1

 

 

Braid is a puzzle-platformer, drawn in a painterly style, where the player manipulates the flow of time in strange and unusual ways. From a house in the city, journey to a series of worlds and solve puzzles to rescue an abducted princess. In each world, you have a different power to affect the way time behaves, and it is time's strangeness that creates the puzzles. The time behaviors include: the ability to rewind, objects that are immune to being rewound, time that is tied to space, parallel realities, time dilation, and perhaps more. Braid treats your time and attention as precious; there is no filler in this game. Every puzzle shows you something new and interesting about the game world.

 

* Forgiving yet challenging gameplay: Braid is a 2-D platform game where you can never die and never lose. Despite this, Braid is challenging—but the challenge is about solving puzzles, rather than forcing you to replay tricky jumps.

* Rich puzzle environment: Travel through a series of worlds searching for puzzle pieces, then solving puzzles by manipulating time: rewinding, creating parallel universes, setting up pockets of dilated time. The gameplay feels fresh and new; the puzzles are meant to inspire new ways of thinking.

* Aesthetic design: A painterly art style and lush, organic soundtrack complement the unique gameplay.

* Nonlinear story: A nonlinear fiction links the various worlds and provides real-world metaphors for your time manipulations; in turn, your time manipulations are projections of the real-world themes into playful "what-if" universes where consequences can be explored.

* Nonlinear gameplay: The game doesn't force you to solve puzzles in order to proceed. If you can't figure something out, just play onward and return to that puzzle later.

 

Screenshots

 

 

 

 

[MarketTantrik]

Eurogamer Review

 

From: http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=205102

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Braid

 

Review by Dan Whitehead

 

Score : 10/10

 

This is perhaps the nineteenth time I've started writing this review. If this were a montage in an old movie, this is the point we'd cut to the bin next to my desk, overflowing with crumpled balls of paper, torn in frustration from an imposing, mocking typewriter. Braid has filled my head with so many ideas, so many opinions, so many emotions that wrestling them all into a coherent critique is like trying to strangle a swan made of jelly. Every time I think I've found a mental strand that leads to the natural start of the review, it unravels. I've gone to bed thinking about Braid, and I've woken up thinking about it. From the fragments I remember, I'm pretty sure I've dreamed about it as well.

 

Braid is that sort of game.

 

Boiled down to its barest essence, it's a platform game where you must travel through six worlds to find and assemble jigsaws. Control is of the basic left-right-jump variety, and levels are made up of ladders, floating platforms and cannons that spit out whimsical enemies, deadly to the touch unless you jump on their head. The twist is that you now have control over time, and holding down the X button rewinds everything you've done. Time and its manipulation, not jumping, is the overriding gameplay feature.

 

Even though Braid takes obvious influence from Super Mario Bros, its creative importance reminds me most of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' seminal graphic novel, Watchmen. On one level, it's exactly what it appears to be. For Watchmen, a superhero murder mystery. For Braid, a 2D platform game. But there's more. Much more. Both are works of homage and deconstruction, commentaries on the way we interact with their respective media. The deeper you look, the more you see.

 

Here's where you learn about the magic items immune to your time-manipulating powers.

 

More than that, it's something that could only be done in this medium. Watchmen was written and drawn to explore narrative ideas that could only work in sequential panels and word balloons. Braid does much the same for jumps, moving platforms and perambulating enemies. So many games try to justify their creative ambitions by cribbing from other forms - wannabe movies dressed up as games, relying on our rehearsed responses from non-gaming experience. Braid is a videogame. It could only be a videogame and therein lies its true genius.

 

At this point, I suspect I'll have lost a lot of you. Understandably wary of artistic pretension in games, and heartily sick of videogame reviewers indulging their frustrated poetic tendencies, you'll see just another low-budget platform game lavished with praise by jaded critics just because of its indie roots. You'll see a clichéd story being praised for its emotional depth. You'll see the time manipulation being praised as an act of remarkable design innovation, and you'll scoff at how Blinx, Prince of Persia and TimeShift all did it first. On all fronts, you'll be wrong.

 

Other games may have offered rewind mechanisms, but always as a peripheral feature firmly within an otherwise rigid gameworld. Like bullet-time in The Matrix, it was a cool visual effect but with limited impact on the core gameplay beyond saving your life. In Braid, being able to rewind your death and try again is entry-level stuff. That's the basics, the launch pad, the minimum that the concept allows you to do. Here it's more than just a limited second-chance mechanism. Not only can you rewind all the way back to the start of the level, undoing everything you did, but doing so is often essential to progress. You must look back to go forwards.

 

The game soon introduces magical items - identified by a green glow - which exist independently of your timestream. In other words, when you rewind time, whatever you do to these items is not undone. The most basic example, and the one the game uses to introduce the concept, is that you can drop into an inescapable pit to grab a magical key. You can then rewind time to return yourself back to the moment before you jumped in, except you're still holding the key. Doors, platforms and even enemies can be subject to this effect, and once you get past the ingrained notion that success must come only from linear leaps, and embrace the idea that you can set things up in the future before rewinding to the past for the payoff, it's as if years of gaming blinkers have been ripped away.

 

And still there's more. The game never plateaus, never stops adding even more wrinkles to its temporal mischief, crafting puzzles that stretch your mind and force you to re-evaluate every assumption you ever held about how games can work. By the time you complete World 3, you'll have solved intricately brilliant puzzles that would be the design highlight of most games, yet each world has its own unique way of handling the flow of time. In World 4 time flows depending on your movements. Move right and time flows forwards. Move left and it flows backwards. There's a level based on Donkey Kong, called Jumpman, which uses this idea quite brilliantly - taking the left-to-right-to-left ascent of the arcade classic and turning it into something entirely mind-boggling.

 

In World 5, each rewind creates a shadow universe in which your ghost carries out the same actions as before, essentially creating two versions of yourself separated by time. If your brain just snapped you won't be alone. By the time you reach the end of the game, in World 6 and finally World 1 (yes, even the level sequence is off-kilter) it's as if you've just experienced the most charming and entertaining quantum mechanics lesson of all time. Only Portal comes close to the mentally liberating effect of Braid's construction, but even that feels like a half-measure in comparison. Time is fluid. Past, present and future are not destinations in a straight line but resources to be used, if only you can free your brain from its archaic A-to-B trajectory. Sorry Kutaragi-san, but this is 4D gaming and it could only have come from the world of the homebrew developer.

 

You see, Braid's creator, Jonathan Blow, has more in mind than just shaking up tired old gameplay conventions. He wants to create games that make you think and feel. Braid doesn't have a story, at least not in the traditional linear narrative sense, but there's a lead character, Tim, and his mission is to find a princess. She's not a literal princess though, but a metaphor - the romantic cliché of that perfect soul mate as filtered through popular videogame motifs. The classic Mario line "our princess is in another castle", knowingly reused here, is more than just an ironic wink to gaming history. In the context of Braid's melancholy mood, it becomes a bona fide commentary on the human condition. Our princess is always in another castle.

 

Each world is preceded by a series of books, which produce text passages as you walk past. They detail fragments of Tim's past - people he left, people who left him, as he searches for this princess. "Her benevolence has circumscribed you, and your life's achievements will not reach beyond the map she has drawn" is a typical example. You can sprint past these sections, should you wish, but to do so means missing the point quite spectacularly. Surrender to the game's reflective intentions and it can be quite profound. I have no problem admitting that I found myself thinking about people and places that I'd not considered for years. Relationships that ended too soon. Some that went on far too long. Memories that no longer seem reliable. Others that are still painfully vivid. It's a platform game. It's an emotional journey. Whatever you invest in Braid, it repays many times over.

 

Given its lofty ambitions, it almost seems mundane to set aside a paragraph to discuss such shallow matters as graphics and sound, but both these elements are expertly woven into Braid's canvas. The hand-painted graphics are truly stunning. They're lovely to look at, but also serve a deeper purpose. The graphical palettes for each world subtly evoke and develop the themes established by the text. Musically too, there's a creative coherence. Gentle folk music soundtracks the optimistic early stages. Music box nursery rhymes play off against levels that explore the friction between childhood and adult freedoms. Even the jigsaw puzzles that you must collect and solve depict enigmatic scenes laden with abstract meaning.

 

What does it all mean? Whatever you want it to, I suspect. There's not one single correct answer to be found, but a series of reflections. Playing with time isn't just a gameplay element, it's the core of the whole game. What if you could take back mistakes? What if your life could carry on in two different directions at once? What if the world really revolved around you - would that help or hinder your progress?

 

You could argue that by using the doomed romanticism of an introspective male as its core that the game is treading clichéd creative soil but in a medium as emotionally stunted as videogames it still represents an enormous leap towards realising the potential of the form. Great novelists, filmmakers and painters have cultivated entire careers and acclaimed bodies of work from this sort of thing, so it seems churlish to criticise a games designer for attempting the same.

 

I almost never give out full marks, generally reserving that honour for retro games that have proven their worth many times over, but Braid has me in its spell. Judged purely as a game, it's cunning, ingenious and endlessly surprising. The puzzles are varied, the level design is revelatory and the whole thing clicks together like clockwork. For those only interested in gameplay, it's simply an excellent puzzler-cum-platformer. But there's so much more here, a desire to create a game experience that is more than mere technical craft. That it succeeds in creating an abstract emotional experience, one where each player can find their own level of meaning and personal context, all within the confines of the 2D platformer, is perhaps the most astonishing achievement of all.

Braid is beautiful, entertaining and inspiring. It stretches both intellect and emotion, and these elements dovetail beautifully rather than chaffing against each other. Still wondering if games can be art? Here's your answer.

 

__________________________________________________________________

[SchizoidFreud]

Braid Gamespot Review

 

The Good:

• Expertly designed puzzles that offer a hefty challenge without frustrating
  
• Subtle art design that is beautiful without being distracting
  
• A mature story with a powerful ending
  
• Stirring score that perfectly complements the mood
  
• Pin-point controls that let you focus on using your brain to solve puzzles.
  

 

The Bad:

• Costs more than most Xbox Live Arcade games.
  

Score: 9.5

[MarketTantrik]

Max Payne meets Mozart: impressions of Braid

 

By Frank Caron | Published: August 07, 2008

 

From : http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars...ssions-of-braid

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Though the PlayStation Network has arguably hosted more stylish and "arty" games, this week's Xbox Live Arcade release challenges the notion that Sony is winning the battle of style with its downloadable titles. Braid, this week's 1,200 Microsoft Points ($15) release, is a brilliant platformer that rewards both the eye and the mind with a great mix of gorgeous graphics and interesting gameplay mechanics.

 

Braid charges players with the task of moving through dream-like worlds in search of puzzle pieces which are combined to reveal scenes exploring the main character and his seeming obsession with "the Princess." With each successive dream world, the character gets closer and closer to finding her. The game's narrative pays homage to Super Mario Bros. as you wind up at castles searching for the Princess who can never be found.

 

The game takes some simplistic 2D platforming principles and infuses them with time control. Braid allows players to manipulate time in order to solve puzzles like Prince of Persia or Max Payne. There is no punishment for death in the game—you simply rewind time—and there is no limit to how much time power you can use. As a result, the game privileges puzzles over pure platforming.

 

What makes this so interesting is the way in which time can be used. Players can rewind and speed up time at their leisure and explore parallel realities as they move back and forth through time. One particularly neat concept comes in the form of items which are not affected by time. For example, at one part in the game you'll fall down a pit that you cannot escape in order to grab a key. Once you grab the key, though, you can rewind time to prior to your descent with the key still in hand. This gets really tricky in the more complicated puzzles, as you combine platforming tricks like chain-jumping off of enemies in order to bounce higher with the time manipulation.

 

Of course, it's hard to talk about the game without paying lip-service to the graphics. This is a beautiful game, truly a showpiece of 2D presentation. Hand-drawn watercolor backgrounds emphasize the dreamlike nature of the game as your smoothly-animated protagonist moves along entrancing, parallax-scrolled environments. Combined with the subtle orchestral score, it's not hard to sit hypnotized by the game.

 

The only real problem with the game is that its price may put off those who would otherwise be enamored with the title. I implore you to take the trial for a spin and at least experience one of the Xbox Live Arcade's best titles. We need more games like this—on every downloadable platform.

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[MarketTantrik]

I'm buying this game tonight

[SchizoidFreud]

Edge 's Braid Review

 

Every footfall in Braid can be undone – every misjudged jump into cannon fire, every tumble into a pit, reversed instantly. Unlike the comparable time-bending abilities in Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time, there are no limitations on the extent to which you can turn back the clock. You might think that this would make a 2D platformer a bit of a cinch – but you quickly realise that Braid’s challenge isn’t getting across each level but collecting the jigsaw pieces that are scattered through it, separated from you by brow-furrowing temporal obstacle courses.

 

Despite appearances, which play heavily upon the conventions made familiar by Mario, Braid is really more a puzzle game in the vein of Portal – and, it turns out, is no less tightly designed, no less sustained in its invention, than that title.

 

Each set of levels introduces a new twist, from which Braid squeezes an astonishing range of ideas without ever letting any one outstay its welcome. The first is that some items are immune to time-reversal. An early example sees you carefully rewinding to shift into phase a series of moving platforms – some normal, some time-exempt – so that you have enough evenly spaced steppingstones to cross a large gap.

 

Later tiers allow you to drop time wells, which slow everything to greater degrees as they get closer to the epicentre, and another duplicates the player with every branch of the timeline – a shadowy doppelganger performing the actions you did yourself before the last rewind. Perhaps the most delightful and coherently realised of Braid’s tricks is seen in the third tier, where every step towards the right advances time in the world around you, and every step left reverses it.

 

Braid teaches you to understand the behaviour of these mechanics, and then ratchets up the convolution their usage requires, culminating in those exultant ‘ahhah!’ moments that are the hallmark of a superb puzzle. Only once or twice do they feel wanting. Sometimes you’ll work out the solution only to be repeatedly foiled by over-fussy platforming and, very occasionally, paradoxes create situations which, while consistent with the rules of the world, results in objects betraying visually jittery behaviour.

 

Such moments of questionable design are rare, and Braid triumphantly proves that the 2D platformer can be much more than the sum of its Goombas; more than a succession of pitfalls and traps. Where it stumbles, however, is in its storytelling – a somewhat awkward text appendage to the action, written in an impressionistic style that feels a little trite in its self-conscious obscurity. There is an attempt to reflect the story’s themes in the game design itself, but this is only really successful in the very final level, which underscores just how much more powerfully an idea can be expressed through the mechanics of play. It’s a disappointment, but one that can be easily skipped past.

 

Braid remains a beautiful and brilliantly demanding game that barely contains its dense population of ideas, taking its place alongside Geometry Wars and Pac-Man Championship Edition as one of the finest original titles available on Live Arcade.

 

Verdict 9/10

[MarketTantrik]

I have been looking forward to something like this for a very long time. Crush on the PSP satiate some of that hunger. Hopefully Braid will be the dessert.

[MarketTantrik]

Screenies

 

 

 

 

 

[SchizoidFreud]

wow :shock3:

[MarketTantrik]

Soo beautiful

 

[SchizoidFreud]

SPOILER ALERT

 

Gameplay Vid:

 

[MarketTantrik]

 

Office proxy blocks youtube

[SchizoidFreud]

No cookie for you

[K'dash]

AWESSSOOOME!!!!

 

2d rules!!!!

[MarketTantrik]

All old skoolers !!! (especially you O&E)

 

Out with your wallets / credit cards / loot.

 

Buy this game NOW !!!

[SchizoidFreud]

No m$ :cry5:

[godspeed4476]

TATA ADSL off for abt 2 weeks , i am want this game so bad.........

[ThirdOne]

Awesome game. Just played the demo yesterday. A must have.

[Bulovski]

Oh man - go to sleep for 2 hours and all this happens. I saw the gameplay videos a few days ago and it looked interesting (like a cross between Lode Runner and Winterbottom). Honestly the vids of Winterbottom interested me more. But these reviews are through the roof. Guess I need to buy.

[MarketTantrik]

Oh man - go to sleep for 2 hours and all this happens.

Grandpa dozes off for a few winks and one of the best reviewed games of the year blasts onto the scene.

 

I'm sending you a crate of valium.