#1. Braid
I hadn’t heard of Jonathan Blow’s Braid until it was pulled from Slamdance over the protests about Super Columbine Massacre RPG – and I forgot about it until Penny Arcade mentioned its release a few weeks ago. At the moment, I consider it the most worthwhile reason to own an XBOX 360 (which may or may not tell you something about the state of my XBOX Live account).
I’ve been saying for days now that Braid does for time what Portal did for space; it takes a familiar game mechanic, makes one fundamental change, and all of a sudden we’re dealing with a whole new animal. It’s not just that the player can reverse time – Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time used that idea extremely well, as have other games – nor even that time can be unwound all the way to the beginning of a level. It’s that each area depends on the player to use time itself as a game mechanic, and then says: once your actions can be rewound and replayed, what else can we ask you to do? And goes on to treat time as yet another interactive puzzle piece, not just a mechanic to be outraced or taken for granted. It’s a simple change that completely transforms the way we look at the game world – and I found Braid deceptively hard at the beginning for that reason, for as long as it took me to wrap my head around the idea.
The plot, while almost too writerly for my taste (I couldn’t handle an entire short story in that overly-poetic style, although it does work in short bursts), wraps up nicely at the end: ambiguous but satisfying, and without a pat “here’s what happened” finish. In a way, it’s a nice solution to one of our problems with gamey-game endings: how can you tell meaningful stories in a medium where the player has to “win”? In Braid, winning isn’t the same as earning a solution, and it’s certainly not a ticket to a happy ending. Instead, it’s the beginning of an understanding, something I’ve always felt to be a cop-out in traditionally written stories, but that worked well for me here.
There’s a book called Einstein’s Dreams, in which a young Einstein about to send his theories off for publication has a series of dreams, each describing a world in which time works differently. In one, time moves slower the higher off the surface of the Earth you are; in another, time is an emotional state; or time stops at a certain point on the earth and only lovers and new parents travel there; or time loops, but only for certain people…. I’ve wondered, since playing Braid, if Jonathan Blow has read it, or what he would think if it. This is a game, in all respects, for adults, but for adults that grew up with games. It certainly takes our past into account, from the familiar construction of the platforming puzzles to the variations on “our Princess is in another castle” at the end of each world, even to the names of individual areas (“Jumpman” and “There and Back Again” come to mind). I wonder how long it will be before games like Braid are seen, in the most mercenary and practical terms, as salable products for a thriving demographic, rather than just a lucky find.
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