Braid

Braid highlights

Started replaying Braid yesterday with a more analytic mindset trying to get all the puzzle pieces. It surprised me a little that the game is more about puzzles than platformingm even to the point of making the platforming almost trivial. Levels are just small sets of challenges (sometimes even 1 single challenge), there´s no jumping or anything outside the proper challenges, to the point of having to travel walking long distances. In this regard it feels a bit underwhelming, as I was expecting more complex designs, but the levels are just cut down to the bare minimum, while at the same time adding long walking sections here and there.

The puzzles are very clever, but sometimes there´s no way to continue but to exit the level and restart it. Also, sometimes you have to rewind A LOT. Many puzzles are not doable the first time as you´re on a tight timer, so by the time you see everything you need you have to rewind and some elements may be immune to time. BTW, having to rewind long periods of time is boring.

I´m liking the game and I´m finding the puzzles very challenging, but for the moment I´m not convinced this is the masterpiece everyone says, at least from a gameplay and level design view. Still, it´s a huge accomplishment for one single dev and I hope I can come up with something half as unique and great as this.

Edit (12/05/2016):

I reached the final world, some puzzles were really tricky, while others required too much precission which felt akward in a game that hasn´t required such thing anywhere. Still, it´s genious how the game bends it´s own mechanics and even reuses exactly the same levels with these new twists, changing them completely. The revisit to the Hunt level or the boss one with the new mechanics of worlds 4 and 5 were awesome: you instantly recognize them, you know exactly what objective you have but the mechanics transform how you interact with these levels.

I specially liked World 4´s mechanic: moving to the right advances time and moving to the left rewinds it (it seems it´s more like the position in the timeline is defined directly by the position of the player in the x-axis).

Note: This is an awesome idea and I think it could work really well in one of Ookami´s levels. It can be really tricky to setup though, so for this level I could start by dividing the level into smaller rooms. Also, verticality doesn´t seem to be affected by the mechanic, so we could "easily" set up a vertical level, climbing a wal with time control would look really awesome.

Note: I should ask Jarosh if he got his inspiration from this level for the x-sensitive platforms in Octahedron.

An aspect I haven´t discussed yet about the game are the graphics: it´s really high quality, very artistic, like you are in a dream world or in a painting (everything indicates the author went for teh second one). The references to Mario games are very direct and I loved them. Music also sets this oniric and relflexive mood, so it matches really well the general tone of the game.

What I didn´t like were all the long texts in the books...I mean, maybe the story is great, but so much text really put me off when I just wanted to play and once I skipped one book, I just couldn´t bother to read the rest.

The more I play this game the less I think it´s a platformer, it´s a puzzle game where platforming is really not more important than the time mechanics, so even calling it a puzzle platformer doesn´t seem right. This is not something bad, it´s just a personal appreciation meaning that I think you really shouldn´t compare this game to SMW, just like you wouldn´t compare SMW and ALttP. I won´t be able to take anything regarding movement or platforming...however the time mechanics and puzzle settings (specially the revisiting) are top tier concepts I can see working in Kitsune.

Only one world remaining, tonight Braid finally falls!

Edit (16/05/2016): Finished the game, the last world presented a new mechanic where you could create a bubble where time will be slowed down, it was nice. I didn´t like (and this is not only a problem in World 6) that some puzzles required very exact positioning or fiddling of the rewind-forward mechanic. An example is when you have to climb the falling ladder while rewinding-advancing, I just don´t understand how I finally solved that puzzle when I did...it didn´t feel very rewarding.

The last level was awesome, it´s the only instance in the whole game where some story telling is done through gameplay, not counting any obscure metaphors the dev used throughout the game. And it was awesome, totally changing the meaning of the scene to the opposite of the original meaning.

So overall, I enjoyed the game, there were some very clever puzzles but I didn´t like the walls of text for story telling, some times the mechanics felt inconsistent (or rather, their required use) and the levels were short and simple. I loved how it revisited old levels with new mechanics and how it introduced and developed the mechanics through each level. It´s definitely a puzzle game, not a platformer, though there are some platforming components.