This is one of the answers to the old question: Are games an art form? (Spoiler: they can be.)



(click to enlarge screenshots)

Braid is a platforming game developed by independent software developer Jonathan Blow for the Xbox 360’s Xbox Live Arcade service. The title was officially announced for Xbox Live Arcade during Microsoft’s Tokyo Game Show 2007 press conference and was released on August 6, 2008.

It’s a game 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. 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. 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.

This game is a thing of beauty. Braid puts an excellent spin on the classic platformer with the added twist of time-bending puzzles. Very cool to play through as it forces you to think in new and creative ways. The sparse and intriguing storyline add to its mysterious and creative charm and to top it off, the use of the visuals and soundtrack are fantastic. The tracks used in the game were licensed from Magnatune and are very much worth checking out.

Finding things to complain about in Braid is pretty difficult because it’s so well done. The only real “flaw” that I could find is that the game itself is relatively short, so the replay value is somewhat hindered by this. Then again, it’s an Arcade title, so by definition it’s going to be short.

In the end, you have one of the most ingenious puzzle-based games ever devised. You owe it to yourself to buy this game. It’s easily worth fifteen dollars. Heck, it’s even worth twice that. Braid has too much to offer in terms of new, intelligent and thoughtful gameplay to be ignored simply because of a few hundred extra Microsoft Points. Braid is a masterpiece.

Honestly, it’s the closest thing to a flawless game I’ve ever seen.

10/10

This post is tagged 360, arcade, braid, game, live, review, xbox