Customer Reviews

Braid

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Braid is a platform game in a painterly style that uses time manipulation to solve puzzles."

Move, climb, jump, and time-travel. The art is beautiful, and with the soundtrack, pulls you into fantasy world were everything is simple and beautiful and nothing is what it seems.

As you travel through more and more doors you must use some skill and a lot of wits to capture puzzle pieces. With the tenacity of a scientist you try new approaches, and repeat failures a hundred times until the truth unravels for you.

Parallel to your efforts, the story of Tim and the Princess unfolds, where Tim asks questions we all ask, and tries to achieve what we all want: understanding.

But so much is Uncertain. So much is subjective.

Braid is all about perspective, assumptions, and breaking the rules of both.

***

This game is amazing, beautiful, and emotional. Buy it, and play the demo while it's in the mail.

This game is loaded with mind-bending, rip-your-hair-out phenomenal puzzles, but you never get completely stuck, since you can simply walk from one end of a level to another and come back to try again at any time. Beautiful game art and music complete the atmosphere.

One of the few games where I actually felt smarter after playing it. Highly, highly recommended.

Jonathan Blow (the creator) impresses in this puzzle masterpiece which revolves around time manipulation to collect puzzle pieces. Some of the challenges are quite difficult and require a fairly high degree of problem solving ability and creativity. This game really forces you to think hard at times and the analytical and problem solving skills are geared more toward a mature, intellectually developed audience (too difficult for young kids).

While I respect others' opinions, I discount the negative reviews that complained that you have to think too much in playing this game because I found the challenges to be the best part. If you want a mindless game this is the wrong genre. If you get stuck there are always walk-throughs on YouTube. It's also interesting to note that there's not always one unique solution to each problem.

This game boasts a vague but intriguing story line. Very impressive for an indy game.

Ok, this game's been out for a while now. I just purchased it based on the affordable price and free shipping. I wish I'd played this sooner. First off, the graphics in this game are beautiful. It's a side scroller with parallax scrolling similar to some of the "old school" video games. In fact, the graphics in this game remind me of an upgraded Amiga game. It seems inspired by the old Monty Python games for the Amiga - except with much better graphics and puzzles.

Some say this game is not "long" enough. To me, it seems like a very challenging puzzle game. Those who say it's not long enough, probably used a little online "help" to play through the game. Do yourself a favor and play through without cheating. From what I've seen of the game so far, it's clever, witty, creative, and challenging.

The watercolor effects are also very cool. The game may be a little dated but you'd never guess based on the graphics and game play. I'm very happy with this purchase! Thanks Amazon.com!

For those who enjoy works that break boundaries-
This is a game (the term is restricting) which prompts you with a quest to rescue a princess. A thematic and thought-provoking story sets the tone for each of the phases of your journey, mapping vague memories to unique abilities needed to solve the puzzles within. The visuals are beautiful and soothing, the music empowering, and the plot fragments mature. Though seemingly short in duration, the execution of this story quite literally addresses the complications of love and success along with the fallacies inherent in their pursuit, a lofty achievement. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with this product and consider it worth every penny.

Braid is, in a word, unique. It's got a little bit for everyone: terrific platforming elements, extremely difficult puzzles, unique abilities and power-ups for each level, enchanting graphics, a beautiful soundtrack, and a very symbolic story and ending that can be interpreted as an allegory for the atomic bomb. Braid is well worth your money. With the shipping, this will run you less than 6 dollars, and if you don't cheat and use a walkthrough to beat it, it will take the average player around 5 or 6 hours to beat the first time through. There isn't a lot of replayability with the exception of time trials, but that's never been my thing. All in all, Braid is one of my favorite puzzle games of all time, and I have to strongly recommend it. But, if you have a "Five Below" in your town, I'd check it out because I found my copy there for only $1.

First off, this is a review for the PS3 version of the game, which I bought for $3.75 after the Great PSN Crash of '011, when I had my free month of PlayStation Plus, and there was a tremendous discount for the game during that time. I heard it was interesting, so I dove in.

The tutorial (one screen) does not even mention the central aspect of the game itself, which is time manipulation. You can rewind time, and effectively never die. Most people will discover this after they get hit by an enemy or fall in a pit and the game just freezes. Mash buttons until something happens? Exactly!

What's interesting about this game is that you can see almost every level by walking through it; no need to pick up the puzzle pieces in the levels if you don't want to. Of course, this can be accomplished in about 15 minutes or less (taking into account two straightforward, nearly identical boss battles). Unfortunately, you won't be able to unlock the last level, and will wonder if you wasted your penny (what this game is going for on PC these days, apparently).

What makes this game brilliant, as I alluded to with my review title, is what happens when you try to collect all of the puzzle pieces. You begin to realize that not only did the game leave out the time manipulation concept in the tutorial, they left out everything about how the worlds work in general. Trust me, though, even if it seems that you can't get that puzzle piece in plain sight, you can; you just have to think WAY outside the box, in many cases.

The laws governing time change from world to world, also, so the developers may throw what appear to be identical levels at you in different worlds, but since time is different, so is the challenge. Pair this with the anti-tutorial stance the game adopts, and you have a lot of exploring to do within a small framework, which may sound contradictory, but is nonetheless the crux of this game.

Oh yeah, the graphics are pretty, and the sounds are soothing (and flow with the way you control time, which is a nice touch). This game could be 8-bit and it wouldn't make a difference (which is probably why it has so many blatant rip-offs from the ultimate moustachioed plumber franchise). It's brilliance is in the way it requires you to make your mind work in the guise of a throw-away platformer; that's it.

When I first played Braid, I had not read any reviews and mistook it for an easy platform game. I was wrong. Braid is a puzzle game that has some truly difficult puzzles, but when you figure them out, it's very rewarding. The object is to collect the puzzle pieces to find out what happened to the princess, and you have to collect them all in order to beat the game. It is a very short game, but for the price, you should really give it a try.

To start off with, this is a side scrolling platform game like Mario. Hop on enemies to kill them, avoid snapping plants and so on. In fact there are several jokes about Mario. The game claims its rated E for Everyone, but this is a brain bending game. Its challenging, because everything is a puzzle. The game lets you shift time, reverse it, fast forward it back to where you were. This means when you die, you only need to reverse time.

Because of this trick, it opens a new dimension to gameplay. Reversing time will reverse enemies, but some things will not reverse. Its VERY inconsistent. What would move in reverse on one level will stand still on another. Then you learn other tricks like slowing down time around an object. Like a time bubble.

The art style is nice, like a drawn book come to life. The music is great too. Its very atmospheric and it slows when in the time bubble, reverses when you reverse the game and so on.

While Braid is a fresh platform game, I can't call it fun. It seems very dreary with its somber music and story. Plus, because everything is an upward challenge, there is no break. No time between tough challenges to just enjoy the game.

If you're up for the challenge, go for it. One final note is that this game feels like a free game on the Internet and that's not a good thing.

Braid reminds me of many of an "old school" genre of games (for Amiga, Commodore 64, etc). The variety of side scrolling games that had beautiful graphics and challenging gameplay. Braid is very similar and that's the reason it's won so many awards. Focus is more on the thinking and less on intense graphics. However, the game is beautiful. They utilize awesome parallax scrolling with beautiful watercolor effects. The sound is also top notch.

You'll probably get stuck several times in this game but that's the point! I've heard some reviews say that the game is easy to play through quickly. From my experience, these are folks who "get a helping hand" by researching hints online. Do yourself a favor and play this through by yourself with no help. You'll be much happier when your done. I've only started this game but I can tell it will be riddled with puzzles. The point is NOT to finish it in a week but take your time and challenge yourself.

For the current selling price in the neighborhood of $5, this is a must own! I just installed it on a 64-bit Win 7 machine with no problems at all. This again speaks to the simplicity of the game design.

<< As a side note, to me this game is very reminiscent of the old Monte Python games for the Amiga (except with much better graphics and challenging puzzles). Just seems like a very similar graphic style. >>