Customer Reviews

Braid [Online Game Code]

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Braid has been out on other platforms for about a year already, but has just recently been released for the PS3. Nothing significant has changed between the PS3 version and the original Xbox 360 version of the game, but if you haven't played this game yet you should seriously think about getting it.

Braid is a puzzle game set in the guise of a 2D platformer. If you are even vaguely familiar with classic Super Mario, then you will recognize all sorts of references to monsters, levels, and themes from those games. However, Braid's central mechanic is the ability to "rewind time", which lets you, among other things, undo mistakes that you might make, whether that be accidentally walking into an enemy or jumping into a pit full of spikes. As such, you can't really "die", and you can easily experiment without fear of failure. As you progress through the game, new mechanics (which all are based on manipulating time) are gradually introduced.

The main objective of this game is to collect various "puzzle pieces", and these form the core of the puzzle aspect of the game. To obtain these pieces, you will have to think about how you use the time-based mechanics to reach those pieces. By the end of the game, some of the puzzles are quite challenging, but because of the time-rewind mechanic, you can easily experiment with many different ideas without any downtime.

The art and music in the game are both wonderful. They compliment each other very nicely, and the music also interacts well with the time-rewind mechanic. The story of the game is actually quite mysterious, but I really shouldn't say anything more about that. If you are even remotely thinking about playing this game in the future, make sure you don't consult any Internet sources which could spoil the story for you - this not only includes game guides but also websites like Wikipedia.

I only have a few minor complaints about this game. I'm not sure if the Xbox 360 version has these minor problems, but I kept getting random errors after obtaining puzzle pieces, which thankfully don't crash the system and can be ignored with a click of a button. Also, the online ranking for speed runs seems to be somewhat buggy. Finally, the game is quite short. The length of the game obviously depends on your puzzle solving abilities; I was able to finish the game in about four hours without any outside assistance. However, the quality of the gameplay experience is so high that $15 is not an unreasonable price for the game. After all, going to the movies costs around $10 for a few hours of entertainment, and Braid is better than most movies out there. If there's one substantial negative about the game, it's the fact that it ends!

This is an awesome game. Definitely, try to make your way through without using any walkthroughs. The puzzles are all solvable if you take some time to think about them (and there is not much to the game other than the puzzles, so if you don't take the time to solve them you won't get anything out of the game)

My one complaint is that, despite being expensive for a PSN title (most games are in the $5 to $10 range; this is $15) is it really, really short. If you're good at puzzles, it should not take you more than a day or two to finish the game. Having said that, there is a little replay value -- the full-game speed run is not easy, and collecting all the stars is quite challenging if you don't use a walkthrough for them (and not that easy, even if you do)

It's an excellent game though, and if the extra $5 that you will spend (over other PSN titles) doesn't matter to you, it's worth it. It is definitely not "just another game".

FULL CONFESSION: I played about halfway through this game without cheating, then used a walkthrough on and off for the second half. Although the official website exhorts you not to use a walkthrough and cautions how regretful you'll feel if you do, I certainly haven't felt sorry that I did so.

I wasted hours with this game trying to solve some of its puzzles before realizing that the game violates its own logic. Its puzzles are not fair or "reasonable," as the maker insists. I love solving puzzles, but I sour quickly when it it's revealed that the puzzle is unfair: i.e, you cannot solve it with the premises given.

I can think of many examples of this in Braid: but here's just one. You're allowed to rewind time, eh? I sat for hours trying to figure out a puzzle, being assured by the gamemakers that you can do so using "reason." The puzzle was such that you had to jump down to this place from which there was no exit and retrieve a key. I boggled my mind for hours how to do it, but then accidentally discovered that you're supposed to "rewind time." The illogical part is that when you do, you HAVE THE KEY WITH YOU! That doesn't make any sense. Are we rewinding time or not? If we are, I didn't have the key when I jumped down here, why do I have it now? How was I supposed to know that when you rewind time, some things rewind and others don't? Oh . . . lemme see: because "anything goes" in this game! Fine. But the philosophy of "anything goes" in a game conflicts with the claim that all the puzzles are "reasonable."

There are many other instances of the game being unfair: with some levels, there's absolutely no way to get a puzzle piece until you finish another, later level -- which I also view as cheating. Any with many levels, you might not be able to solve a puzzle until you restart the level. This is quite frequent. You'll be starting at the screen for hours trying to bend your mind around the puzzle, but there's no way on earth to solve it because something happened at the beginning of the level that you cannot recall or repeat now, hours later.

Crud. And I'm glad that chick dumped the programmer. He deserves much more heartbreak in the future for making games like this.

UPDATE: Months later, and I'm still not sorry I cheated!

Braid is a rare thing among games -- a genuinely fresh experience, executed with both skill and artistry.

First of all, the "rewind time" mechanic, which occurs in several variations (depending on game stage), is pure genius. The puzzles will bend your brain, especially when you start to grapple with objects and enemies that operate in their own timeline. I give kudos to the design team: many levels are challenging, and some require real thought to figure out, but I was never frustrated by a lack of a clue what to do next or undue difficulty at the jumping-and-dodging aspects. In fact, the rewind button came to feel so natural, that I was conscious of its absence in other games. To me, that's a gameplay mechanic done right.

However, Braid's gameplay alone isn't why I find it brilliant. The gameplay takes the standard "save the princess" story and does something completely *different* with it. Something more grown-up. In fact, the game doesn't really have a story in any conventional sense, but more of a multilayered meta-story, revealed in floating snippets of text that appear on the between-levels screens. At first glance, the "plot" appears to be about a relationship that has gotten derailed in some way, with the nature of time being the dominant theme, but as the game progresses, we learn that there are other connections...

The colorful hand-painted visuals compliment the creative design and ambiguous emotional content quite well. A collection of jigsaw puzzles that become wall murals depict enigmatic scenes, with some apparent connection to the in-game prose. Like the story, it's not exactly clear what they're all about, but they add to the haunting, evocative vibe of it all. The music is pleasingly warm and acoustic.

Of course, if cerebral themes aren't your thing, you can simply treat the game text as a series of poetically-written gameplay hints and ignore any further meaning, but for me, Braid was a step forward in maturity for video games. It takes the childish escapism of Super Mario Brothers and turns it into a commentary on the world we play video games to escape from. People of my generation may not have outgrown jumping on platforms, but we've become adults, open to more sophisticated emotional content. I found Braid to heady stuff, showcasing the potential of games to MEAN something. Braid's own message is open-ended, leaving a certain amount of interpretation to the player, and therein lies its accomplishment.

This is an awesome game to play when you want to be pretty mentally challenged. Each world has its own unique set of physics/time laws and so you have to change your game play to fit the situations. The visuals in the game are beatutiful as their are very artistic and stylistic. The soundtrack for the game is wonderful and fairly relaxing as well through the majority of the game. This game is very short in theory, but unless you are able to crack each unique "puzzle" quickly, I expect it will take a good chuck of hours to finish. But worth it!

I'm not a big fan of 2-d scrollers, but playing Braid proved to be both a fun and memorable experience. The puzzles are both unique and challenging and will have you willing to replay (or rewind) a level an unnecessary amount of times before you succeed. While this may seem frustrating to many, the complexity and novelty of the game mechanics make the puzzles very fulfilling to solve, even if do what I did and had several friends trying to figure out the levels while I played on the big screen. The several different game mechanics add depth to the gameplay as the story proceeds, and they are all excitingly new even to players familiar with time-traveling games. For example, one level in the game has the typical Mario jump on Koopa to proceed objective, which is made a very difficult problem when every time your character moves forward time goes in reverse and every time you move back time goes as normal, and you have to plan the order of which you kill the monsters. The game is also helped by the natural controls, which make all the gameplay seem extremely fluid, though if you are playing it on the PC I would suggest grabbing an Xbox controller to make it a little easier. The twist at the end is also very surprising, and is the shining point of a strangely deep and unique story, that will have you scratching your head for days. While the game is short, I do not believe putting in more levels would have added to the gameplay experience, even though I would like to have seen maybe a level editor to allow the online community to come up with fun and creative challenges. Additionally I think a multiplayer level where two players have to work together to proceed through the game would be an enjoyable addition that could be designed similarly to the last level of the game. I would suggest, to experience the game the way it should be, to not look up how to solve the puzzles of the games, no matter how frustrating it may get. Once you know how to solve the puzzle you will never have the positive feeling of when you finally beat that part that none of your friends knew how to do. Overall, this game is great for gamers and non-gamers alike, even if they are not a fan of puzzle type games.

"Wait...what?"

beat

"Oh my God! No way!!"

That was more or less what I was blurting out at the conclusion of Braid. This game is truly a gem. It is so deep, so expressive, so challenging, and so fun to play.

The first thing I noticed about Braid was how beautiful it looked. The graphics utilize a hand-drawn style that makes for some stunning visuals, from the characters to the dramatic and dynamic backdrops. The next thing I noticed is the music, which always manages to fit the mood of the game perfectly, whether it be cheerful, brooding, or even foreboding.

The lovely art style and music sets the backdrop for the ingenious gameplay and incredible story. Braid is a very deep game, and there are many different interpretations of it, all of which I believe have validity and relevance to them. While I will not go into details of my interpretations of the game (to avoid spoilers), I can say that one interpretation involves the gameplay itself as a commentary on the way video games to date have told stories and handled gameplay mechanics.

The story is told through a series of books at the beginning of each chapter. I personally think these are well-written, and I disagree with those who criticize the scripts as being too heavy-handed. Not only do they do a great job at setting up the chapter to come, but they also make insightful, relatable comments on various issues, often including the painful realities of life, relationships, and growing older. Just a sample (excerpt from one of my favorites):

"Escaping, Tim walked in the cool air toward the university he'd attended after moving out of his parent's home. As he distanced himself from that troubling house, he felt the embarrassment of childhood fading into the past. But now he stepped into all the insecurities he'd felt at the university, all the panic of walking a social tightrope."

Braid makes you consider so many things, especially your relationships with other people. It is a beautiful, often frightening thing, and a shame that games of this caliber and depth are still rare in the gaming world. But Braid is an encouraging sign of the possibilities of where games can go from here. Play it. Your mind will be blown!

This is one of the most creative puzzle games to date. It makes you really think. Once you figure out all the puzzles, however, there isn't much incentive to go back to replay the stages. For $10, it's definitely a must play game.

Hi,

This is one of the best games I have downloaded from PSN, they have started having weekly sales & I suggest you check out the PSN store as right now this game is only $7.99.

UNO is also down to only $3.99.

Both excellent games, UNO has online multiplayer too.

Mind-eye coordination, curiosity and some sense of humor are what it takes to successfully travel Braid because that's the kind of journey Braid is. You don't need above-average reflexes or uncommon mastery of the dual-shock to beat this game even though such skills would help and beating the game is not ALL what the game is about. Braid is a good illustration of the belief that many quests are more about the journey you take to get there than what you get when you finally reach your destination.

The main objective seems to be saving the princess - not that she specifically asked you for help - because she seems to be bothered by some monster. But for reasons unclear, the princess doesn't seem to like you much. And so you move back and forth through half a dozen worlds of warped dimensions, stepping on bouncing heads and killer rabbits as you collect pieces of jigsaw puzzles and figure out clever - sometimes impossibly clever - ways to get the keys that take you from here to there.

And strange worlds they are: strictly two-dimensional as far as space goes, allowing you to move up or down and forward and back, where the lack of a third spacial dimension is more than compensated by time's strange behavior. Time is fully reversible and the good news is the you have as much control over time as you have over your two-dimensional jumps in game's flat space. When you die in Braid you don't get to use one of those silly 'extra lives' that many games give you. You simply go back in time, as far back as it takes, to a time where you were still alive, learn for your mistakes and simply try to do better next time - or is it the same time rewound? And time is different in the different worlds. In some worlds it's totally related to your movements, elsewhere it flows differently depending on where you are or your simple presence or actions may alter the flow of time - flowing more slowly near you and faster farther away. There is even a world where time's default movement is what we like to call 'backwards'.

Oh, I forgot, the objective... saving the princess, right? Well... we better don't go there. Or you go there and then see for yourself :) and getting there is ALL of the fun, trust me. Then, when it's all over, you spend a lot of 'time', if you can afford it, wondering what all that was about and what it really meant.

I hope I was able to give you a hint of what makes Braid such a fun game for some, fun AND intriguing for most who play it. Visually and in many ways mechanically, Braid may seem Little Big Planet's poor cousin and it could be played that way, only it couldn't because there's a bunch of puzzles to solve and it sometimes it takes a huge amount of brain power and thinking WAY out of the box to solve some of them. Unlike LBP, you don't get points or stickers and there's no top one-million. There isn't even a linear progression from 'easy' challenges to 'harder' - thankfully, you can bypass most of the puzzles you can't figure out when you encounter them for the first time and can come back later and try again. The satisfaction you get is that of 'beating' the game but proving yourself worthy to go farther and to get closer with each piece of the puzzle you collect to what you assume it's the final goal of saving the princess and, once you get to do that... ahh... better not talk about it.

I wouldn't call Braid 'a must have' game but, like it's sometimes the case with some of the downloadable little games you get at the PSN, it's a very original game and it can be an enjoyable game. Definitely worth a try and it won't cost you a mint.

For what it's worth, Braid was originally developed for the Xbox and, I believe, the PC and it's been one of the most popular if not THE most popular downloadable game in the Xbox universe. The PS3 version is as shiny and beautiful as the original, with stunning hand-painted backgrounds, simple but flawless animation and controls well mapped onto the dual-shock.