Steam Sale Review: Braid

Anyone who knows me well knows that I tend to be turned off by popular things, partly because the masses have low standards and partly because I'm fairly juvenile. So when Braid came out and had praise and awards heaped upon it again and again I lost interest in playing it. But when it was being sold for less than milkshake, why wouldn't I give it a go.

Braid is a puzzle platformer, which differs from more traditional platformers (like Mirror's Edge) in that the challenge isn't making difficult jumps as much as working out how to use your jumps to solve the current problem.
You also can rewind time as for back as you want, and each world after the first have their own unique time manipulation feature, such as the world's time moving only when you do, or that you leave a shadow double after each rewind which follows what you just did.

The game's difficultly may as well be a feature. It starts off easy enough but with each world it gets harder and harder to collect all of the jigsaw puzzle pieces till you hit a brick wall where there's nothing left you can solve yourself. Or at least that's what I found.
It's hard to design challenging puzzles as at any difficultly there's going to be people unable to complete it and other's who aren't breaking cerebral sweat. Once I gave up and started using a walkthrough I found that there were some puzzles that I could have worked out if I had tried harder and there were others that I never would have thought of.
So my point is that Braid is hard. Really hard. Often it is clever, and some times it is totally bullshit, but once you get past the early stuff it is always hard.

Braid's story is very dividing. You play as Tim, a guy searching for the princess; that's about all you can be definite about. At the start of each world and in the conclusion of the game there are rooms with books that display text of debatable clarity and relevance. In the actual gameplay only the very last level of the last world has any storytelling what so ever (and that one level redeemed many of the game's flaws).
If the game's strange story bread crumbles don't indicate it, the quaint hand drawn art and the peaceful classical music will. Braid is an artsy game, and it follows the line of thinking that true art is incomprehensible. Fans claim that the story is layered and deep, and critics claim that it is just random stuff thrown together. Personally I think that there is some sort of a coherent story, but that it was deliberately distorted to be more artistic.

The levels themselves undermine Braid's plot (see above) and tone (dark) in my opinion. The locations and puzzles are abstract and don't seem to fit in anywhere. This is probably just another case of the drastic segregation of gameplay and story. As for the tone, Braid is full of homages to Mario Bros; goombas and piranha plants are common enemies, and at the end of each world you are in formed that the princess is in another castle. These less serious tributes clash noticeably with the a lot of the games themes such as a protagonist (for lack of a better word) being consumed by obsession.