So I was all ready to write a lengthy post about my thoughts on Braid, having promptly finished the game in 3 days (not including all those hours I didn’t play the game, of course). I went over to take another look at Yahtzee Croshaw’s Braid video review (embeded below) so I could address some of his criticisms, and it was rather dickishly revealed to me that I haven’t, in fact, finished the game. If you happen to know me and my video game habits, you’ll know that I’m generally a pretty obsessive gamer, and as such this “secret stars” business is unacceptable.
But for now, I suppose I’ll have to make do with my “unfinished” experience.
Braid says a lot about where video games are as an artistic medium, and where they can go. Presentation, narrative, and interaction are executed excellently individually, and mix in very interesting ways, so much so that it is difficult for me to talk about them separately. Typically these three traditional pillars of the medium have such stark, solid, and buffered borders it makes one wonder why they are even sharing the same mental space in the first place.
First things first, though. I know that all one of you (perhaps two) that may be reading this aren’t quite as video-game obsessed as I am. Braid is, at its simplest and basest description, a 2D environmental puzzle platforming game. Think of Super Mario Brothers (they clearly want you to), meets Rubik’s Cube, where the world is the cube and part of shoving the cube’s pieces around involves controlling time in very specific ways. It’s an awful and probably unhelpful metaphor, I know, but it’s the best I could do. It is short and sweet and does so much in it’s several hours of gameplay that it has gathered immense amounts of critical acclaim. Enough, at least, that a friend of mine (who I know damn well does not play video games) was asking me about it within days of its release on XBox Live Arcade.
I tend to be somewhat skeptical of hype, especially in this industry, but I will admit that it was very hard to keep a minimal dosage of skepticism while playing. I just liked it. And the more I played, the more I wanted to like it, and the more it satisfied. I would say that the basic requirement for this was that it played well, but I have seen way too many failures at this step to take this for granted. It is a game that is meant to be played, and like all good games of its kind, meant to be solved. Braid brings two main gameplay metaphors to the table here, one decently novel and one satisfyingly classic. The environmental puzzles (the latter of the two) are just amazingly well crafted, thoroughly challenging while still being clearly solvable, and satisfying to complete. There are a few specks of easy here and there, but it’s really just there to cut you a break. The challenging puzzles are so wonderfully deceptive at times, giving the impression that your brain must not be working right; that on any other day the solution would be glaringly obvious. And the fact that there IS a solution is glaringly obvious.
The time-manipulation gameplay mechanic is its fresh blood. In some ways it isn’t entirely novel: it has the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time “oops, I died. lets rewind a little” platforming mechanic. But unlike PoP that isn’t it’s sole reason for being there. The temporal manipulation in each world is actually a part of the puzzle itself, an axis about which to manipulate its state. Progress requires an awareness of not only its physical configuration, but it’s configuration with respect to a temporal position that can move forward and backward, branch, and change at different rates. Clearly this is an aspect better played than described.
This is where it starts to get a little sticky. Braid has all the gameplay elements of a good game, but so does Go, and I wouldn’t call that art. Braid uses its choices of gameplay mechanics to interact with its narrative and vice versa in a way that simultaneously evokes and defies the archetypes of its medium (this is, by the way, a phrase I previously never would have thought I would write about a video game). This is most obvious in its relationship to Mario. Regardless of why the designers chose to work in the lost art of 2D platforming, it is always clear when you create such a game that you will be evoking/influenced by Shigeru Miyamoto’s work. Braid has an easy way out of this in that the platforming isn’t the central gameplay mechanic, but a means of traversing the world, but instead they decided to work within that construct, admit it’s influence, and challenge it. They draw the comparisons for you: goomba-like enemies dispatched by head-bopping jumps, a level named “Jumpman” in the shape of Donkey Kong’s tower, and constant reminders that “the princess is in another castle.” But with every dragon and every castle we are reminded that in spite of the fond memories we have of the Plumber, it’s narrative was simplistic and insufficient at best. It accomplishes this with contrast: how silly it must seem to save a princess, to have her consistently out of reach, without some plausible human motivation for doing so. Braid, in contrast, is a love story that in many ways reminds me of a video game I played when I was a kid.
It takes some fairly nontraditional stances in it’s narrative as well. Like it’s gameplay, there isn’t a whole lot there that hasn’t already been done, but it chooses and executes very well. It’s story isn’t strictly linear, a concept that is so easy to fuck up. Each part of its written narrative is a moment, paralleling its temporal gameplay theme, and jigsaw visual theme. Each page stands independent of the next, fits into a context of the meaning of all the other pages, and doesn’t require a particular order to understand. It is abstract but with a very clear arc, making for a concrete story that manages to be very deep due to the large but contained space of interpretation. It’s clearly about something very specific, though there isn’t any evidence of this in the text, which leaves one with the impression that they are projecting something that isn’t implicitly there. It’s a choice that allows for its story to be universal, to be specific to everyone, to millions, while only telling one story.
The presentational style wraps it all together. Visuals and sound are constructed to evoke the spaces where our experience of time behave a bit more like they do in the game: memory, future projections, counterfactual space.
These three pillars come together in a beautifully palindromic end sequence that is no less than absolutely fucking stellar, totally new, and only successfully possible with the set of tools and choices they have provided. I will avoid spoilers here, but this game is worth playing solely for this sequence.
Video games have always seemed to be capable of benefiting from a theatrical production model. This may be my experiential bias, but there are many mappings. Video games, like theatre, are necessarily interdisciplinary, both in its production and in the instance of the art (in theatre, the performance, in gaming, the play). Braid is inspirational in that it showcases what a small, independent production team can do in a way that is truly interdisciplinary. They all contribute excellence in their individual areas of expertise that are only complete in the context of the whole work. No pillar is ignored or secondary. However, Braid also highlights the costs and constraints of producing art in this medium. Small production teams must make compromises, and often they will compromise quality somewhere in exchange for cost. Braid opts to take the hit in cost, bankrolled in large part from the producer’s own pocket, highlighting how inaccessible this medium still is to many artists. Theatre is exciting in part because it can be produced guerrilla style. Video games are a long way from guerrilla production.
As I’ve alluded to before, there’s little I can say here that would be very meaningful without actually playing it. I’d like to hear other people’s thoughts on it, but if you don’t have access to it (no XBox, no 15 bucks), I’d be happy to have you over to play on my box. I’m really dying to know some of your perspectives on it, as I can be full of shit at times.
PS – Yahtzee Croshaw’s review is below just because I like it. Also, thank you Ashley for guilting me into posting. I hope this serves as sufficient penance.
