On the surface it's a fun and intelligent little puzzle platformer full of neat tricks and clever level design that doesn't wear out it's welcome and you'll generally be happy and satisfied by the twist conclusion.

Dig deeper and it's a frustrating mess with reams of plot dump, excessive meta commentary, stupid secrets and hidden meanings that turns a fun game into an ego fuelled nightmare.

My advice? Play the game, skip the story and just play for fun.

Jon Blow is a bit of a douche, and the story elements of this game are pretentious as fuck, but I still do love this game.

The art is great, the music is great, the puzzles are extremely well designed and unique, and the secrets are neat albeit incredibly obnoxious to find. While the secret "le atomic bomb metaphor" twist is dumb, the actual ending sequence is still cool to me, if only because of its visual storytelling through a gameplay mechanic.

Also it's still really weird to think that Jon Blow of all people put a speedrun mode in his first game.

Obviously there is a wide spread of opinions on this game but a lot of the "critical re-examination" this game has gotten over the years just seems absurd and performative to me. You guys know there's more than one name in the credits, right? Sure, Blowey Joey might be an asshat, but the way people talk about this game you would think the very concept of a game having puzzles was inherently a pseudointellectual, elitist idea.

Everyone loves to bring up that Soulja Boy video as some kind of dunk, and there's obviously something funny about the idea that someone could be offended by it, but the reason it's funny is precisely because Soulja Boy is clearly having fun engaging with an obviously satisfying game mechanic, and that isn't enough. It's a cheap criticism that only caught on because of a really unflattering edit in Indie Game: The Movie, and it's a criticism that really only applies to one of the 80-ish people in the game's credits.

It looks good, sounds good, feels good, but some of those puzzles definitely suck. A lot of them just kind of feel like "a programmer realized a certain thing was possible in the game's systems", and in the last couple worlds it drifts into Amiga-core territory.

Весь 4ый мир от начала и до конца - душная залупа; уровень 6.5 это просто пи__ец.

Но, несмотря на это, и на мою общую нелюбовь к платформерам (и прочим гев гаме, где надо думать головой), определенное удовольствие я от процесса получил

UPD: игра понравилась мне не так сильно как хотелось бы, но, поиграв в другие игры жанра, не могу не оставить этот крик души - механика игры со временем использована просто гениально - а именно возможность откатиться на неопределенное время назад в случае своей смерти. Все, АБСОЛЮТНО ВСЕ БЕЗ ИСКЛЮЧЕНИЯ, платформеры-головоломки должны её спиздить, я устал начинать весь уровень заново, в случае случайно-идиотской смерти от падения в пропасть/на шипы, ваншоты эбанные из - за одной ошибки это не сложно и не весело, блин, избавьте меня от необходимости смотреть экран смерти и последующую загрузку.

I'll come right out and say that I think Braid is a great game. It introduces all of its mechanical building blocks right out of the gate, it teaches you all the quirks of each world's unique gimmick about as naturally as possible, and it makes you assemble all the knowledge you've gained by yourself in order to solve each puzzle, which parallels assembling the in-game jigsaw pieces yourself even after you've collected them. It doesn't push any of its mechanics as far as it could have, but it covers a really respectable amount of breadth for each one despite its very short runtime. I found myself fulfilled by every single puzzle solution and excited to find out what each world's new mechanic would be, which I truly don't think I can say about any other puzzle game.

Braid also has a story. But we shouldn't talk about that, since everyone agrees with me in that story in video games doesn't really matter, right? Just making sure, nobody actually took Braid's story seriously, right? Guys?

In a sea of "Puzzle platform" games that desperately try to masquerade themselves as art. This game was one the worst offenders.

If your story need to carry the game, especially if it's your first game, it should never make the player have to go read books or any other media for references. After you finish the base of the game, there's really nothing left to explore since the game's plot is frustratingly convoluted to try to understand at first unless you want to strain your brain and look up the guide to the "secret".