It ain't got no point to the game.

It would be very simple to play Braid in 2023 entirely as a lark, an opportunity to travel back to the year 2008 and come back laughing over just how wrong everyone was. Now, to be fair, everyone was wrong. Braid getting all this high praise for elevating video games, bringing philosophy and deep thought to a commercial video game, and expanding the audience's understanding of games, it all sounds like horseshit nowadays. It throws decades of independent, challenging work under the bus simply because it wasn't on Xbox Live Arcade. There is value in bringing more non-conventional games to the mainstream the way Jonathan Blow was able to by having the game be promoted by a big platform holder, but Braid is not the first game to do that either. Any prestige over Braid being the first Anything might as well be thrown out of the window.

That all being said, I came to Braid with an open mind and left with both more and less than what I expected. First of all, the game looks like ass. It has these painterly backgrounds that look ok, some nice pieces of art for the puzzles, and then every sprite clashes with all of that. Tim looks like shit, he's over-animated to the point of being uncanny, and every other moving thing in the game looks about the same level of bad. It's so sloppily put together in terms of art that I wonder how intentional it is, as this along with the sound effects and library music gives off a general vibe of cheapness, like the game was hurriedly put together. Considering the way the game is a commentary on games, that could be the case, but Blow talking about the care he took into art direction in interviews, and the fact that the upcoming Anniversary Edition looks basically the same but sharper, maybe someone out there thinks this looks good.

The game references Mario constantly, and the physics feel like they’re attempting to mimic Mario World’s, which would be appropriate given the nature of Mario World romhacks at the time which often encouraged save states and rewinding. But it’s completely off. Jumping off enemies often requires multiple attempts, having to rewind constantly because you were one pixel off their needlessly small hitbox. Levels are bizarrely put together in such a way that you never have to engage with any puzzle to progress outside of a small number of required ones. Blow said in interviews that he did this to avoid the constant rewarding of coins or collectibles that games often engage in, but it leads to every level consisting of two or three usually separate puzzle sections just floating in the air, often not connected or progressing from each other. This leads to levels feeling sterile and unexciting, the art does it no favors in, again, looking like it was just put together ungracefully.

The art along with the constant references to Mario emphasize the video gamey-ness of the whole thing. It’s like the game is defying the idea of having to lean towards more conventional story-focused game genres, like it was made on a dare to make a Mario game that was About Something. This game is made up of five main worlds, each one having a unique mechanic that builds on the base mechanic of rewinding and forwarding through time. Before every world, you’re given several paragraphs of text that tell the “story” of the game. Ostensibly the game is about the main character Tim looking for a princess to save after having jeopardized his relationship with her, but eventually, the princess and his struggle to find her come to represent many things. The time mechanics become a commentary on the irreversible nature of our decisions, the desire to go back when we can’t, and the virtue of patience. One world introduces a mechanic where certain objects are not affected by time after the text beforehand explains how Tim attempted to live a life unaffected by the things around him out of fear. Another has a ring that can slow things around him after explaining that Tim still wears what is presumably an engagement ring despite the princess leaving him, and how all social interactions are affected by this ring in a way he must navigate carefully. It’s a unique system of storytelling, and I’m not going to act like the text is poorly written or anything. There are some passages that I found genuinely affecting, but it isn’t an elegant solution for merging storytelling and gameplay at all. I get wanting to avoid cutscenes, but at the end of the day, this mode of storytelling feels too detached and non-committal. As Poyfuh explained in her review, these kinds of readings could be applied to anything, it doesn’t necessarily make this a deeper game than any other platformer. If I wanted to be more generous though, it’s kind of a museum approach to game presentation, as if each level is presented with a plaque next to it. After all, each world is accompanied not only by text but also by a painting, one that is revealed after completing each level of the world. It’s an interesting exercise in how context really can be everything, so I don’t want to completely invalidate it.

A lot of people have pejoratively described Braid’s plot as being another story of a sad straight boy lamenting the fact that he can’t talk to women. This is true, but I have to admit that in multiple parts of my life, I have been the sad straight boy that can’t talk to women, so a lot of the passages hit home in places. Shaking off years of misguiding narratives surrounding romance, and unrealistic depictions of love from fiction, including games, was a tough process that involved a lot of brutal truths, and the way the protagonist is not able to break away from them, felt very relatable. Having to learn that people are not abstract concepts, and the world doesn’t revolve around you, these are all experiences I’ve been through. I was expecting the writing to be laughable, but I ended up seeing myself in it, and I’m willing to admit that despite how embarrassing that may be.

But that’s the problem with Braid. I just spent most of this review talking about the writing, all of which is separate from the game part. Sure, it may have changed my understanding of the gameplay to an extent, but at the end of the day, when I miss what should be a really simple jump on an enemy’s head and have to rewind for the 10th time because everything still controls like ass, it’s hard to always keep all of that information in my head. The gameplay and puzzle design are tuned just wrong enough that these two parts of the game can’t connect despite all attempts to have them do so. You end up with some kind of neat journal entries and a forgettable puzzle platformer. Braid is almost there, but the way people talked about it back then just seems disconnected from reality, much like Tim in the game itself, and much like Jonathan Blow is right now according to his Twitter account. Braid and its legacy ended up becoming another weird puzzle floating in the air, one no one is excited to navigate anymore, no matter how much preamble it’s given. Nothing requires you to beat it, you can just move on to the next level.

It ain’t got no point to the game.