Braid is a curious game for a lot of reasons, despite it's impressive art style and legacy it actually isn't as enjoyable as it appears.

As the trailer suggests you are capable of turning back time, thus you never officially die. Despite this the leaning curve is quite steep and not always fair.

If anyone has heard of the Infamous Goat puzzle in Broken Sword this may make a bit more sense. But basically in the point and click adventure game Broken Sword there is a puzzle that requires quick timing. But you the player have never used it before, so what makes it so difficult is your lack of understanding and knowledge of a gaming mechanic. You are unaware that you are even capable of doing what the game expects you to do.

This is how Braid often feels. Although it is a very clever game many of puzzles require you to use your powers in unconventional ways to meet your goal. Although I never cared for tutorials or hand holding, the way it expects you to use your new abilities can often seem ridiculous and are incredibly specific.

As an example there's a part in the game that requires you to let an enemy kill you, by doing this you see that when the enemy kills you it jumps back upward as it falls on top of you. Similarly to how Mario would when killing a goomba.

But lets say you rewind too fast to realize this is something that can happen or you've never had an enemy kill you from above.

Because there's not really an oppuninity in the game dedicated to this very specific mechanic you might not know you're able to do this.

Since you don't know all the mechanics the game can feel as if it's cheating you. It's not that you didn't understand the puzzle but rather you didn't understand a mechanic that was never revealed properly in the first place.

Braid does this multiple times, which is where I find the most difficulty in the game.

As for the story? It's interesting but for lack of better words leaves you feeling empty of confused. Even when you do research into theories or see the ending of the game you just never feel as if you knew the whole experience. And that's not always bad but a lot of games can hold a sense of mystery while satisfying the player. This game just didn't satisfy me with it's conclusion.

Furthermore to complete the game in it's entirety you are required to collect stars. Many of which you as the player would never have even known were in the game. The first star in world 2 takes about an hour and a half to collect by standing on top of a cloud.

Let that sink in, how is the player expected to wait that long at the beginning of the game?

Perhaps later in the game a challenge like that is realistic after the player is aware that there are actual collectables. But for the completing the game it felt unfair. There is a star map at the intro but I was unaware that I could actually collect items for it as well.

Furthermore despite how interesting the story is the creator Johnathan Brow is rather pretentious in his attitude towards those theorizing or reviewing his game.

If you'd like to play it I'd suggest to avoid reading his lengthy interviews as they just leave a sour taste in your mouth and ruin the experience of a decent game.

It's normal for an artist to be protective of his work and to have a specific outlook or belief. Brow often justifies parts of critiques and mistakes as being intentional or experimental. Yet as an artist regardless of if an element is intentional or not that does not make the game improve in quality if it wont translate to the player. A game element needs to make sense not just in the eyes of the creator but the audience.


Furthermore the soundtrack is pretty but incredibly repetitive and many levels don't suit the soundtrack. Plus, a world in the game requires you to listen to the majority of it in slow motion or backwards and trust me when I say it gets irritating quickly.

The enemies feel uncreative, but I'm sure they serve some purpose in terms of appearance besides being a reference to Mario. Although the sound effects for the rabbits and goomba looking enemies are annoying.

So please before purchasing this game for 15 dollars just know that although it isn't a bad game it is overhyped. It might be a enjoyable use of your time but I don't believe it's worth the 15 dollar price tag.

I wasn't smart enough for this game. At least, that's the conclusion I come to from reading so many glowing reviews and having such an ugly experience trying to play it.

Braid has a lovable core time-warp gimmick: if you make a mistake, you can rewind your playthrough of the level as far as you like. It makes the first several levels' platform action-puzzle gameplay forgiving and enjoyable.

Then the game starts layering additional gimmicks atop the gimmick. A level where simply moving in a particular direction reverses time for everything but you. A powerup that causes you to clone yourself when rewinding. Areas that trap objects such that they don't get rewound when everything else does.

These things sound awesome, and they could have been, if the difficulty curve didn't go stratospheric as soon as they were introduced. I found myself skipping level after level, because the solution was either so opaque and convoluted that I had no idea where to begin, or because I could see the solution, but it required such flawless timing and precision that full play sessions of practice got me no closer to success.

Then I learned that in order to finish the game, you must complete every. single. puzzle. Collect every widget in the game, cleverly disguised as bonus challenges. And I was done. Game uninstalled, added to my "Let's Not" category.

I watched Indie Game: The Movie and bought this game on sale. After about 4 hours, I did everything except for the speedruns, which I decided weren’t worth my time.

The story just seems all over the place, I know it's supposed to be out of order, but what order is it supposed to be in exactly? Reading through the texts, almost nothing seemed to be part of some cohesive story line and nothing was even enjoyable to read. What a terrible epilogue. Far before the end of the game, I had lost all interest in the story, which comes off as pretentious.

Puzzle difficulty increases almost exponentially, which would be fine if there was more instruction on your new powers than just "The Pit" levels at the beginning of each world, especially with the ring.

The art is also very off-putting to me. The main character, Tim, has this unsettling stare up into the sky, like he’s looking at nothing and his expressions consist of a creepy toothless smile and what looks like a frown maybe? One of the puzzles has the gall to make use of the jigsaw puzzle pieces scattered throughout the game, as if the bland looking platforms are distinct somehow.

Most of the music was good, at least the first time I heard it. In world 4, since your movements change time, each level is really only about 8-20 seconds of real music and you get to hear it all distorted and weird for like 30 minutes as you struggle through the puzzles.

This game was enjoyable for about 45 minutes and I don’t recommend buying it at full price under any circumstance.

Edit: I have since read the Wikipedia article about this game and it just about validates every single problem I had with this game. Blow basically says outright that the story is whatever you thought it was (in my case it was trash). Blow was so pretentious about his game that he didn't think anyone was smart enough to make a soundtrack for it. And again, Tim looks like Chucky.

I have also realized that this game is, in fact, not at all as intelligent as it is made out to be. Just because you can't understand something, doesn't make it smart, it doesn't make it a masterpiece. If you want to ponder and reflect on a story, read a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ book, don't play this game.

I really tried to like this game and i can see why it's popular but unfortunately i just found i didn't enjoy it.

It's a platformer that uses time-manipulation to solve puzzles to collect puzzle pieces. The way this game has built puzzles around time-manipulation is actually quite clever and that added to the ability to rewind time when you die keeps the game flowing nicely. However the difficulty curve is steep and this is where the game may divide people. While i've no problem with a challenge i found myself getting irritated with the puzzles which led to me losing interest in the game altogether.

The visual style of the game is quite nice and so is the soundtrack. Even though this game has a story it never really sucked me in and felt a bit irrelevant.

While i have chosen No for game recommendation i would recommend looking at gameplay videos to decide whether this game is for you or not. It's not neccesarily a bad game but it just wasn't for me. I'd give it 5.5/10

I see that a lot of people got "scared of" by the dificulty, and I don't blame them. On the other hand, I see people overhyping this game, those people I don't understand.
The reason people like it, is the story, complemented by great soundtrack, graphics, and a very inovative time mechanic. The reason people don't like it, is the difficulty of the gameplay.
My opinion here, is that the gameplay goes too far with being hard, sometimes just being idiotic, and that ruins the experince of the game. Specially if you consider how difficult it is to actually get the ending.
Maybe Braid could be considered art and therefore it needs patience.But I feel it wasn't fine tuned, it needs more patience than it is prepared to "pay for".
I'm gonna vote negative, because I feel for the time you need to actually get through this game on your own, and get all the endings, you could have enjoyed yourself with something else and get more mental stimulation (if you wish to see it as art), or more enjoyment (if you just want a fun game), either way saving yourself from some rage.

This isn't a bad game, it suffers from being overly hyped. Braid is very nice to look at, but I wouldn't say that everything is very well executed. The fact that certain mechanics are never given a decent explanation (i.e. what the arbitrary limitations are) makes a lot of this game very frustrating personally. I do like puzzles and games based around them, but there are too many times to me where the solutions have seemed "fiddly", for lack of a better word. You may understand the solution perfectly well, but it may be unnecessarily difficult, often due to the awkward platforming elements. All in all I have some enjoyable moments in the game, but I am very glad I got it on sale because this is simply not worth $10. The visuals are extremely polished, the gameplay could have used more work in my opinion. The underlying story is also boring me to tears.

While I realize am a minority here in not recognizing this game, I believe it is with good reason. Here are my issue with this game that really ruins it for me

It's too cryptic: To get all the puzzle pieces and even the stars requires you to do very specific things that only somone with a walkthrough would know and I do not state that lightly. Some of these things are virtually impossible to find so you find yourself constantly watching youtube video to figure this stuff out. Otherwise, you are left running through the game which is not very much fun and makes the game way too short. Now I know many games can be cryptic but this one is over the top and the way they do it is not even fun. One level you are supposed to wait 2 hours just so a cloud will appear in a certain part of the map. Does that sound like a fun way to spend 2 hours playing a video game?

I love Blow's puzzle in term of novelty, creativity, thinking out of the box, etc. All the good thing that make puzzle genre charming. However, I also dislike, or to use the more correct word, hate some puzzle that's've gone too far. Especially that one f*king hidden star that you MUST complete it by intentionally misplace the jigsaw asap, otherwise it will became impossible to get later (once the jigsaw is correct, you can't disassemble them). Not to mention that there's another star that need you to do nothing IRL for two hours straight.

Play it to witness the remarkable moment in the gaming history of the indie puzzle genre, if you are into game design and/or want to make some great puzzle game yourself. But don't expect anything polished or pleasantly time spent here.

I wanted to like Braid. It's a game that begs to be liked: beautiful, painting-like art, soothing soundtrack, and ingeniously crafted puzzles. It has a complex, well-written storyline that requires a series of intelligent inferences to follow, as well as a whole horde of subtext and interpretation articles written by people far more intelligent than me. It's an intimidating game, too: a game that birthed an entire genre and has become a sort of initiation into indie gaming for many players out there. It's one of those games that, when you're having a conversation about small developer teams and the rise in indie gaming, you just can't ignore.

A lot of people make the mistake of equating an industry changing game with a good game, and while Braid is, in truth, a work of art, I struggle to qualify it at as a truly enjoyable experience as a game. The mechanics of Braid revolve around the idea of time-manipulation as a core gameplay element. When your character moves forward, time moves forward. If your character moves backwards, time moves backward. But what starts as a relatively simple and unique method of creative puzzle solving turns into something grotesquely twisted and almost indecipherably complicated. Hard puzzles in a game should never be a bad thing, but puzzles that are so far out of the realm of my thinking that they become nigh unsolvable aren't fun, they're incredibly off-putting.

On top of the intensely challenging puzzle-solving aspect of Braid, the game also identifies as a platformer that often tests the reflexes and timing of the player holding the controller. As the game progresses the player must become more and more precise with their control of the main character. Unfortunately, this, in combination with the difficult puzzles, made for a game that I could only play half of—any of the puzzles that weren't too farfetched for me to understand were instead doubly frustrating because they required a precision and sense of timing that my fumbling hands just couldn't seem to fathom.

Altogether, Braid's the kind of game whose phenomenal story is somewhat ruined by its gameplay for me. It's the sort of game that I would rather watch someone play through on YouTube and then read about it on the wiki afterwards than sit down with the controller myself. It's a summary game—the kind of thing that when you step back and look at it as a whole, it's a wonderfully enlightening experience, but that experience is drowned out by an incredibly steep learning curve and absurdly convoluted puzzle solutions. Playing Braid is an uphill climb and while the view at the top of that mountain is pretty great, it's not quite worth the struggle to get to it in the first place.

Braid's puzzles and general mechanics are interesting, and the fluid, wavy art style is much more flattering in motion than I'd ever imagined it being based on screenshots, but the game ends up feeling like more of a choir than a joy to complete. Each of the game's 5 short worlds introduce the player to a new mechanic that will be used to solve the rest of that world's puzzles, so there is quite a bit of variety in such a short adventure. Still, this is not so much to the games benefit as it does expect a lot out of the player to essentially master the new mechanic and know all that it can be used to do in a rather quick time. This leads to many head-scratchers that will likely make you roll your eyes when you do realize how to solve the puzzle. Combine this with some pixel perfect jumping and an obtuse story line (and some especially irritating secrets--if you are so inclined to sit on a platform for two hours), and you have yourself one especially grating journey.