Amazing game. Amazing remaster. Switching back and forth between the old and the new graphics will blow your mind. It looks exactly how you remember it, until you switch to the old graphics and realize how much of that is nostalgia, and how age has not been kind.

Unfortunately, the developers have seen fit to use machine translation for the Japanese version of the game (and possibly others), when the original Japanese translation was very well-crafted. For the commentary, this renders it completely inscrutable as the machine translation cannot intuit the context of what is being said. This renders the game largely inaccessible for a non-negligible amount of its audience. Worse yet, the original Braid has been taken down from sale, meaning new players are stuck with this subpar translation effort.

At bare minimum, a mode should be added allowing for the original, pre-Anniversary Japanese translation (and any other affected translations) to be used. Ideally, this would entail them hiring an actual translation company like 8-4, Ltd. to also translate the commentary, but having the commentary be in English would suffice if the funds for proper localization do not exist, because at least then they would not be shipping the game with a translation that is, to be blunt, patently incomprehensible.

It is absolutely shameful for Braid, one of the most historically important indie games to release, to release in this state. Machine translation offers no value to the people who need it, at best making the game's text wooden and broken, at worst making it entirely inaccessible and incomprehensible. It saves time and money, but it robs localizers of jobs, of work, for no benefit to anyone. This is a game that helped set the early standard for what indie games were and could be. It is art. Art deserves a translation that can convey its weight and meaning, and is equally artful as the original text. And art owes localizers, artists in their own right, the dignity to not have their jobs stolen by subpar, deficient machines that can produce something that at best only sounds accurate, but misses the je ne sais quoi, the message, the heart, of the text.

When taken in Japanese, this is a Braid without its 精髄.

The Braid, Anniversary Edition launch trailer promised: 40 New Levels.
Not knowing what they actually meant as "Levels", I considered those Levels to be new puzzles to solve. Turns out they consider every new created instance as a new level. This does not only include the 13 instances which contain the 16 new puzzle parts but also every other instance, whether it is filled with commentary only or their new redesigns of some puzzles with less red herrings for the player. And the new puzzles themselves were quite straightforward, too easy for my point of view. Mostly consisting of one single task to fulfill and nothing that might lead you to a wrong path.

The 15 Hours of Commentary became tiresome over time.
Listening to it in the background is not an option as it will mute the whole game including the documentation if tabbed out. Relaxing while listening to it is not that easy due to the fact that players need to trigger the next part of the documentation every 3-5 minutes on their own, including having to overcome certain obstacles.
Don't even think about spending two of the 15 hours at the most famous star puzzle that people love to complain about while having the game developers as your company, because that is not an option.

Is this game worth buying if you are here for the:

• new graphics and sounds: Yes, the new graphics are more clear and suitable for bigger screens
  
• 15 hours of commentary: Only if you are prepared for it; you might also just buy the game to support the developers and enjoy the commentary via an alternative way[rss.com]
  
• 40 new levels: No, since there are only 16 new puzzle available and they are quite straightforward

I am a fan of Braid but I can't say the same thing about the Anniversary Edition.

Surely you can't satisfy everyone with your game, some might consider it too hard, others too easy.
I bought it for the extra puzzles and I am not satisfied with it.

Feel free to comment.

I love Braid. This is not a review of Braid, but a review of the Anniversary Edition.

I mostly bought this for the developer commentary and extra puzzles. I don't like how the commentary is laid out. It seems that a lot of the commentary is composed of pieces from interviews with Jonathon Blow and others. It's a bit weird to have these laid about in seemingly random places, all throughout various doors and worlds in the commentary area. I think I would rather just listen to it all in one go, perhaps setting the game in the background or something. So maybe listening to these on YouTube (I think these are all on there) is more my style. It just seems so fragmented in the game.

The extra puzzles are around, but you have to find them, and I wish there was a world that you could go to them all instead. Actually getting to the doors sometimes required solving puzzles, but these felt tedious. I did like most of the extra puzzles, I just wish they were all in a row like a regular world.

The graphics are great, but if you're like me and don't really care about graphics, you won't notice (or, perhaps, remember) a big difference until you can switch the graphics back to the old style. Wow! Big difference, that's cool. But I'm mostly here for the gameplay.

The new music in the commentary area is really nice.

It's nice to see that there is so much commentary on the game, but the experience of going through it is very poorly thought out. Most of the audio only commentary seems to expect you to just sit there for 5 minutes without doing anything. There seems to be some attempts to fix this by allowing you to skip ahead in the commentary, but that ends up being almost useless. For someone how prides himself for doing things right, as Jonathan Blow does, I would have expected to add an option to skip to the next subtitle instead, or even just controls for commentary audio playback speed.

The game in itself is good (at least I remember the original being good). It's nice that there's a remaster.

But it is unplayable on a monster pc with rtx 4080 - the lags and fps drops are terrible. I had no choice but to ask for refund.

Bleh, obtuse and obnoxious puzzles, don't get the hype.

she sucks my jonathan til i blow

You *have* to like JBlow's voice to go through hours of his "oh here i left a clever reference" commentary and the visual redesign is technically top-notch but mostly misses the whole damn point, (For example, turning with a key in your hands makes much more sense in the original graphics.)

Braid is an "ok" game but not something incredible for today's standards. There are better games out there.

As for the remaster:
- New graphics and sounds are great.
- The commentary is nice, but you can't listen to it while doing anything else - you're just stuck waiting, staring at the screen while nothing happens. You can't speed it up either. I think you'd have a better experience waiting for someone to upload it all on YouTube and watch it at 2x or 3x speed there instead.

It really isn't hitting like it did 15 years ago. So many good new indie games came out this month and this really is just the same thing again