yes, you may

Thirteen years ago, I sat down in a campus auditorium to watch The Usual Suspects. The film had been in theaters for months and I heard good things about it, but aside from knowing the actors' names and seeing a few bizarre television ads where characters screamed meaningless words like "kaiser sozay" at each other, I hadn't a clue what the movie was actually about. I enjoyed nearly everything about the movie (the acting, music, and even the editing were superb) but my fondest memory of the experience was during the closing few minutes when I, along with the rest of the audience, finally figured out what was really happening. There was a collective gasp of understanding from the crowd, and I can recall saying "Ohhhhhh..." rather loudly, as if I needed to let everyone else know that yes, I too understood the concluding montage. More than the film itself, I fell in love with that moment when everything made sense and we all suddenly solved the puzzle together.

I bring this up because when I bought my Xbox the first game I wanted to play on it was Braid. The game was released last summer and I had heard all of the acclaim surrounding it, but aside from seeing a few bizarre screenshots and having a brief playthrough of the first World in February, I hadn't a clue what the game was actually about.

One of Braid's strengths is its simplicity, at least as far as the controls and premise are concerned. You're told that you're trying to rescue a princess and your character jumps on monsters' heads to defeat them. This has all been done many times before, and playing the game in this way is extremely simple. I would wager that any player could "traverse" the first five worlds in a half-hour without much effort.

Of course, Braid is not simply about running through the levels and looking for a princess. Each World contains a number of puzzle pieces scattered throughout and in order to reach the epilogue, players must find them all and correctly assemble them. The pieces are not hidden and do not require any searching at all, nor are the puzzles themselves hard to put together. However, almost all of the pieces are located just out of reach or behind locked doors. Discovering exactly how to obtain them is the real puzzle of Braid.

Making all of this more complicated (and more entertaining as well) is the player's ability to manipulate time. There are no lives or continues to worry about in Braid. If you screw up a jump or run into a monster, you just rewind into the past and try again. While this proves instrumental in solving certain puzzles as the game progresses, I really appreciated this feature from a pure convenience standpoint. As an adult without much time for games in my life right now, I find the "punishment" notion that most games apply to be a real turn-off. Rather than being sent back to replay the previous stage or restart the game from the beginning, Braid allowed me to just play at my own pace thanks to the built-in "undo" function. This didn't make the game any easier to complete either, it just meant I wasn't frustrated by pointless repetition.

That lack of frustration was the key that made Braid so much fun for me to play. I never felt lost because the levels were small and completely linear (even when they went backwards). There were plenty of head-scratching moments when it came to collecting the puzzle pieces, but this never led me to get pissed off and run to the Internet for help. Instead, careful experimentation and the occasional night's rest led me to discover the solutions on my own, each time resulting in that same wonderful "Ohhhhhh..." exclamation that The Usual Suspects elicited all those years ago. The puzzles were just hard enough to make me stop and think about them, but easy enough to let made me feel smart by solving them without much personal anguish.

If anything got to me, it was a few of the trickier, timing-based puzzles. It's ironic that a game where you control the flow of time would have challenging portions that required precision timing, but there were a few parts where I struggled. It was during these sections that I grudging went online for tips, feeling a little guilty in doing so because Braid really rewards self-discovery. Amazingly, during my online searches I discovered that the game features a completely hidden bonus section that requires finding eight stars across all six worlds. I had never even seen a star in my playthrough and the game's Achievements did not mention them. I hope to replay Braid at some point to see if I can discover these incredibly well-kept secrets.

Another reason I have for going back to Braid is to try and make sense of the game's rather clunky story, which I am still struggling to interpret. While I have no doubt that the in-world gameplay, the paintings that are assembled via the puzzle pieces, and the final stage play a larger role in the game's story than I understand at this time, the primary on-screen story is delivered through long passages of text at the start of each world and in an extremely verbose epilogue. I have nothing against reading but considering how well the game handles teaching you how to play without using any words, flipping through pages of exposition feels terribly awkward. I cannot hold this against the game, however, because I am positive that there is simply something I have missed and must further consider to understand the story. Unlike The Usual Suspects, there is no dramatic unveiling of the game's secrets in the finale. The curious decision to make "World 2" the first stage and "World 1" the last one is another hint that the game's story is another puzzle that needs to be solved rather than simply read through to the end.

Braid may be a very short game that seems expensive compared to other XBox LIVE Arcade titles, but the simple fact that I continue to think about my experience with the game weeks after "completing" it demonstrates its long-lasting impact on players. It is fun to play, yes, but solving those puzzles was an absolute thrill. Until I manage to solve them all, including the game's deceptively complex story, I shall revisit Braid again and again. That's more than I can say for the big-budget disc-based games I've purchased. Hell, that's more than I can say for most of the movies I watch or the books I've read. With the game's recent release on PC I strongly recommend that everyone, not just Xbox owners, give Braid a try.

Labels: Braid, fuzzy memories, video games, Xbox