THIS RANT WILL SPOIL THE STORY OF THIS GAME BIG TIME, SO YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.
I’m not really one to consider video games as art, but Braid puts quite a dent in my argument.
First of all, it looks absolutely wonderful.
A unique visual style that pays great homage to Super Mario Bros., the game presents itself as a platformer at first, but it’s really anything but. The game is, by its nature, a puzzle game… but not only a puzzle game, but the kind that’ll make you tear your hair out trying to figure out a solution. Getting the puzzle bits in each level though is wonderfully rewarding, and it makes you feel like the smartest person in the universe.
But what’s so appealing about Braid, is how it weaves an interestingly tragic tale in a package that looks all happy and fun. It introduces a mechanic that is as essential to the gameplay as the story is to the game mechanic.
You play as Tim, a man who allows whimsy and carefree thoughts to often roam unchecked in his mind. Tim’s made a lot of mistakes recently, and it’s cost him the girl of his dreams. He’s unwittingly pushed her away, and now she wants nothing to do with him. Tim schemes ways to win her back by rewinding time, so that he can somehow find a way to undo his mistakes, and be happy with her again.
Tim refers to this girl as “the Princess”. It suits his mind, as he tries to make some kind of quest out of his journey, that he’s defeating evil creatures and he’s going to find the princess and free her, and that they’ll be happy and together again.
As the game progresses and you unveil new gameplay mechanics and pictures, you get to see that Tim’s world is not coming together again, but is instead going further and further out of his control.
Eventually, when Tim finally gets to his big standoff with the big jerk keeping his princess captive, he is forced to rewind the whole final series of events, to discover that the girl was not trying to help him, but was actually trying to keep him away. The big jerk that he thinks has kidnapped the girl, turns out to be the man that’s saving her from Tim’s obsessive self.
It’s an interesting paradox, because you spend so much of the game rewinding time and bending it to your whim, only to discover in the end, that Tim can’t undo his mistakes, and that time isn’t some malleable plaything.
As it gets to the Epilogue, Tim puts his focus on other things, and eventually reveals that he’s built a weapon (or monster) that he can no longer control, and that it seems up to the rest of the world as to how to deal with it.
It all comes full circle, and as you get back to what you once thought was a city completely incased in twilight, you return to it again only to see now that it was a city burning the entire time.
“Someone near him said: ‘it worked!’”
“Someone else near him said: ‘Now we’re all sons of bitches.’”
The obvious meaning that could be taken away is the Manhattan Project, or even Frankenstein. But there’s the beauty in the game, it’s mostly abstract, so there’s no single solution for the plot. It has an obvious focus, but you talk to different people that have played it, and they’ve likely taken different meanings out of the story. Either way you get a sense that his loss of the girl drove Tim to be some kind of modern Prometheus. In the end, he takes a bunch of blocks that represent each of the levels you’ve beaten, and he begins to make his own castle with them. Creating a foundation of learning from his mistakes, and finally moving on, even when he has nothing left to look forward to.
It’s a hell of a puzzle game, because everything ties together so well. The gameplay itself is as engaging and challenging as the story, and the water color look of all the stages look absolutely stunning.
Braid’s one of those games where the deeper you sink into it, the more it gives. Each stage changes only ONE thing in terms of the gameplay, but the puzzles and mechanics are such that it’s like you have to completely relearn the game every time you wander into a new world, and the constant back and forth of time doesn’t leave confusion, but rather a strange sort of understanding, one that very easily put a smile on my face many times after spending an hour and a half trying to get a single god damn puzzle piece.
The story may come across as a bit mopey or such, but I wasn’t really bothered by that considering it always had a flavor of whimsy to it. Tim’s done a lot of really dumb things, and he just keeps repeating his mistakes, but he’s never entrenched in sorrow because of it. Instead, he just obsesses on ways to fix it, change it, alter it, whatever.
It is kind of heartbreaking to see the standard platformer story twisted the way it is in the end, but that alone adds another dimension to it. The whole game LOOKS like a Super Mario clone, but it always takes that simple concept, and keeps spinning it around and twisting it, even in regards to the simplistic plot goals.
All I can really say though, is it’s easily one of the best games I’ve played all year, and it’s also likely one of the best stories I’ve ever seen in a video game. So often when games try to be “serious” they either end up pretentious or sloppy… but Braid nails it.
Tags: Games
