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Between crawling through fibreglass in the loft, lifting heavy bags of
compost and making cups of tea every time I'm ordered to, I got bored.
minutes to download. Installing took a bit longer. (Why it has to
install the .NET framework and the DirectX 9 runtime I don't know, but
anyway...)
The graphics look better than the screenshots would lead you to believe.
The trailer says it's done in a "painterly style", which translates to
most of the imagery looking like watercolour paintings, which just a
suggestion of canvas. As you walk around, there's about 8 levels of
parallax scrolling happening, with variable transparency, which all
looks quite nice.
On the other hand, the overly cutesy characters and fairly flat colour
schemes seem to lack detail and interest. It's pretty, but not /that/
pretty. After about five minutes, you stop noticing the fancy background
scrolling, more or less.
The Big Deal about Braid is that it's a game where you solve puzzles by
altering time. Now that's not terribly self-explanatory. Suffice it to
say, you launch the game, and without so much as an options screen,
you're playing what appears to be a standard 2D platformer. It comes
complete with a player character who's conspicuously rectangular in
shape. Also, he has floppy brown hair and he's wearing a black business
suit with a red tie. Which is pretty random, really.
Before you start each "world", you read a bunch of pages of text that
casually toss around "him" and "her" and a manner so vague, it's
difficult to tell what the hell it's talking about. As ZP put it, "in
this game, the story is kept in a different room to the gameplay, and
you can only peep through a tiny hole in that wall - which is a pity,
because there are moments of real genius in there".
Anyway, world 1 is the hub, where nothing happens. World 2 is where the
game proper actually starts. So you're running around, jumping over
bridges, picking up keys that opens doors, all the usual sort of thing.
There's even big green plant pots which plants pop up out of and try to
kill you. Now where have I seen *that* before? :-P
But then you make a mistake, and die. And as your character falls to the
bottom of the screen, suddenly the whole game pauses, and a message
flashes up saying "press Shift". And as you hold down the Shift key,
time goes into reverse. Everything happens backwards. And once you
reverse past the point in time where you died, you can let go of the
Shift key, causing time to go forward again. Except now you know what's
coming, and you can do things differently and Not Die.
Missed that tricky jump over the moving cloud bridge? Hit reverse, try
again. Didn't see that pink killer bunny rabbit there? (Which
conspicuously sounds *exactly* like a cat...) Just reverse out of it.
Jump into a pit and die because of the spikes at the bottom? Just undo it.
So, essentially, you can never die. Or rather, every time you die, you
can just undie again. At the press of a button. So this game isn't about
whether you can make it to the end without the monsters killing you.
Actually there aren't many monsters to worry about. (There's a grand
total of 3 kinds - the killer plants, the killer rabbits, and the
bounder-like guys which can kill you, but can also be used as stepping
stones.) It's a puzzle game. The aim is to beat the puzzles.
For example, anything that sparkles green is "immune" to the effects of
time reversal. So there's a level where a sparkling green key awaits at
the bottom of a deep pit. You can easily jump down, kill the monster and
pick up the key. But now how the hell do you get back out? Actually, you
just reverse time to the point before you jumped in. And because the key
is immune to time, the key stays with you. You can then just walk past
the pit and unlock the door.
Notice the brilliant violation of causality: In the end, you walked in,
somehow had the key and unlocked the door. The key was never in the pit
in the first place, once all the time manipulation is done.
That's an entire "level". One screen. Some of the other levels are
bigger, but not that much. And each "world" has about 6 "levels" or so.
And there are a grand total of 6 worlds. So this is a pretty tiny game.
I managed to see every level in the game in about 40 minutes. Because
you don't actually have to *solve* one level before moving on to the
next - although I tried to do so.
Each world has its own time special power. So, like what?
In one world, every time you reverse time, when you let it go forward
again, a shadow copy of yourself goes and redoes what you just undid. In
summary, you can be in two places at once. Start the level, go pull
lever A. Reverse time back to the start of the level, and while the
shadow-you pulls level A, the current-you can do pull lever B. It would
be impossible to pull both levers at once by yourself, but comparatively
easy with this mechanic.
Unless you need to time things so that the levers are pulled in a
certain order, or so that things happen at a particular moment. And
*now* of course, if you make a mistake, you can't just reverse and try
again. That would make the shadow-you repeat the mistake you just tried
to undo. So you have to repeatedly try to pull level A until you get
that right, and then you get ONE SHOT at pulling lever B at the right
moment. Screw it up and you must start over.
The promotion material for Braid states "Braid does not waste your time.
There is no filler. Every puzzle has something new. Braid isn't about
pulling off tricky jumps; you can undo at any time. It's about solving
interesting puzzles."
O RLY?
Suffice it to say, there's a level who's solution goes like this:
0. (Solve some other part of the level, which involves pulling a lever.)
1. Go stand in a certain exact spot on the floor.
2. Wait for a monster to fall off a ledge above you and hit you on the
head, killing you and bouncing the monster high into the air.
3. Reverse time to before all that happened.
4. Let time run forward. The shadow-you walks down to the floor and
waits. When the monster bounces off of shadow-your head, current-you
jumps into the air and bounces off the monster, killing it and allowing
you to reach an inaccessible high ledge.
If you stand in the wrong place, or don't get there in time, or you miss
the jump (which has to be timed and angled to perfection to hit a moving
target that you can't see yet), you must start this whole improbable
process all over again.
No tricky jumping puzzles? Yeah ****ing right! :-P
Even worse, there's a world where you no longer control time. Instead,
when you walk right, time goes forwards, and when you walk left, time
goes backwards. There's an impossible level where you have to kill 6
monsters, but if you walk too far left, you'll reverse time past the
moment where you killed them. (And when time goes forwards again, they
don't re-die. They stay alive.)
In short, you have to figure out a way of killing all of them, and
getting to all of them, without ever walking too far left. Obviously
this means basically killing them from left to right. But they all walk
around (when time moves, obviously), so it's not nearly so simple. Then
there's the location of the ladders to factor in... Not to mention that
platform that can only be accessed by jumping from one platform,
bounding off the (alive) monster below you and managing to hit the other
platform. (You've got to *get* to the first platform without reanimating
anybody, of course.)
Also, the music speeds up, slows down and reverses while you're doing
all this, which gets annoying fairly quickly. And there's lots of
puzzles involving entities which don't respond to time. Like a monster
that walks continuously forward, and you have to shuffle time around so
he misses all the obstacles. Which would be easy, if the evil level
designer hadn't put so many obstacles in *your* way as well!
In another world, you have a (single) ring. If you put this ring down,
it slows down time. The nearer you are to the ring, the slower time
goes. The further away you are, the less time is affected. So here we
aren't just making time go forwards or backwards, we're actually
/bending/ it. Put one near a cannon, for example, and the shots it fires
become further apart. They're the same distance as they leave the
cannon, but as they get further away from the time dilation, they spread
out.
There's a level where the thing you need to get is suspended over a pit
of burning spikes. There's a platform that moves to cover the spikes,
but another platform slides into its way so it can't move. I spent hours
trying to figure out how to solve this impossible puzzle. Then one time
I played it through, doing exactly what I did before, except this time
the platform came out, and it was trivial to get the item. Utterly
baffled, I want and watched a video of a presentation by the (singular)
developer who built the game. Apparently the secret is to not reverse
time for the first 20 seconds of the game. I hadn't even realised I did
that. (There's a bunch of monsters that run at you in a space too small
to manure in, /forcing/ you to repeatedly retry. Even the developer
couldn't do it in front of the crowd!)
There's even a level where you have to reverse time, but reverse it at
8x speed - which the game doesn't mention that you can do. (!)
In short, after the first few levels, the game degenerates into
keyboard-smashing frustration. Nowhere does anything really explain how
the game works; you just have to sort of /guess/. And if you don't
really understand how something works, it's almost impossible to solve
complex puzzles with it. The difficulty of some of the puzzles is quite
absurd. I had to look up an Internet walkthrough to solve more than a
tiny fraction of them. And almost every solution involved either "OK, I
had no idea the game lets you do that" or "OMG, how many billion
attempts would it take to ever get that right?!"
There are puzzles that I've read the solution for, and I still cannot
actually solve. Because I can't get some critical jump to work, or
because I haven't played through multiple thousand times to get the
timing perfect, or whatever. THIS IS NOT FUN.
In the end, that's what the game comes down to. 6 worlds, one of which
is just a hub, so 5 worlds containing about 6 levels each, that's 30
levels (some of which are just one screen). That's a very, very short
game. And the difficulty curve is just vertical. Most of the difficulty
isn't difficult in an interesting or entertaining way, it's difficult in
an obtuse way. It's hard either because it requires ridiculous amounts
of dexterity (remember the trailer saying the game isn't like that?), or
it's hard because the game doesn't tell you something critically
important. Actually, the game doesn't tell you /anything/, you have to
guess most of this stuff. Sometimes it's self-evident enough. Pressing
Shift makes time go backwards. No need to explain further. But something
it isn't - if something glows purple, what does that actually mean??
So really, all you need to know about Braid is this:
- Kinds pretty.
- Very small.
- NOT FUN.
(Unless you enjoy playing and replaying the same 2 screens of action a
billion times until you manage to get it right. In that case, might I
suggest WoW? They could use grinders like you...)
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null> wrote: