I hear it’s important
This past weekend, the Steam sale was a big pack of Indie games at a huge discount, and it included a fair few games I liked well enough from their demos, so I picked it up. One of the games involved was Braid, which, as you may recall, was heralded by some people as a game that’s "important," and which we should all be willing to pay $15 for.
Well, I did not pay $15 for it. In fact, I didn’t buy it until Steam was willing to sell it to me for $3, because I just didn’t like the demo that much. I’ve now played it, and I have to admit, the later levels are a bit more fun than the earlier ones, and the last level in particular is downright incredible. But is it important in some magical, special way that sets it apart from other puzzle-platformers? You’ll be surprised to hear this, but, actually, no it is not. It’s just pretentious. Spoilers follow, so you may wish to abandon ship now if you care about that sort of thing.
The gameplay is fairly straightforward: it’s a platformer with gimmicks, and the gimmicks are employed to solve puzzles. Every world introduces a new gimmick, and the whole world is themed around it. As you traverse the worlds, you collect puzzle pieces which you reassemble into paintings, just like in Banjo-Kazooie. It’s generally pretty fun, though some of the puzzles can be annoyingly finicky. There are, however, some moments of incredibly boneheaded design — there are hidden "stars" in the game to collect also, and collecting one of them requires you simply to go to the right level and stand around and wait for — I shit you not — two hours. That’s the most egregious example, to be sure, but hardly the only case where the instincts of the designers were just not good.
So that’s as maybe; it’s a decent but not entirely remarkable puzzle-platform game. But what gets people all drippy about this game — and no doubt what people refer to when they talk about it being "important" — is the game’s story. You know you’re in for a good time when I start a paragraph that way, hey? Braid, ostensibly, is about a dude called Tim, and his search for the Princess. The flowery background information books explain this to you. If you’re a bit sharp (and, of course, if you’re paying any attention to the flowery background books), you’ll probably notice early on that something’s not quite right about them, and that’s the case; you can piece it together earlier, but the game’s Epilogue makes it explicit with the following text:
On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pinpoint. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World…
Someone near him said: ‘It worked.’
Someone else said: ‘Now we are all sons of bitches.’
That last line sound familiar at all? Braid, taken on another level, is an allegory for the creation of the atomic bomb. All the would-be sophisticates on the internet get very satisfied with themselves when they spot that, and — as I can state with experience — proceed to look down their noses at the lesser players who can’t appreciate what the game really means.
And, of course, they’re wrong too. Braid isn’t about the Bomb any more or less than it’s about a fantasy princess. The whole point of Braid — made from the game’s very first screen all the way through, and made explicit in the awesome final level — is that things can seem very different when seen from a different perspective. The game cannot be labeled with a right way and wrong way to interpret it; the key to understanding it is to realise that it’s both. There’s argument on the internet about the very first thing you see in the game; is the city on fire? Sure looks like it is. No, it’s not burning, it’s just the sunset. Again: it’s both.
So Braid is a tolerably fun game with some annoying parts, and it’s fun to think about afterward, since it does make its point in a very engaging manner. It is not, however, any kind of "important" just because you can read it as making vague, hand-wringing commentary on the Bomb. The only part of the game that really stands out from the pack as far as I’m concerned is the very last level.
