This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
The Bitmob Game Club, created by the legendary J.Cosmo Cohen, is a community effort that spotlights a single game. With the patch-work design of Bitmob, what could be better than stitching a few writers’ efforts together collaboratively?
In this edition of the Game Club, the contributors tackle one hell of a beast: Jonathan Blow’s Braid. It’s innovative, it’s divisive, and it sure makes for some damn good reading.
After all, how do you deal with a game whose iconoclastic creator directly expressed that he intended it to be art?
An all-star cast of Bitmobbers is ready with four ways to answer that question: like an unpleasant home invader; a dusty, digital relic; a synaesthetic sandwich; and a platforming speed-run.
Hit the jump to find out more about how the contributors responded.
Maenam by Jami Sieber
Braid Edition Contributor: J. Cosmo Cohen
J. Cosmo is hungry, which helps explain why he’s comparing Braid to a sandwich. If Braid were a sandwich, would Tim, the main character, be the pickle? He hopes so — preferably dill. J. Cosmo is currently playing The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (on the toilet), Braid (on the couch), and Borderlands (on the hour, every hour).
I used to frequent a sandwich shop called Big Town Hero. My favorite sandwich there, the Very Berry Turkey, is an amalgam, among other ingredients, of turkey meat and a cranberry spread. Whenever I went, I couldn’t bring myself to get anything but that sandwich. It tasted like magic…if magic had a taste — which it does: Very Berry Turkey.
You know that part on Ratatouille when Remy combines a mushroom, some saffron, and a drop of dew from a bit of sweet grass? Remy closes his eyes, takes a bite, and sees swirling colors and lights, exploding and twirling around; this, obviously, represents the taste of the melange he’d created.
Anyway, the sandwich is like that: flashy lights and colors, mmm-mmm goodness, and bit of magic. Braid is the Very Berry Turkey of video games; it’s a perfect blend of different styles and impressive artwork.
The first bite of Braid is confusing — but not in a bad way. The main character, Tim, starts silhouetted, with tall buildings off in the distance, waiting for input from the player. Moving Tim forward, you enter a house with giant, empty canvases inside. A few doors stand along side the canvases, but you can only enter the first one, oddly named World 2.
Walking through the door doesn’t help the confusion either. It transports Tim to a dreamy cloud room with books on pedestals that open as you walk by them. If you stop to read the books, thing become clearer. Through some egregious mistake, Tim estranged himself from a girl cares about. His quest is about reversing this error…I think.
Everyone knows the best sandwiches combine their condiments and meat perfectly, so that every bite is scrumptious and satisfying. If the intro to Braid, the bread — also very important in the sandwich eating process — threw me off, then the gameplay itself, the inside of the sandwich, more than makes up for it.
Controlling Tim is a breeze; his physical limitations are obvious. Tim can’t jump fifty feet into the air or anything crazy, but his hops play just right. Platforming games are all about their feel, and Braid nails it. The core of Braid is simple, but it’s that perfect blend I was talking about that makes it so wonderful to move Tim around.
Not only is the movement wonderfully simple, the levels are richly detailed. In fact, I didn’t notice the cool effect that rewinding time has on the background until World 3. Time manipulation makes the background bend and move in a way that helps the player believe that everything is actually reversing. It’s very subtle, but this kind of attention to detail helps Braid stand above other art-game contenders.
I know I mentioned rewinding time and time manipulation without any real explanation, but like Braid, you’ll have to wait a bit before I reveal more. Or perhaps one of my other fellow Game Club contributors will do that for me. Who knows.
For now, imagine seeing the perfect combination of sandwich items at the deli, asking the deli person to combine them, and then waiting for the result. Once you have it, you realize just how magical all the parts are together, as a whole.
First though, you have a twenty-minute drive home before you can eat it. Right now you’re on that drive. I know you want to chow down on that Very Berry Turkey, but be patient. It’s magic
Braid Edition Contributor: Derek Lavigne
Lately, Derek Lavigne spends much of his time working on his parkour skills in Assassin’s Creed 2 — when he’s not busy hosting Pixel Revolt. Soon his endless journey through a daunting backlog of RPGs will resume, and his sanity will once again take a backseat. He’s also hoping to shake off his recurring nightmares about Jeff Grubb’s hair.
Time manipulation is not an easy thing to pull off in an interactive experience. Just ask Blinx, the time cat. When I first heard about Jonathan Blow’s indie darling, Braid, my thoughts immediately turned to that feline failure. But after hearing almost universal praise, I decided to pick the game up. I played it for a bit, but then life got in the way, and it fell into the darkest reaches of my Xbox 360’s hard drive. When the Game Club offered the opportunity to cover Braid, I knew it was the perfect chance to revisit it.
Although the game wraps itself in a complicated, high-brow love story, I’m not sure the majority of people who played the game, myself included, paid much attention to it. What’s drawing me in are the art style and the subtle ways in which Braid manages to stand out among a crowd of knockoffs and sequels while still paying homage to one of the most prolific game series of all time, Nintendo’s Mario franchise.
To start this Game Club, James tasked us with playing through the game’s first two levels which, oddly enough, are named World 2 and World 3. In retrospect, they seem more like a tutorial for the rest of the game than anything else. These were the two worlds that I played previously, so there weren’t any big surprises. It’s possible that I breezed through them more easily than I would have if it were my first time playing.
World 2 is meant to get you acclimated to playing Braid, and doesn’t feature any complicated time mechanics like the rest of the game’s levels do. The only tools you have are jump, climb, and rewind time. This area also serves to introduce you to the types of stages you will see going forward. Other than that, there really isn’t a lot to say.
As with the most of the worlds in Braid, World 3 introduces it’s own unique gimmick — rewinding time does not affect certain objects, highlighted in green. The game highlights everything from keys to floating platforms…even enemies. These time-proof object really enliven the problem solving. The puzzles require a little outside-the-box thinking, but for the most part, everything is simple and charming enough to bring a smile without much frustration.
World 3 also includes the game’s first boss fight. I wasn’t really expecting this out of a game that concerns itself so largely with puzzle solving. Nevertheless, I believe the fight adds a welcome wrinkle to the game, and I look forward to what may be in store for me in future encounters.
Now that the “tutorial” levels are over, I’m wondering just how much of my hair I am going to pull out in order to complete next week’s assignment, World 4 and World 5.
Braid Edition Contributor: Alex Martin
Alex is currently thinking about Braid. He’s not really playing it much because he completed it ages ago and can complete a lot of the puzzles quickly. That’s OK. He really should be writing an essay for his English degree, but Braid is more intellectually challenging and fun.
Oh! Hello again, Braid. It’s me from before, but I’m using a new Xbox Live account. The only other way to undo all of those jigsaw pieces would be to delete my save data. Theoretically, I could start a speed run too. It should only take 45 minutes, but I’m too fastidious for that. I would restart after every mistake.
Which is part of Jonathan Blow’s point with Braid: I have a magical, time-rewinding X-button, but in the end, some mistakes are irreparable. The first text you read in Braid asks how wonderful it would be if apologizing was enough to fix a mistake. The gameplay actually illustrates this much better.
The release of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time made me want a rewind mechanic in every game I play. But alas, speed run times and the game’s climax — more on that later — are final, and Tim’s fantasy world isn’t real.
Braid drew criticism for compartmentalizing its gameplay and story. Separate rooms, segmented from the actual game, contain books which relay the game’s text . Understanding the reason for this is necessary in order to identify the multiple levels of Braid’s discourse.
The book rooms reveal a story about Tim’s adventure to find a princess, but the game itself is an abstract representation of this. The text is about a man who goes to cafés and cinemas in a world like ours. But in the gameplay segments, Tim — if we assume the boring, little man in the red tie is the same Tim from the books — can survive 20-foot-falls, and he spends his time looking for princesses in castles.
It seems that one is actually happening, and the other is just a daydream or a metaphor. The puzzles in the gameplay segments abstractly reflect the themes in the texts.
There are some obvious ways the puzzles represent various concepts — so far, rewinding time clearly represents the idea of fixing a real mistake by apologizing and learning.
What about the fact the only way to interact with the creatures of the game is to use them or run from them? Could this be indicative of Tim’s views of other people?
One of the World 3 books talks about becoming non-manipulable and achieving transcendence. In the same World, I stood on a green plate and became immune to time in order to get a puzzle-piece.
I’m sure there are many interpretations that give the puzzles more weight than simple, fun challenges. Ferreting out those connections isn’t easy.
It is a valid criticism of Braid to say that it is somewhat impenetrable. All of it makes little sense without careful scrutiny. And even then, no one seems certain that they fully understand it. The writing style is very verbose, and it can be as allusive as a Bob Dylan song.
Either way, if you ignore the narrative, you’re still left with a damn good puzzle/platformer that makes you feel like a genius when you solve one of the game’s myriad enigmas. Obviously, nothing can be new twice, but I got a fraction of that original feeling in one of the latter stages in World 3. I barely remembered it.
Before the Game Club started, I tried to start a speed run, but too many mistakes in the first two worlds always made me give up. It was quite some time since I played past that point.
Hopefully, over the next few weeks, I’ll be able to approach Braid as something that feels almost new. If so, I’ll talk more about my actual experience with the game rather than my interpretation of it. I spent 15 minuteos playing the first two worlds, and then I spent three day thinking about them.
By the way, I used an FAQ to get the first star. You have to know about this star before you assemble the puzzle pieces in World 2. If you assembled the puzzle and wanted to get all the hidden stars, you’ll have to restart the game.
The next star requires you to wait two hours for a cloud to cross the screen — sounds like fun.
Braid Edition Contributor: Travis McReynold
Travis McReynolds is getting very sleepy. Veeeeeery sleeeeeeepy. At the count of three someone will snap their fingers and he’ll wake up thinking he’s a duck. 1… 2…
He’s currently playing the rerelease of God of War 2 from the God of War Collection.
I tend not to think things through. Something evidenced by the fact that I’m writing this. See, when James DeRosa announced this edition of the Game Club, I voted that Braid be chosen. I also volunteered to be part of the group to play through it.
Perhaps you’re not familiar with my shtick (considering my 47 Twitter followers, it’s a safe bet that you’re not), but I make fun of games. It’s kind of my thing.
Braid is a game that defies classification and (unfortunately for me) humor; it’s more of a mechanism for conveying artful prose, stunning backgrounds, and pretty music than a traditional video game.
The game’s creator, Jonathan Blow, draws as much attention to the game’s ethereal story, and the emotion behind it, as he does to the puzzles that its hero, Tim, must face. The result is a line-blurring experience that, to me, comes closer to a true work of art than any other game. What you take away from Braid isn’t just what’s presented to you: it’s also about what kind of person you are and how you approach it.
What follows is my attempt to poke fun at a game I love. It’s basically the video game blogging equivalent of beating up my mother. In order to keep a clear conscience at the end of all this, I’ll continue to mix in some elements of genuine, personal insight regarding the game. Consider these the boring bran bits mixed with the otherwise sweet, marshmallow-y goodness of my traditional fart jokes. It all adds up to a full bowl of Bitmob off-brand Lucky Charms. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s two metaphors in one paragraph. Looks like I’m on my A game.
You begin Braid overlooking a city which appears to be in flames. The main character is standing silhouetted on a bridge. As you move to the right, you find a house with its door thrown wide open and you enter. Apparently Tim was raised in a barn.
I entered the door for World 2. Since I found no door for World 1, I surmised that the bridge/open-door level was World 1, and that I had conquered it handily. Not to brag or anything, but I’m pretty awesome at video games.
The preamble to World 2 describes Tim’s situation — girl troubles. He made a mistake (cheating) and a horrible monster (eHarmony) snatched his girl. To sum it up, Braid is a game in which a “World” consists of walking a few feet, and the protagonist is an unfaithful fraternity pledge who may or may not have been raised in a barn. Basically, it’s a video game adaptation of the reality TV show Jersey Shore.
Things started to improve for me in World 2. Tim showed off his impressive vertical jumping skills and even defeated a couple of bodiless, afro guys in the process. The level’s background music appears to have been lifted from a New Age healing shop, so that’s nice. Maybe World 3 will feature Enya.
After a missed step, Tim fell into a flaming spike pit, and I learned his horrible secret. He can manipulate time. This is most likely due to a deal with the devil (have I mentioned I’m from Georgia?). No involvement with the occult is evident in Jersey Shore — at least not in season one.
Having collected all the available puzzle pieces, I continued to the end of World 2 only to discover the Princess was already in another castle. Those commercials don’t lie…that eHarmony shit works fast.
In World 3, I had to wrap my head around a new gameplay element: items and platforms that can’t be manipulated by Tim’s probably-satanic time warp ability.
No luck on the Enya thing I’m afraid.
After a few screens of puzzles, a respectable amount of headscratching, and the game’s first boss, I reached the end of the third World. There I found that the stuffed dinosaur from the end of World 2 had completely forgotten about the princess. What an asshole.
Once I assembled the first two puzzles, I saw that the one depicts a bottle of wine and the other, a glass full of libation. I took that as my cue to get into character as a frat boy and start drinking. I’m hoping ol’ Tim moves onto shots in World 4 so that I might have an excuse to do the same. Stupid pledge.