One of the main things I remember about Braid is the controversy over its price when it was released. ”Fifteen dollars for an Arcade game!?” the Internet cried. “That’s outrageous!!!!!”
Granted, Braid was something new at the time, one of the first truly “indie” games available in a market place filled with ports and retro-themed titles. Braid's price has decreased since then, and the whole episode has been forgotten, mainly because a lot of people learned that the game was worth every penny.
After all, Braid is a game about learning from your mistakes. The ability to rewind time, while nothing new to most gamers, lets you learn Braid at your own pace instead of being forced under the constraints of, say, a time limit or a life meter. This also starts the game’s learning curve off nice and easy, since each level in Braid is constructed around learning to control time in a new way. The problem I’ve had with a lot of puzzle games is that I feel like I’ve seen everything they have to offer about half way through. The fact that each of Braid’s world is built around a fresh mechanic kept me coming back until the end, even when some of the later puzzles stumped me for days on end.
While the game throws its share of hazards at you, the fact that you can simply undo your mistakes means that your primary obstacle standing between you and the solution to a puzzle is your own ability to understand the environment. If I wanted to, I could wring an entire avant-garde romance novel out of that analogy, but I won’t bother because creator Jonathan Blow already wrote it and included it in the game.
Ok, so the story in Braid didn’t win me over. If somebody can tell me what a lost princess, dinosaurs, time manipulation and an atomic bomb have to do with each other, please let me know. But I do respect Braid and Blow a lot in how effectively the game ties its narrative and gameplay themes together. Tim, the character, can't move on unless he learns from his mistakes just as the player can't move on until he or she learns the answer to each world's puzzle. And anybody who has reached the last level of the game knows this theme wraps up beautifully.
While I haven’t returned to Braid with the regularity of a game like Castle Crashers, I count solving all of its puzzles as one of my favorite gaming accomplishments. It stands out as a great puzzler, a bold narrative experiment and, as a forerunner to games like Shadow Complex and Limbo, proved to many gamers that the phrase “downloadable” didn’t have to mean “simple.” Not bad for fifteen bucks.