I finished Braid this morning. It was a lot of fun… I got through all but one of the puzzles, but had basically no clue on that one so I cheated and used a walkthrough. Once I heard the solution, it turned out to be something I totally should have figured out. Ah well. You can get through all the worlds easily enough without solving all the puzzles, so if you’re stuck I’d suggest trying other puzzles and coming back to the ones you’re stuck on.
I have two non-spoiling comments on the ending:
- The timed part at the end was really dumb. Games do this all the time (”Let’s take our careful, thoughtful gameplay and add time pressure so it’s more exciting!“) and it always results in a completely different kind of game that the players have not been trained to play. Maybe that was on purpose as some sort of artistic statement, but that doesn’t make it any less dumb. I ended up finding a video on YouTube that showed me I was about 0.5 seconds behind the required pace and had to back up and do half the level over to get through one section. The margin of error was way too small and the whole level was extremely frustrating.
- I don’t get it. I don’t know what the story was about, in the end. I had fun anyway, though, so it doesn’t matter.
Anyway, it’s well worth the $15. I suggest you pick up a copy and give it a try.
