On Braid

Braid is perhaps the most thoughtful game I’ve ever played. It easily has the most nuanced story. It is artful in what it does and what it doesn’t do. It’s also a maddening puzzler that drives your emotions. If this game has a spiritual cousin, it is Portal, another game about madness and puzzles and the meshing of interesting takes on traditional mechanics.



It is, in my opinion, also a reasonably adult treatise on villainy, and with its allusions to castles and the Super Mario Brothers series… that it’s really about Bowser. Why would a monster want a princess? Why would he build huge castles, engage in villainy, all for a princess?



This is one theme of many very good themes in the game, but it bears mentioning as I have seen nothing about it on Google. The allusions of the oft-posted Donkey Kong level shows an origin, a passing by on the way to something else. It feels almost chronological. When you see the green flag raised at the end I was reminded of when a green flag was lowered. Repeatedly, at the end of every level. By a plumber. I don’t think this is an accident.



They also reference the creation of the atomic bomb, throwing in a line that is actually a line of history. That quote was the summation of sane individuals who built the ultimate tool of self-annihilation. And I do think this is about redemption and deconstructing one’s fantasies to see the real reason a human can fail. These are heady, heady themes. Most books about redemption don’t touch the dirt. There’s scrappy, seldom blunt references to a person’s past in ways other than flashbacks. They don’t share the level of self pity and vice that can leave a man alone. By confronting as bluntly and yet artfully, they have successfully shown that games like Final Fantasy 5,7,8, and Legend of Zelda, and others have been unambitious as storytellers. I’ve thought this often; Braid’s the treatise. The new crop of American storytellers, creating games like GTA4, Portal, and Braid show that this medium has been irrevocably one-upped, and it will be to the detriment of studios looking to check-mark their way into a story. That’s bad news for companies like Nintendo and Square Enix, which do check-mark their stories. The proposition of Final Fantasy 13’s main protagonist being described proudly as “Cloud… but a girl!!” does little to allay my concerns, for one simple reason.



I’ve already played that game.



Braid offers something new, and we are the better for it.