I think the moment was when I was perched upon a chandelier, with only one horn left upon the beast’s head resembling a creature from the adult noir novella "Where the Wild Things Are." I cut the rope and took the mighty creature down knowing I was close to saving the princess, who was no doubt, achin’ for some firey man meat. I was only a few levels away from her, and I had to tap that ass while the getting was still good.Jonathan Blow’s Braid was created by a star-infested threesome. Mario and the Prince of Persia were already tangled in a web of love and let’s just say Banjo arrived in the nick of time for the facial finale.
The main mechanics of this platformer are straight out of the first Super Mario titles. The jumping ginger truly wishes he was an overweight Italian stereotype with a mustache even Tom Selleck would envy. Braid even has its own take on the classic Goomba. In an impeccable comparison, Sir Evan Griffin so vividly describes their appearance as: “a disgruntled piece of cauliflower that won a Danny McBride look-a-like contest.” Hell, even at the end of the level it says: “Sorry, the princess is in another castle.”
The goal of the game is to collect puzzle pieces to complete portraits, which, in turn, unlocks the final stage where you save the princess. Most of the time, collect-a-thons resulted in me killing everyone’s first born, (permitting that there was no lamb blood on the door.) But Blow blew me the right way. A welcome change to the tradition of Nintendo 64 Rare titles like Jet Force Gemini, Donkey Kong 64, or any other fucking game that did not allow you to progress to the damn final boss of the game until countless hours are spent collecting every last fucking gizmo and gadget this side of go fuck yourself, In Braid, collecting is what’s fun about the game. Think of them more as stars from Mario 64 rather than those goddamn Jingos from Banjo-Kazooie. There are twelve pieces of the portraits in each level, but you can complete the tasks to get them in any order that you want. Surprisingly, the game’s progression reminds me of Professor Layton and the Curious Village. The puzzles are similar in the way that there is usually a trick to them rather than the straightforward answer you think you see at first glance; where you are welcome to pass on most of the puzzles in the game and figure them out at a later time, a welcome change to the foreboding sodomy of Dr. Quandry.
The only downside to this structure is that you always leave the hardest puzzles for last. This is the same problem with many platformers. For instance, the last 2-4 hours of Super Mario Galaxy was essentially the equivalent of attempting a Rubik's cube with a lobotomy. At one point, I was at the last puzzle of stage 5 and I was literally staring confounded at the television for a half hour. I decided that haphazardly guessing and checking the solutions was the best course of action. However, this flaw came with its perks. When I finally completed this seemingly impossible task, it felt as if I had just found the lord and savior Jesus Christ, and he told me and only me, that I was his chosen child, a perfect being... or at least that’s what I imagine it would feel like. This game is another among the few and the proud that makes you “think with portals.”
What Portal accomplishes with the controls of the first person shooter; Braid accomplishes with the premise of a 2-D side-scrolling platformer. You play these games like no other. They teach you their basic rules and you push them to their limits. In Braid, each world has an individual set of rules that you need to follow. This keeps the game consistently fresh, unlike most of the overpriced $60 green packaged pieces of shit that have come out for the Xbox 360 this summer. It really starts Jonathan Blowing your mind (sorry, had to) when you get to world 4; all the creatures in the level respond in time with you. If you move forward, so do the enemies, even the music goes to your redheaded lad’s speed.
The only aspects that were disappointing within Braid were the boss variety and the length. There were only three bosses in this game, which is only a problem because the bosses are awesome. One of them you had to fight twice which is a bit of a lame cop-out and the other was more of a final level that felt like a legitimate boss fight. If every level had a boss that was as well designed as the others, this could have been my favorite game of the year. Secondly, I wish it had followed in Mario’s footsteps and had a total of eight worlds. I wanted a wee bit more from the lad. I was fine with the fact that I completed it within a day (I played it in two sittings), but it was so uniquely presented and illustrated it left me hankering for more. It was not quite like in Portal, where I felt the length was perfect, due to the manageable pace and level design, despite being short for conventional gaming standards.
In the final will and testament of my previously stated buffoonery, or if you are one of those shit eaters that only reads the first and last paragraph of an article and then posts as if they know what the fuck they are talking about, Braid was well worth the $15 (1200 points in Xbox annoying peso pounds). For those delinquents who think $15 is too much of mommy’s money for a live arcade game, go play your copies of Dark Sector and Turok, leading the industry to continuously regurgitate such “original” and “well designed” characters as Master Chief and Lara Croft, rather than investing in intriguing, innovative pieces like Portal and Braid.
Goddammit.
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