Explore the concept of time in this new indie XBLA puzzle-platformer.

Every so often, a game comes around that simply blows you away. Braid, released on the Xbox Live Arcade on August 6, is one of those games for me. Developed by the two-man team of Jonathan Blow and David Hellman, Braid is a puzzle-platformer.

The first thing that you notice about Braid is that there is no main menu. When you load up the game for the first time, you are faced with the image of a burning city. The word “Braid” is written in the sky, and the protagonist Tim is seen in silhouette. Walking Tim to the right eventually brings him to his house, where you begin your adventure.

This bold opening sequence illuminates two things about this game: first, its almost complete lack of formal instruction. The game offers no tutorials or hints as to how to play the game, outside of a few pictographs in the first game world. This is just one of the many things Braid does to thumb its nose at game conventions, others being the various allusions to other video games (most notably Super Mario Bros.) and the shocking end sequence that makes you question fundamental assumptions you make when playing video games.

The other thing you notice from the game opening is the aesthetic design. The Braid world is made up of gorgeous hand-painted art, full of vivid colors and perpetual animation. The result is something that looks like a living painting. I feel that the sprite for Tim looks out-of-place when compared to the rest of the gorgeous scenery, but other than that Braid is visually stunning, especially in HD, and stylistically more than a little surreal. The audio that accompanies the game is equally mystical, full of lush string quartets and rustic-sounding folk pieces that help set the mood for relaxed puzzle-solving.

At the simplest level, Braid is a puzzle game centered on time manipulation. Holding down the X button rewinds time, allowing you to undo any mistakes you make. Unlike games such as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time you can rewind as often as you’d like and as far back as you’d like without consequence. Each world introduces a slightly different gameplay element into the way you interact with time, such as items that are immune to your rewinding power or a ring you can drop that slows time selectively within the immediate vicinity of the ring. Each world has you using these powers in unique ways to collect puzzle pieces.

The game’s ad blurbs boldly assert that it has “no filler gameplay”, which is a fair statement. Braid only took me about four hours to complete, but nearly every puzzle required a different approach; never did I feel like I was doing the same thing over and over again. I would rather play a four-hour game that is fun from start to finish than a longer game that overstays its welcome. In a pleasant contrast from the unintuitive and logic-defying puzzles that often plague games like this, every puzzle solution in Braid felt like it flowed very naturally from the established game rules, even if a few did take some outside-the-box thinking.

As fun as Braid’s puzzles are, it is a mistake to just write it off as a silly puzzle game. Although there are silly people continually questioning whether or not video games can constitute works of art, I feel that Braid is unarguably a work of true artistic merit. Its story, shrouded in poetic mysticism, slowly builds up over the course of the game. The snippets of prose that precede each world begin to tell you a vague story of regret, loss, and an obsession with the past, but it is during the actual gameplay that you as the player build upon these themes.

Your character, manipulating time to solve puzzles and put everything together, becomes obsessed with the mechanics of time and the past. All of these themes that the game subtly envelops you in swell up in the game’s climax to create a true tour de force of a plot twist unlike anything I have ever experienced before. It simply is a story that would not work at all in a non-interactive video game. It is the digital equivalent of a poem, full of topical beauty but filled with multiple levels of deeper meaning if you delve below the surface.

I don’t really have anything bad to say about Braid. It is a great game, offering a fresh look at the game mechanic of time manipulation, and explores it in a way that is difficult but never feels forced or overwhelming. As an experience, it is completely unlike anything else out there. While it does not tell a ‘story’ in the conventional sense, it communicates a very emotional narrative and expresses very complex and mature themes in a nuanced fashion the likes of which is very rarely seen in this medium. Not only is this the best game I’ve played this year, but it may very well be my new favorite game of all time. At $15 (1200 Microsoft points) Braid is an utter steal.