Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Innovative"

Braid is a very unique game. Instead of being another run-of-the-mill platformer, the game focuses less on the jumping and enemy-stomping and more on pure logic puzzles. However, this essentially means the game is constantly quite vague and confusing.

Braid follows the story of an artist who searches for a princess. The story can be read through a few books that can be accessed before each set of levels. However, there is no real incentive for doing so. Standing still and reading things just isn't a very exciting way of experiencing the story, and the plot doesn't seem to really have any meaningful impact on the gameplay. I played through the entire game without worrying about what this little man was doing. Supposedly, according to the internet, the game possesses some deeper, darker meaning, but I didn't really feel like that made any meaningful contribution to the overall experience.

The puzzles are also very vague. The game doesn't give you any clues at all, and you may spend half an hour running back and forth not doing much before you figure out what you have to do. You don't have to complete all the puzzles in order to beat the game - in fact, you don't have to do much at all to beat the game. Running through, ignoring most things will allow you to breeze through the game in about an hour. Stick around and solve everything and you add a significant amount of extra time to that, with the addition of an extra world after your efforts. Even so, the whole thing can be completed in about six or seven hours. The game never tries hard to truly explain to you what you're doing, and even upon completion, it never really felt you accomplished anything.

Braid is a nice little platformer, but suffers due to lack of clarity. The game is also too short, and after beating it you don't really feel you did much. It's a distraction at best, one that truly tests your puzzle solving skills but never truly grasps your full attention.