[Game Review] Braid

Note: There are spoilers here! Read with caution if you haven't played the game!


Will there ever be an auteur theory for games? Video games have a unique problem to face if ever they want to reach the atmospheric heights of the other art forms in scope and affect. Most art forms are able to have clear direction from one or a few individuals who shape it to be: the painter paints, the musician plays (or gathers some friends and plays), and the writer writes. Film is the closest medium that compares with their expansive budgets and crews, but even in this most similar case there are some concerning differences. While special effects, makeup, set design etc. may take quite a bit of independence away from the director, it is always within the range of the story. Video games, for better or worse, are rarely so dependent on the story. Given the complexity of game mechanics and the engines they run on, the technology in video games isn't flexible enough to follow a story closely.  This isn't something any art form can ever get away from, and often it is the challenge of overcoming the limitations of the medium itself that creates the most interesting works of art. But even so, given the medium's focus on interactivity over passive analysis, it doesn't make much sense to tailor the years of development on game mechanics and engine specifics to a story when it is the story that can be so easily changed. Is it not the purpose of art to communicate with the means of its medium? In video games, those means are interactivity. While a story may be easily the responsibility of one auteur, the technical aspects of games nearly always require crews of at least a few people - if not hundreds - to be made.This inherent need for diffused direction is an aspect to game design that puts games in the precarious position of either becoming something entirely new unto itself, or falling short of many art forms that came before it. It isn't that art cannot be made by the group, but that the particulars of what we consider art - the idiosyncrasies that make them feel so personal - may get lost in translation.

Nobody told Jonathan Blow that. If there has been one developer to personify the possible video game auteur, it is Jonathan Blow. Scrutinizing the particulars of how his now classic indie hit Braid was made makes it much more obvious that any such repeat of his artistic success with his subsequent identity as primary/sole artist of Braid is extremely rare. Braid wasn't just the little game that brought indie gaming to popularity, it proved that video games could be incredibly ingrained in what makes them games and still translate as art in the same metaphoric breath. The separation of story and gameplay was something that not only didn't make sense to Jonathan Blow, it was counter to what he seemed to believe in. The story was the gameplay. After all, the story in a book is what you read, the story in a film what you see, and the "story" of an album what you feel. Therefore, it stands to reason, the story of a video game is how you play.


GAMEPLAY

Braid is all about your interaction with the game conveying something deeper about the story itself, and the themes Blow wishes to express. The gameplay of Braid mimics two classic games: Super Mario Brothers and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The game is mostly a platformer with the rewinding gimmick from Sands of Time, only without the limitation on uses or of lives. It doesn't want to create artificial ways of holding you back or accountable. If you mess up, the game wants you to be able to easily return to the most recent position in which you can continue.

Your primary objective throughout is to reach the end of each level, collecting each of the puzzle pieces and then finally assembling the puzzle at the end of the world. Trying to collect each one of these puzzle pieces stretches your imagination of what the game mechanics can do. You first learn of simple mechanisms such as keys that unlock doors and jumping on two enemies in a row makes you jump higher. But as you continue to the next world, the mechanics take new twists, some of which continue for the remainder of the game. By the second world (called World 3, for reasons specified later) you are introduced to objects with a green sparkling cloud around them. At the beginning of each world, the game rarely gives you explicit direction, instead giving you a pit with an enemy at the bottom. In the second world, jumping down the hole allows you to steal the key with the green cloud from the enemy down there, in which your only choice of action is to rewind the game. Rewinding, you find that the key comes with you.

This kind of design is all over the game, from subtle placements of background imagery like flowers to other subtle changes in environment and level layout that always provide the answer for you without ever explicitly telling you. It is part of the reason the game feels so fresh, even playing it my second time: you get that genuine feel of discovery. And that is what the game truly wants you to feel: like you've figured it out. Not that you have bested their challenges, but that you figured out how to use the mechanics and the environment to your advantage, used some ingenuity and gathered the puzzle piece required to unlock the next world. It can be frustrating to find yourself occasionally staring at a puzzle piece just barely out of reach, but it all becomes worth it when that "ah-ha!" moment finally dawns on you. The game's mechanics are rarely too difficult to wrap your head around after the first couple of pieces, but the game often finds inventive ways to challenge your use of them.


STORY

But all of these mechanics don't exist in a vacuum: they are intertwined with the story itself. The game follows Tim, a preppy looking man who desperately searches for the Princess. At the end of each world you pull a flag down and are greeted by a dinosaur who tells some variation of the famous "Your princess is in another castle!" The plot is dotted with these nostalgic references, almost always toward Nintendo games (another level is modeled after the classic Donkey Kong arcade game). But these references give weight to the plot itself. In my basic description above, the plot is identical to that of Super Mario Bros., which, as I also said earlier, the primary game mechanics take after. Your enemies are all essentially variations of goombas and Bullit-Bills and piranah plants, and this is no accident. The game makes a point to show you what it takes its mechanics after, and occasionally even questions your motive for playing: "Are you sure there even is a princess?"

The plot of games have historically not been very engaging, and it is only recently that there has been serious reevaluation of this fact. Braid wants you to feel this, to realize that you aren't playing to save the princess at all. You are playing to discover. The plot is expressed to you vaguely through cryptic books at the start of each world, but they can only hint towards what the game is actually trying to tell you. Through these books you see numerous illusions to this so-called princess, instances in Tim's life where he made sacrifices to find her and the bizarre methods he went through to continue his search. Most notably, there is a passage where the game tells us that Tim dissected rat brains among other experiments to find the truth of the princess, and as you near the end of the game you are given a quote by Kenneth Bainbridge, one of the men who worked on the atomic bomb: "Now we are all sons of bitches." The princess herself, more than likely, is the discovery you are craving from the game. You do not play to figure the plot out so much as to learn how to get past the current challenge. Each challenge provides you a unique way of looking at the game mechanics, and each completion provides you with that satisfying moment where you finally figured it out, that "ah-ha" moment, again. Braid is a game that knows why many of us play games, and what games are truly good at: a way of looking at the world like we can figure it out.

What poor Tim is trying to figure out through the Princess is difficult to discern from the game itself, but it is obvious the Princess doesn't want to be found. The game presents its first world to you as World 2. After completing World 6 and solving each of the puzzles associated with the other worlds, you unlock World 1, which is constantly going in reverse. You see the Princess running from a knight, and you quickly chase her through various obstacles that she helps you traverse. Finally, when you get to the end of the level, you find her asleep in her bed, and the only thing to do is hit the rewind button. As you do, you realize that what you've just witnessed is an illusion: you were the monster chasing her.

Tim has many illusions involving time throughout the game. You hear of how he relives his youthful days by going home and walking routes he enjoyed or didn't enjoy in his youth. All of the time he has experienced is swollen around him, and it is implied that he can slip between these experiences. Tying with the mechanic of time manipulation, it is easy to take this literally, but when confronted with the ending it begins to look like a coping mechanism for Tim, a way for him to redefine his past in a way he can live with. This adds another level of depth to the game I could never quite follow to any conclusion I like, but it encourages me to return to the game a third time in the future. I have theories about how it ties in with discovery, how discovery can be colored by the intention of the person who discovered it, and how this could all tie back again with that quote about the atom bomb, but there are aspects I have yet to properly set within the overarching framework of the game.    

Braid, at the very least, was an incredibly clear picture of what gaming as an artform could accomplish, and with satisfying finesse. At best, it fulfilled this promise, satisfying a postmodern "having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too" that some of the greatest works strive to achieve. It made a commentary on what it wished to do while executing exactly that. Over the years since its realease, the game has become essential playing for all gamers, and it has yet to lose its impact.  

9.5