If you only play one video game in your life...

Make it Braid.

What is Braid? If I wanted to be Wikipedia, I'd call it something like a 2D platforming/puzzle game with some time manipulation elements, but that doesn't really tell you much, does it? Braid is much greater than the sum of its parts, much like another wildly popular recent game: Portal. WARNING: Spoilers within for Portal.

If you haven't heard of it, the key gameplay mechanic of Portal is the creation of "portals" (duh) that you can travel through. Put one on the floor and another on the wall, and you can jump in the floor and come out through the wall.

The designers took this seemingly simple mechanic and ran with it, creating an unbelievably unique video game in the process. There are very few "enemies" (a few turrets and the final boss), so the focus of almost the entire game is on solving the creative portal puzzles. On top of that, the atmosphere draws the player in. You wake up in a white room with absolutely no explanation of your circumstances. Throughout the game, you are accompanied by the disembodied voice of an AI named GLaDOS, instructing you and commenting on your actions with a uniquely dark and monotone sense of humor. Another highlight of the game is the gradual revelation of the nitty-gritty guts of the sterile and white facility that you're in. At first, you just catch glimpses of grimy walls, pistons pumping behind the white shell, but eventually you end up running through the dark underworld of the facility after the AI tries to kill you. A brief scene after you complete the game gives you a view of the outside of the facility, now rubble, leaving all sorts of questions unanswered - how did you get there? What was that facility? What was GLaDOS trying to accomplish? However, the game manages this in such a way that you don't get ripped off. Jason McIntosh summarizes it here better than I can:

"[Braid] also follows in the footsteps of Portal - last year's celebrated action-puzzler - by balancing its brevity with a tight structure and sense of purpose, so that when the game is done you feel more like you've just experienced a fine work of artistic entertainment, and less like you just pushed over an amusing but rather small collection of puzzles."

Braid is much like Portal. It seems simple on the surface, but the whole experience is much, much more than just a puzzle game. The basic objective of the game is to travel through a number of worlds, solving puzzles to collect puzzle pieces. When you collect all the puzzle pieces in each world, the way is opened for you to see the conclusion to the game, which is absolutely stunning. Please do your best to avoid spoilers of the ending if you ever intend on playing this game, it's not worth it. The central mechanic of Braid is your ability to reverse time. Simply hold the Shift key, and everything that has happened in the level (and I mean everything) will play back in reverse until you stop holding down the shift key. However, objects that sparkle and glow green are unaffected by your time-shifting abilities. Successive worlds introduce variations on this mechanic that apply only in that world. In one, you can drop a glowing ring that slows down time for everything close to it; the closer they are, the slower they go. In another world, every time you reverse time, a shadowy copy of you emerges and repeats your actions that you just reversed - however, the shadow can only interact with the real world in a limited way. Finally, the most fascinating variation is a world where time only moves as you do: walk to the right and time flows forward, walk left and time runs backwards, stand still and time does too. As a consequence of your unlimited ability to move time backwards, there's no such thing as death. Your character can die from any number of causes (enemies, spikes, fire), but you can always simply undo your death by rewinding time. This puts the focus of the game less on intense, dangerous platforming and more on figuring out the key to the puzzle at hand. You can check out a trailer for the game here:



A few more details on the things I find most appealing about the game:

• Art: Braid's art design is absolutely stunning. One of the most impressive aspects of it is that it's not "tiled", as most 2D-platforming-type games are. What that means is that in most games, the artist creates a pretty simple pattern, maybe some trees for the background, or a narrow stretch of grassy plain for the player to walk on, and then makes enough copies of it to fill the whole background, or make the plain as long as the level design requires. This reduces the burden of the artist, but it also makes the game look like it was made with a cookie cutter. In Braid, however, every plain and every background is unique. No tiling, no duplication, which gives the game a very natural feel. On top of that, the actual art used is splendid, and the game is fluid and beautiful in motion. You can check out some samples and explanations of main artist David Hellman's work here, and a series of more in-depth blog posts from him showing his creative process here.
• Music: Like the art design, Braid's music is incredibly polished. Interestingly, none of the music was composed originally for the game; it's all licensed from a few different professional artists. You can find the creator of the game, Jonathan Blow, describing his motivation for using licensed music here. The music is also extremely well-integrated into the gameplay: when you reverse time, the music plays backwards. When time is still, there's no music. When time slows down, so does the music.
• Immersion: The Braid experience is incredibly immersive. It's obvious that this isn't your standard videogame from the very beginning. The game opens with a captivating image of what appears to be a burning metropolis in the background, the title of the game in flames, and no explanation. No main menu, no instructions, just the game. As you figure out that you can move this small shadowy figure around with the arrow keys, the game tells you that if you do want the menu, you can press escape, but this experience is indicative of the rest of the game. Control is never taken away from the player for the sake of advancing the plot or setting up a scene, and what plot there is is never introduced in a heavy-handed immersion-breaking way.
• Simplicity: Braid is an extremely simple game in many ways. The only control is done with the arrow keys for movement/interaction, the space bar for jumping, and the shift key to reverse time. The menu is simple and not overly cluttered with options, though I would have appreciated one to restart a room rather than having to exit and re-enter. The beauty of Braid is how it takes simple concepts and extracts every ounce of potential from them in the puzzles. Everything about the game is easy to explain. Some of the most diabolical puzzles in the game are in World 4, where time is controlled by your position. I can tell you that time flows forward when you walk right, and backwards when you walk left, and it'll make sense. However, that simple piece of knowledge leads to a number of devilish consequences for the puzzles. For example: you can't kill any enemies while walking left. Why? Well, for them to die, time would need to be flowing forward, but when you walk left, time is going backwards. Likewise, you can't open any doors while walking left. Braid is full of deceptively simple concepts like this taken to the extreme, which makes for a much more rewarding game than one with tons of complicated concepts and rules that are just played straight.

The final word? Braid isn't a game, it's an experience. I can try to describe it all I want, but like any great work of art, you have to experience it so see what I'm blabbering on about. The demo is free, PC and Mac! Go try it out!