Braid

Braid XBLA

Maybe not today and maybe not next week, but one day soon they’re going to write books about Braid. The cutesy, childlike 2D graphics – one part Mario, one part impressionist cartoon – conceal a game of such searing inventiveness, such dizzying wonder that it may well change your perception of what a videogame is and what it can do.

To control, the game is pure basics. You’ve a jump button and that’s pretty much it. Various enemies, all of which are bad-dream distortions of Mario’s villains, can be dispatched of by jumping on their heads and the aim of the game, at its most basic level, is to find your way to the exit door. Braid is split into a number of different worlds, each one containing six or so different rooms. You can rush through the worlds, usually by simply pushing from left to right but the real challenge is in collecting the jigsaw pieces that are placed in impossible to reach places in each of these levels.

To do this you’re going to need to understand the game’s fourth dimension: time. By holding down the X button it’s possible to undo everything you’ve just done, reversing time so that you don’t mis-time the jump over the pit of spikes and so on. But more than just being a way to undo past mistakes – as time control was in Prince of Persia, for example – time forms the basis of most of the game's challenges. Some items in the game glow with a green aura. These objects are not affected by time reversal and many of the game’s challenges come from working out how the relationship between time and these objects can help you to secure those difficult-to-reach jigsaw pieces.

The game’s brilliance is in its apparent simplicity. Many times you’ve a room, an enemy, a key, a door and a jigsaw piece and you have to simply sit and work out how they all fit together. There’s no trial and error here really, it’s a game that takes place in your mind as much as it does on the television screen.

At 1200 Microsoft points Braid is one of the more expensive titles on Live Arcade. Additionally, once its puzzles are solved, save for a time trial mode there’s not much to go back for. But that’s to miss the point: in one single screen Braid displays more thought, more inventiveness, more sheer beauty than most AAA titles exhibit across their whole. It challenges, befuddles, confuses and angers before, when you fit the pieces together and solve a screen, bathing your mind in joy and wonder. It’s the reason why we play games and that’s the reason why you simply must play Braid.

5 out of 5