Braid

Good

a game for intellectuals only

Utter garbage, like everything that comes from this dev.
Avoid it like plague.
What's more disgusting is the existence of a remake for this trash.

This game is a beautiful, landmark example of a legendary game that started a genre, and by some miracle, isn't really that good. It's an interesting peak into game history, but. It's straight-up not good.

My god, this is such a good, underrated game. The art and the poetry in this game is awesome. I really love the metaphoric gameplay and the story behind this game. It's truly genius

Jonathan Blow has a superiority complex and acts as if everyone not on his level are worthless. I'm just not going to support it anymore, and I'm going to recommend that you don't either because you don't need another person out there bringing you down -- there are probably already enough people doing that. I would take my money back if I could!

Excellent puzzle game

I can no longer recommend the game on ethical grounds.

This game is boring and the mechanics are very confusing. You can't pass through everything without a guide.

7/10 - A nice looking little puzzle platformer.

Okay puzzle game, the time travel puzzles get annoying quickly.

There isn't a lot of games like Braid. On the surface; it's a puzzle platformer with a unique rewind mechanic. It's filled with a lot of little eureka moments and is perfect for anyone that wants to get into that genre more. I've played this game through again for the 3rd or 4th time now. Either my intrinsic familiarity with games leads me to play with little resistance, or those playthroughs, distant in some years apart, lead me to remember each solution. Every key and locked door. It all clicked in place.
Now that I'm older, I see this game differently. There's a puzzle to the meaning of this work. With time we grow old and look back on what we could've done differently. We make mistakes that we can't undo. They haunt us into an obsession until we lose ourselves. There's a loose connection to the game's art and mechanics, and how it connects to the story.
In all the games I've played and media I've enjoyed, it's rare for a game to feel more sentimental and introspective. I understood each puzzle, but it never clicked before that there was more to the game than the sum of its parts. Its physics, mechanics, objectives. It felt like there was something more that I didn't understand before, and yet I'm still left with questions.

I recommend this game to people interested in puzzle games, nostalgic fans of the former Xbox Live Arcade line-up of titles, speedrunners and general audiences.

Side note to speedrunners specifically: this game kind of has bunny-hopping and momentum conservation. Try jumping at the edge of a solid platform down a ramp (or in other words some might understand: perform an "edgebug"). It's fun!

I usually never write reviews before beating a game, even more so if it is a negative review. I'm doing it now since I don't know if I'll ever come back to this game. The main reason why I dropped it early on is because I think a puzzle game should focus primarily on puzzles, and use the rest as background. The platforming in this game felt not responsive, with bad physics and bad hitboxes. I could have coped with that if it wasn't for the fact that it also felt hard from the very beginning for absolutly no reason. I would have played IWBTG or Celeste if I wanted a hard platformer, not this game. The main focus felt actually doing the things rather than understanding them, which I really much didn't like, especially when combining it with not liking the controls at all. Not to mention that the rewind mechanic, although being cool, is slow and most of the time you need to rewind more than you would like to to avoid dying again, due to the afromentioned bad hitboxes. If I ever decide to give this game a third chance I hope I'll update this review with some positive things, but for now that's all really :(

Ayo man, they got this game right, if you drink and you get drunk if you smoke weed and you get high play this shit, this shit call braid

the idea is interesting
the gameplay has no pleasurable moment in it (except maybe the puzzle)

so much pretty

This game is interesting and original, but doesn't have a very fun flow. It's all based on your rewind button, I don't really like holding the rewind button.

However, it might be worth a try if you have more patience for this kind of a thing.

Classic.

Jumping is too floaty.

Great puzzle platformer !
The puzzles are fun to solve.(Some puzzles require strong platforming skills or you're have to try multiple times to get the right timing.)
The sound track is great.
The visuals are interesting.
I didn't get the story, to be honest, but I enjoyed the game anyway.
Recommended!

After seeing the constant perspective shifts both mechanically and narratively within Braid, and after several hours of thoroughly enjoying The Witness for the first time, I can’t help but make a connection between Jonathan Blow’s work and that of the Cubist painters of the early 1900s. Cubism is an artistic movement that's interested in showing all perspectives of a three dimensional figure onto a two dimensional space at the same time. (Two dimensional with regards to Cubist painting.) A way to transcend our conceptions of time and space and create a porthole into an extra dimensional perception of a subject, that with our limited human faculties, we only ever see one side of at a time. This is an internal frustration explicitly touched upon in the games epilogue:

“Ghostly, she stood in front of him and looked into his eyes. ‘I am here,’ she said. ‘I am here. I want to touch you.’ She pleaded: ‘Look at me!’ But he would not see her; he only knew how to look at the outsides of things."

Enemies and Objects you interact with in-game function differently as circumstances and the environment changes. Recognizing how enemies react and change as each new power or influence is introduced, is the most important throughline to navigating the world of Braid and interfacing with its challenges. Each level silently teaches you, and builds upon, the many ways that the roles of people and environment can very naturally and immediately change under influence. I am one person; that takes on different personas when my role in a social situation changes. I act differently with coworkers vs when I’m out with friends vs when I spend time with my partner. I feel different at work and my relationship to time and space is different when I’m there too.

Mechanically, your main tools for navigating the world and solving problems take the form of manipulating time and space. Slowing down or manipulating objects to make successive events happen in different orders. Mixing things up is both literal and metaphorical here. Although sometimes its characterization is done maybe too bluntly during puzzle-downtime, by just having you read the story of the main character, Tim, literally in books, to get context for his journey. (The epilogue being particularly revelatory to its more central themes.) It's very Cubist interest in examining and approaching the multiplicity of space and the subjects within, are so interwoven into its puzzle design, its time-manipulation mechanics and its description of Tim’s attitude towards life, that even its simple and stratified text-then-puzzle-repeated format still delivers cohesive messaging and is meaningful and deliberate. Both as a game and a text. Do not let its more neo impressionistically styled visuals (thanks to the phenomenal, surrealistic brushwork provided by artist David Hellman) convince you its atmosphere is solely concerned with mood. The hard, clashing edges and solid colors reminiscent of a classic Picasso, lie within the game itself: the structural, the systemic, the kinetic and the philosophical. These design choices not only capture a silhouette of the subject through play but additionally render them expressionistically. Each new mechanic is given the context of a shift in Tim’s life as to build a more multi-layered picture of the man he was and would become. The layering, each aspect of the multi-dimensional, delicately placed one on top of another. Each layer as a picture of Tim and the collection of images transposed also represent one image of him as well.

I was talking with a friend about playing Braid the other night. She wondered if I thought it was really worth it for her to go back and play it as well. I had completely finished each world and only just reached the door of World 1, the final full-series of levels, before this conversation. At the time I said I couldn't know for sure if my feelings on the game were final since I hadn’t completed it. But I had mostly made my assessment that it was an overall engaging experience and a beautiful, indulgent thought experiment. More than a tech demo but mostly a novelty with a Bioshock-esque twist ending, a correlation that dates the game even more unfavorably. And that it was for a good reason, that its legacy was mostly wrapped up in arriving at an opportune time for independently made video games, like it, to be successful. It had cool ideas but only expanded on them long enough for them to work and make sense to the average player. So, play it only if you really want to.

This assessment was made with only having remembered the princess escape-sequence, back when I first played it, seventeen years ago, in 2008. And unknowingly to me at the time of this casual conversation with my friend, as I was about to enter said escape-sequence and the games epilogue, that the just-scratching-the-surface attitude of its mechanical application is extremely intentional and central to the games core beliefs. Its breakneck pacing and seeming hesitation towards complexity are so much more thematic than I first had thought. More about our limited abilities as people to perceive the material world, rather than the scope of the designer's ability or imaginative curiosity around creating more intricate puzzles. Its challenge is to push away the desire to have already found our respective Princess versus articulating and appreciating the very human process of learning how to walk by falling over and over again. Provoking us to pay attention and ask questions. That not knowing is the prerequisite for knowing. An appreciation for the multiplicity of everyone and everything in our lives and the tremendous, quiet impact that that has on all of us. Braid has a reputation for being a very subjective game thematically and I believe it is so generative of interpretation because its entire premise is predicated on the idea that: the only way to get an answer, or to even know if there is an answer at all, is through the act of asking a question. Its level design is a gracious and thorough teacher that nurtures you to ask questions as you play. A typical playthrough is a cohesive examination of the questions you can begin to ask in the spaces that Braid wants to play in.

These revelations were laid bare during my time in the epilogue. And the entirety of the experience ouroboros-made its way around to meet me at that final castle, in the final moments of the game. In the vein of an artistic continuity with 20th century Cubist painters, mechanically and thematically, Braid's perspectives are now all reflected at once, when the final layer is laid down.

A great puzzle game with a story that will leave you thinking about it for a long time to come.

A wonderful puzzle game! Great soundtrack and beautiful art. Quite a challenge on the first play.

Play the remaster instead of this one! It is well worth it

Seems so basic and randomly cobbled together to me but maybe it was unique 16 years ago

Glad to see this version of the game relisted. AE is still better, but omits some important speedrun tricks and the level editor.

I wish so badly Steam reviews let you attach videos, the Johnathon Blow crying over Soulja Boy dunking on his magnum opus is really a one-of-a-kind moment in gaming history.

This was the first indie game I ever played, about after a 10 year break from consoles. Definitely blew my mind with the backstory and care obviously put into making this.

A perfect game.

Fun, deep, innovative, and beautiful. The game rarely holds your hand but is never too difficult either. The story is genius without being intrusive (and can be completely ignored if you want). Art is gorgeous as is the music.

10/10

Braid is a landmark indie game that holds up extremely well. It's worth playing knowing nothing more than that. Get it when it's on sale. You can complete it in a long weekend. I believe in you.

This is one of the original indie darlings and it's a fantastic puzzle platformer!
But if you haven't played this yet then the anniversary edition is probably the better version to buy.

My favorite game of all time. Gameplay is awesome and, if you get a bit into the emotional tone, even not fully understanding the story, the game is quite a ride.

My brain hurts.

Some of the most inventive puzzles ever. Perfect run time and difficulty.

4/5 Classic

The Witness is probably my favorite game in my entire Steam Library, after beating it three times over the span of 10 years. Every time I played it, something about my perception of it evolved. I played Braid some months ago and I've got the feeling that something similar will happen with it. I already got the remastered edition and I will probably like it more as years pass. Jonathan Blow is one of the most intelligent, insightful and competent game designer in the entire industry. I admire all of his work.

Cool game with interesting mechanics, and a story that I couldn't really follow but maybe it all makes sense in the end?

I would recommend trying the demo, because this game wasn't for me unfortunately. I guess just not into Platform based puzzles. But I'm sure others would really dig it.

There is allways a trick to it

Not Guilty Gear

This game is a 7 out of 10 for me. Great time based mechanics and platforming levels. I might be the only one, but I always ended up with 1 or 2 puzzle pieces missing in each level that I was not able to get on my own. The way to get them became too complicated, sadly it made me drop the game several times.

The puzzles in this game are very difficult. I don't know how you solve them without following a guide. There's a story that seems like it could be interesting but not compelling enough to keep me playing. I'm giving up on this game.

Excellent game

A gem from the days passed..