Braid (video game)

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Braid

Developer(s) Number None, Inc. (XBLA, PC)
Hothead Games (Mac)
Publisher(s) Microsoft Game Studios (XBLA) [1]
Number None, Inc. (PC)
Designer(s) Jonathan Blow
Artist(s) David Hellman
Composer(s) (music licensed from Magnatune)
 Jami Sieber
Shira Kammen
Cheryl Ann Fulton
Native resolution 720p
Version 1.014 (PC)[2]
Platform(s) Xbox 360 (XBLA), PC, Mac
Release date(s) Xbox Live Arcade
August 6, 2008 [3]
PC
April 10, 2009[4][5][6]
Mac
TBD
Genre(s) Platformer/Puzzle[7]
Mode(s) Single player
Rating(s) BBFC: 12
ESRB: E10+
PEGI: 12+
Media Download

Braid is a platform/puzzle video game developed by independent software developer Jonathan Blow. The game was released on August 6, 2008 for the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade service. A Microsoft Windows version was released on April 10, 2009. Hothead Games is assisting a port for the Macintosh platform.

The story follows a man, named Tim, who attempts to rescue his princess from a monster. The game features traditional aspects of platform titles; the player runs, jumps, and climbs through a linear set of stages, while solving puzzles and defeating enemies. The player may also control time, allowing actions to be "rewound", even after death. Using these abilities, the player progresses the story by finding and assembling jigsaw puzzle pieces.

Blow designed the game as a personal critique of recent trends in game development efforts. He funded the project with his own money and spent three years creating it. David Hellman drew the artwork, which underwent several iterations until it satisfied Blow's desired vision. A preliminary version of Braid without the final artwork won the "Innovation in Game Design" award at the Independent Games Festival in 2006; the final version received additional accolades. The game received positive reviews from critics, eventually becoming the top-rated title on Xbox Live. The game's price and length were points of criticism.

Contents

[edit] Gameplay

Braid is played by solving physical puzzles in a standard platform game environment similar to that of Super Mario Bros.. The player controls Tim, the protagonist, as he runs, jumps, and climbs across the game's levels while avoiding being touched by enemies. Tim can jump and stomp on enemies to defeat them, and can collect keys to unlock doors or operate levers to trigger platforms. One of the fundamental game elements is the player's unlimited ability to reverse time and "rewind" one's actions, even after dying. The game is divided into six worlds, along with an "overworld" in the form of Tim's house. The worlds are entered through doors in the house. Each world has its own time-based game mechanic:[8][9]

A screenshot from Braid, showing a homage to Donkey Kong
  • Time and Forgiveness plays as an ordinary platform game, except that the player may rewind time to undo their actions. The section includes several challenges that would be unplayable or unfair in an ordinary platform game, but become trivial when the rewind mechanic is available. As such, it has been interpreted as an oblique ironic comment about traditional platform game design.[8]
  • Time and Mystery contains objects which appear that are unaffected by rewinding. Rewinding can thus be used to change the synchronization between objects that can and cannot be rewound, which is the basis of many puzzles in this section.[10]
  • Time and Place has time linked to the player character's location on the level. As the player moves toward the right, time flows forward; when moving toward the left, time flows in reverse, standing still will pause time. This sets up a large number of complex correspondences that must be managed.[10]
  • Time and Decision involves a "shadow" of the player character appearing after the player rewinds time and performing the actions that the real player character rewound. Puzzles in this section revolve around using this mechanic to carry out multiple actions at once.[10]
  • Hesitance provides the player with a magic ring which, when dropped, warps the flow of time around itself; the closer moving objects (including Tim) are to it, the slower time passes for them. The regular rewind control remains available.[10]
  • The final world is untitled, but the number one appears in the main room of the world in place of the title. In this world time flows in reverse. Rewinding time returns the flow of time to its normal state.[11]

Several worlds feature objects or enemies that are outlined in green; these objects do not follow the same mechanics as the rest of the world and remain in a persistent state as seen by the player. For example, a door marked in green will remain unlocked even if the player rewinds time to before he had unlocked it.[12]

Each stage contains puzzle pieces that must be collected to create jigsaw puzzles that tell the story, and to unlock the last stage.[9][12] On completing the main game, a speedrun mode becomes available.[13] There are also eight stars hidden throughout the world of Braid that correspond to the stars in the constellation of Andromeda just outside the main character's house.[14]

The game pays homage to other video games; one level features a Donkey Kong-inspired puzzle, while the ending of one world tells the player that "the princess is in another castle", similar to the end of each level of Super Mario Bros..[15][9]

[edit] Plot

Braid features Tim, a man searching for a princess who "has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster".[11] His relationship with this princess is vague at best, and the only clear part of this relationship is that Tim has made some sort of mistake which he hopes to reconcile or, if possible, erase. As one progresses through the six worlds in Braid, storyline text at the beginning of each world provides further insight into Tim's quest for his princess. The themes evoked include forgiveness, desire, and frustration.[11]

In the final level, in which the player moves Tim in "forward" time while the rest of the world moves backwards in time, the events depict the princess escaping from a knight, and then Tim and the princess working together to surpass obstacles and meet at her home. However, when played in reverse, the events show the princess running from Tim, setting traps that he is able to evade, until she is rescued by the knight.[11]

Following completion of the game, the player will find additional texts that expand upon the story. The ending of the game is ambiguous, and has been subject to multiple interpretations.[11] One common theory, based on the inclusion of the famous quote stated by Kenneth Bainbridge—"Now we are all sons of bitches"—after the detonation of the first atomic bomb, suggests that the princess represents the atomic bomb,[11] though Blow has stated that there is more than just this interpretation of the story.[16] Blow has also said that he "would not be capable" of explaining the whole story of the game, and stated that the central idea is "something big and subtle and resists being looked at directly".[17]

[edit] Development

Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid

Jonathan Blow came up with the concept of Braid in December 2004, inspired while on a trip to Thailand, and started development work on it in April of the following year.[18] By December 2005, a version of the game with the same number of worlds and puzzles as the final version but without the final artwork was completed; this version won the Independent Games Festival game design award at the 2006 Game Developer's Conference.[18] While working on the art direction, Blow tightened the presentation and mechanics of the puzzles to improve their playability.[18] During the game's three years of development, Blow put about US$200,000 of his own money into its development, most going towards hiring of David Hellman for artwork and for living expenses.[19][20]

Originally, Blow had envisioned the game to be broken into several different worlds as in the final game, each exploring facets of space, time, and causality, but with each world having very different high-level mechanics. One mechanic that Blow could not develop further was a world with no "arrow of time" that would have required the player to traverse the level in a manner that could be repeated in reverse. For example, the player would have been forbidden to jump down from a tall height while moving in forward time, as they would not be able to jump that height in reverse time.[18] While this idea was not used, Blow discovered the rewind feature could be developed further for other aspects.[18] Another mechanic that was considered was called "Oracle Billards", in which the result of a billards shot would be shown to the player before he made the shot. Blow came to realize the result was informative, but did not work well as an entertaining game mechanic.[21] After selecting the game mechanics he wanted, Blow began adding puzzles that made philosophical points on his views on game design in general. After brainstorming several more puzzles and concepts, Blow then dropped the least interesting puzzles and worlds from the game.[18] Blow noted he wanted to include consequences of rewinding time, features not found in games that have such an aspect such as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Blinx: the Time Sweeper, and Timeshift.[18] While these games immerse the player with these time-shifting effects using a first- or third-person perspective, Blow decided against this and used a 2D presentation. Blow noted that some of the puzzles in Braid would have been impossible or more difficult in any other perspective.[18]

One of Jonathan Blow's design factors into Braid was to achieve gameplay innovation naturally through the artistic expression of the game. Blow used Rod Humble's The Marriage as an example, in which Humble set out to make a game that related his feelings of being in a marriage, instead of developing game concepts first and adding the story later. As such, Blow noted that while there were no new gameplay mechanics, "it doesn't play like any game you've ever played".[22][23] Another concept that Blow used for Braid's development was related to the game's presentation to the player. Blow recognized that many games present a complex interface to the player that get in the way of understanding the game, but at times are needed to explain the rules and concept of the game to draw in players. Blow referenced Jeff Minter's Space Giraffe, pointing out that the game never communicated the purpose of playing the game upfront to the player, citing that as one of the reasons for the game's poor reception.[22] Braid was developed to promote this communication to the player, explaining the fundamental rule of each world at its start as to then allow the player to interact with that rule throughout the world.[22]

Blow recognized that the puzzles in Braid had a range of difficulties, with some puzzles being more difficult for certain players than others, and did not have any set difficulty curve.[23] Blow designed most of the game's levels to let the player bypass the puzzles, allowing them to experience the rest of the game even if they could not solve a difficult puzzle. Only certain boss characters require the player to defeat the boss before continuing on. Blow hoped that players would be able to find solutions to puzzles they had skipped by completing puzzles later in the game.[23] Blow felt that "unearned rewards are false and meaningless", and thus included the gameplay mechanic of earning a collectible only after solving a puzzle, and only one collectible would be earned per puzzle.[18]

[edit] Story

The game's story was influenced by such works as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, Robert Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.[18][23] Specifically, while Blow took the model of Invisible Cities, he did not like the homage to it taken by Einstein's Dreams, and thus avoided taking the story in that direction.[18] Blow's goal was to have Braid "be mind-expanding" and to have "people to get experiences from it that they have not gotten from anything else".[18]

[edit] Artwork


Blow provided simple drawings of what he envisioned the levels to look like in Braid (top), and Hellman would then create the necessary pieces of artwork to match the drawings as well as the mood and tone of each level.

The art for the game took more than a year to complete.[18] Background artwork for the game was created by David Hellman, artist of the critically-acclaimed webcomic A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. To create the art, Blow gave Hellman rough images of the level's layout, and told him to draw over it.[24] Hellman and Blow iterated through several styles before achieving the final versions. Through these iterations, the two worked to identify and remove elements of the art that could be seen as aesthetic and confuse the player, while still retaining aesthetic elements that would be generalized by the player as non-functional parts of the level.[24] Once the game's overall artwork was created, Blow and Hellman worked to break out functional pieces that could be used in Braid's level editor. As each world was built up using these pieces, Blow suggested more changes that reflected the tone of each world and avoided art that distracted from the gameplay. For example, "Time and Forgiveness", the first world the player encounters, was drawn to create a feel of exploration and forgiveness,[24] while artwork for "Time and Decision" used a mix of "luxurious domestic objects (nice furniture and fabrics) with rugged outdoor objects (swampy water, rotting piers and nautical rope)" to create an intentionally "incongruous" look to convey aspects of alternate realities.[25] Several variations on the game's backgrounds were done until they arrived at the concept of blurring the background elements to make them appear out of focus, while keeping the foreground elements sharply in focus and clear to the player.[24] Particle effects were applied to both background and foreground elements to add apparent motion to them, such as the waving of grass blades or the movement of clouds.[24] The character visuals were originally created by Edmund McMillen, but were later redrawn by Hellman "to better match the now-predominant style of the backgrounds".[25]

[edit] Soundtrack

Braid features licensed music from Magnatune artists Cheryl Ann Fulton, Shira Kammen and Jami Sieber.[26] Part of Blow's decision to use licensed music was to reduce development costs.[27] However, Blow also preferred licensed music created independent of the gameplay, as the composer of such works would have a vested interest in their music without any bounds. Blow also felt those that regularly compose video game music did not have the necessary skills needed to create the mood he wanted for the game.[27] Blow ultimately selected eight tracks that were sufficiently long to avoid notable looping while a player attempted to solve a difficult puzzle, and that provided a "different and interesting" sound when played in reverse to match the reverse time mechanic of the gameplay.[27] Blow also selected songs that were "organic and complex" as to help set the game's mood and aimed "to present something that isn't necessarily clear-cut".[27] The selection of the music also influenced the creation of the background artwork for the game.[27] Both Kammen and Sieber have received positive comments about their music as a result of their inclusion in Braid.[27] Blow is seeking to publish a soundtrack of the music from Braid in conjunction with Magnatune.[27] The songs included in Braid are:[27]

  • "Maenam" by Jami Sieber, from Hidden Sky
  • "Undercurrent" by Jami Sieber, from Lush Mechanique
  • "The Darkening Ground" by Jami Sieber, from Lush Mechanique
  • "Tell It By Heart" by Jami Sieber, from Second Sight
  • "Long Past Gone" by Jami Sieber, from Second Sight
  • "Downstream" by Shira Kammen, from Music of Waters
  • "Lullaby Set" by Shira Kammen and Swan, from Wild Wood
  • "Romanesca" by Cheryl Ann Fulton, from The Once and Future Harp

[edit] Release

Prior to release, Blow withdrew Braid from the 2007 Slamdance Guerrilla Games Competition, in protest of the controversial Super Columbine Massacre RPG! being dropped from the competition despite being one of six finalists.[28][29] Several other developers followed suit and later withdrew their games, including thatgamecompany's flOw and The Behemoth's Castle Crashers.[28][30]

Braid was originally developed as a PC title with possible console versions.[18] The Xbox Live version was announced at the 2007 Tokyo Game Show.[31] However, Blow was critical of the Xbox Live certification process, as he believed the effort to meet all the requirements could have been better spent on polishing the game. However, at the same time, the certification team allows Blow to retain certain aspects of his vision for the game. For example, the certification team allowed Blow to launch the game with the player immediately in control of the game instead of requiring a start-up title screen.[32] Regardless, Blow stated he would likely not release a game again on the Xbox Live service under the same business model.[32]

The PC version was original slated for a late 2008 release but had slipped to at least October 2008 due to other factors. Blow decided to prevent Braid being overwhelmed by a number of large titles that were scheduled for release in late 2008 and pushed the release to early 2009.[4] Prior to the game's release for Microsoft Windows, Blow had priced the game at US$20, using pricing models for other games such as World of Goo and Crayon Physics Deluxe. However, this was priced $5 more than the Xbox Live version, leading many to criticize his pricing choice.[33] Due to this response, Blow reduced the price to meet the Xbox Live cost, stating that he would "rather have people talking about the game itself" than complaining about its cost.[34]

Blow said that a PlayStation 3 version of the game "might happen in the future", but a WiiWare version would not be possible under Nintendo's current size restrictions.[35][36][37] Hothead Games will port Braid to the Macintosh platform.[38]

Blow has expressed that he has no current plans to either release more levels or make a sequel. However he specified that "If another developer out there really likes the time mechanics and wants to make a game that uses them, and perhaps some new ones, with their own new level designs, then hey, awesome".[39] Shortly after the PC release, Blow began released resources for a level editor for Braid that will eventually allow for users to import new graphics into the game.[40][41][42]

[edit] Reception

 Reception
Aggregate scores
Aggregator Score
GameRankings 92% (Xbox 360)[45]
87% (PC)[46]
Metacritic 93% (Xbox 360)[43]
88% (PC)[44]
Review scores
Publication Score
1UP.com A+ (Xbox 360)[47]
Edge 9/10 (Xbox 360)[10]
Eurogamer 10/10 (Xbox 360)[9]
GameSpot 9.5/10 (Xbox 360)[12]
IGN 8.8/10 (Xbox 360)[13]
8.8 (PC)[48]
Official Xbox Magazine 9/10 (Xbox 360)[49]

Upon its release onto the Xbox Live Arcade, Braid was met with very positive responses from critics, with an aggregate review score of 93% at MetaCritic,[43], making it the top-rated Xbox Live game[50] and the 10th highest rated Xbox 360 game.[51] Braid was purchased by more than 55,000 people during the first week of release.[52] According to Blow, Braid was the second-largest selling Xbox Live Arcade title in 2008.[53] Blow has stated that the sales have been "very profitable", making him more money than if he had been working at a high-paying job for the time it took to develop the game.[53]

Braid was highly praised for the unique puzzles it presented. Dan Whitehead of Eurogamer noted the creative variation on time manipulation and the need to understand the non-linearity of his actions made him feel as if "years of gaming blinkers have been ripped away."[9] Furthermore, the connection between the puzzles and the overall presentation of the game was favorably received; Tom McShea of Gamespot stated that Braid was "the rare game that will make you rack your brain trying to solve puzzles one minute while challenging you to come to terms with its mature tale the next".[12] Braid's artwork and presentation were given high regards. Nick Suttner of 1UP.com commented that Braid's artwork "juxtapose old-school design sensibilities with impressionist backdrops and lovingly hand-painted environments",[47] while GameSpot's McShea stated that the game's visuals were "eye-catching but never distracting".[12] Jean Snow of Wired stated that Braid's "beautiful symphonic melodies contribute to what is already an impressive and unique vision", and that "the soothing tunes are probably the reason you never really lose it when facing particularly tough puzzles".[54]

The game was primarily criticized for its short length. IGN's Hilary Goldstein stated that the game offers "no reason to come back" once you've completed all the puzzles.[13] However, others compared Braid's short experience to similar criticisms with Portal in that its length "can be disregarded in the face of its unique approach to storytelling and expansive ideas".[47] The game's price was also seen as a negative for the game, though reviews did state that "Braid is worth every penny".[12] Reviews also noted that while Blow had tried to integrate the story and gameplay throughout the game, this only worked well in the final world, and otherwise the story was "a little trite in its self-conscious obscurity".[10]

The PC version of the game was consider to be "faithful" to the Xbox 360 version of the game, retaining the same content without adding any new features.[48] Reviewers commented that Braid benefited from keyboard controls.[48] However, as a port of the Xbox 360 version, the lack of initial support for optimizing the graphics display for one's computer, either through larger screen resolutions or turning off certain game effects, was seen as a drawback, though it is expected that patches will be released to add these options.[55]

In addition to winning the Independent Games Festival award in 2006 during its design, Braid was selected by GameSpot for their 2008 awards in "Best Original Downloadable Console Game",[56] "Best Platformer",[57] and "Best Licensed Music",[58] and by Official Xbox Magazine for their 2008 awards of "XBox Live Arcade Game of the Year", "Best Soundtrack", and "Best Ending" and one of their "Indisputably Incredible Runners-ups to Game of the Year".[59] Braid was awarded the "Casual Game of the Year" at the 12th Annual Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Awards.[60] Braid was nominated for five Xbox Live Arcade 2008 awards[61], winning one award in the category of "Best Innovation".[62]

Goichi Suda, developer for killer7 and No More Heroes, stated that playing Braid made him want to try making a 2D title.[63]

[edit] References

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[edit] External links

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