Braid

One of the best platformers I've ever played. And it involves time manipulation. Puzzles range from easy to hard. If you just want to complete the game, you can get by with the easy puzzles. But completionists will have to work for their 100%. Plot is maybe a little too "edgy", kind of hard to follow. Works great on both Windows and Linux, good with gamepad.

This was the second indie game I played, that was back in 2013, so it has a special place in my heart and brain. It’s a puzzle platformer, with a time controlling mechanic and a nice story. It’s made with love and care, and it shows. Graphics are good. Contrary to what some say, I liked the graphics very much. The backgrounds look especially nice. It’s like you are in a painting, haha, very intentional. Music is nice. The music is calm and soothing. This fits the in-game scenario and helps keep your mind calm while trying to solve the puzzles. The platforming, puzzles and time mechanics are fun. The game gives you, at a proper pace, the knowledge and tools you need to beat it. They are well thought out. At the end of a world you will meet a brown dinosaur called a Greeter. I love the Greeters and the things they say. World 4 Greeter is the best, poor dino. The story is great. The plot twist at the end is a wow. The ending is alluded to so it doesn’t come out of nowhere. Read the books at the beginning of each world. Think about them. Pay attention to the paintings. Greeters’ dialogues are part of the story.

I checked this game carefully before buying; not just lots of hype, but it seems to be actually delivering. One big bad issue with it was not mentioned anywhere, though; that's why I do here, as a *warning to potential buyers*: The keybindings are hardcoded to cursor keys + space. If that's your jam, congratulations, you'll probably have lots of fun. If they are not, movement will be awkward, because you can't assign the keys you are used to. So besides solving the actual puzzles, you'll also fight with the movement. That's much less fun...

In Braid you control Tim, a love-struck young man on a quest to find his princess. Said young man has the power to rewind time (as far back as you want), which is the core mechanic of the game. You have several words, each containing a set of levels, in which you collect jigsaw pieces to assemble pictures at Tim’s home and unlock new worlds. Tim cannot ever die – death just causes the game to pause for you to rewind time. There are also a couple of boss encounters where you fight slightly different versions of the same boss. One puzzle in the first world was too difficult for me to figure out on my own, but it’s the only time I needed outside help finding jigsaw pieces, every other piece was behind a puzzle that was actually realistically solvable. There are questionable elements to Braid too: the backstory is rather vague, you’d almost think it’s intended to be a community effort to figure it out. It is told through books at the beginning of each world, which also allude to a unique gameplay twist of the given world. Despite those cryptic books, the ending is clever and does not disappoint. There is a way to alter it (the ending, that is), but to be able to do so you have to find extra-secret collectibles, which is virtually impossible to accomplish without a guide. One of them is permanently missable. From those specific angles Braid can be frustrating, but otherwise it’s a decent game.

RECOMMENDED: Beautiful short puzzle game that explores time-manipulation mechanics applied to a platformer. PUZZLES ARE OPTIONAL: You can finish the level without solving them -in fact, solving the puzzles is the hard way to go about a level. In Braid, SOLVING A PUZZLE usually means collecting one of the jigsaw pieces scattered in the level by manipulating time. The basic time manipulation is rewinding time, but each "world" explores different mechanics: a movable ring that slows time around it, time flowing forward or backward as you move, a shadow that replays the moves you just rewound, and so on. Other than the time-based mechanics this is a simple platformer. MOST OF THE PUZZLES ARE easy in terms of platforming difficulty; most players will be able to pull them off once they figure what they need to do. Figuring out what you need to do can be hard sometimes, but since all puzzles are optional you can proceed anyway. A few puzzles are really hard in figuring out or in the precise jumping they require, but they are a minority. STORY: The deliberately vague and ambiguous story is about Tim's quest for his Princess. Each world begins with Tim reflecting on his past, usually with regret. His reflections on these times introduce tangentially the time-manipulation mechanics of the next levels. The last level is a big puzzle in itself, solved with time manipulation as all the others. PRETENTIOUS? It's definitely "artsy", but you can easily ignore the story if you want and enjoy the puzzles. For game design fans is an amazing catalog on time-based game mechanics. NOT A PLATFORMER: you solve a puzzle by exploiting time manipulation in clever ways, but each puzzle has a different twist to it -there's no repetition. This makes the game short and interesting but not a platformer in the traditional sense -you never have to face the same obstacle (puzzle) twice. BEAUTIFUL Water-colored animated backgrounds and long, deep background music make this game really beatiful.