Braid

I bought this game last night and beat it this morning. It was highly and persistently recommended to me, and last night I finally caved and dropped fifteen on the Xbox Arcade game. It was fifteen bucks well spent. At first glance, Braid is very little more than a simplistic 2D platformer. There are five worlds and each is broken into only six levels or so. Each level has a certain amount of puzzle pieces you must collect; only once you've collected all the puzzle pieces in a world have you truly beaten it. Pretty basic, no? No. What makes Braid so special is a unique aspect of gameplay: the ability to control time. It may not sound like much, but it was more or less everything that was great about this game. It really forces you to solve puzzles four-dimensionally. (Well, three-dimensionally - my point is, the temporal dimension comes into play.) Most of the puzzles were relatively simple, but several really made me need to stop and think for a while. Some were just downright perplexing. Somehow, though, the game never got frustrating. There were no sloppy controls or ridiculous boss fights to speak of. I do have one minor gripe though, and it has to do with the storyline. The only story to speak of is told in vague poetic paragraphs at the start of each world. That's fine by me, but the Internet at large is abuzz with how "deep" and "mature" the plot was. Come on! Ambiguous does not always mean praiseworthy. It was more of a head-scratcher than a chin-stroker. And while I admit the possibility that I'm just missing something big here, I can't imagine many fans of the story really "got" the point of the story, so to speak. All in all though, Braid was a great game. They could certainly make a sequel, or even a spin-off. Either way, I'd buy it.