The Armchair Game Designer

Most of the games on the Top 100 list are extremely big name, big budget titles from AAA developers with great track records. Braid is a different beast. An indie game in both its development and its heart, Braid is like looking into a moving Monet painting while listening to Mozart and attending a MENSA meeting. Come rescue the princess… or perhaps not… after the break.

INTRO:

• Incredibly easy to pick up and go; there is absolutely NO down time after the initial load
• Player is in the “game” right away (no ‘main menu’); the Main Menu IS the start of the game
• Player character begins silhouetted and is eventually illuminated: thematic touch for how puzzles and story will unfold
• Story is presented through text- while not a very engaging way to present the optional story, it is well-written and likely the result of budget constraints
• Story begins as cliché: Save the princess from a monster, yet game and story quickly subverts the gamer’s expectations

GETTING GOING:

• Contextual buttons overhead are non-intrusive but helpful
• Part of the first level is a means of subtly showing how to interact with the game world; presents ‘what to press’ as part of the environment in a progressing series of small challenges
• The player does not feel as if they’re told how to solve these problems, but rather intuits them out
• Within the first minutes, all of the ‘rules’ of what is possible are clearly established and maintained throughout the game
• These basic gameplay assumptions are shown and rewarded concretely (with progress or a puzzle piece for success)
• The Pit is a recurring, friendly, low-pressure display of the ‘new concept’ of the particular level; by showing the same scenario in different ways, players can immediately identify what has changed about this level

FUN:

• Immensely satisfying to complete a puzzle… the rules are always the same, so you never feel as though the solution was a ‘trick’ of the game
• Concepts are repeated with a gently growing difficulty curve (e.g., Hunt!, Lair)
• Never had to pause the game to take down notes: low pressure until you decide to act (creating a sense of agency)
• No sense of real punishment: Like having unlimited Sands of Time (from POP), never any Game Over
• The puzzles are actually inventive and truly challenging rather than just gimmicky and exuding a feeling of ‘guess what the developer was thinking’

VISUALS:

• Art style evokes utter calm, and contributes to the lack of frustration
• In a platformer or puzzle game, you must inherently show the solution to a problem somehow; Braid does a good job of keeping the solution within one or two screen-widths (and usually the former)

INTELLIGENCE:

• The game does not hold your hand through the puzzles, making you feel DAMN smart for completing a puzzle
• Solutions never feel cheap because they all adhere to a set of very clear rules as laid out by the level
• The one exception to this, and ironically the one frustrating moment, was in the section “Fickle Companion” where it was not very clear why the key would occasionally stop following the player character or follow a path of its own

IMMERSION:

• Immersion is cut ever so slightly by the inclusion of the storybooks, but these never feel mandatory
• The game dangles an ever-present reward, something that must be attained
• At first glance the “assemble the puzzle” section is a departure from the immersion of the game world; yet even this defies expectations by being crucial to the solving of several puzzles in the ‘proper’ game world
• Calming, zero-pressure atmosphere heightened by music
• Theme of ‘putting together the pieces’ and ‘reversing old mistakes’ conveyed seamlessly through gameplay

CAMERA:

• Sometimes ‘runs forward’ to preview a puzzle in its visual entirety
• Puzzles usually tailored around what can be seen on-screen; when something is off-screen, it is usually an intentional feature of the puzzle

CONTROLS:

• Utterly simple controls mean focus can be on puzzle-solving, not button combos
• It is not until the penultimate level that a new control function (Y button) is introduced, and by them the control scheme is already well-established
• Controls only presented when game predicts you need them; for instance, rewinding a long ways at -1x speed will helpfully remind the player that they can speed up or slow down the time travel

IDEAS:

• Takes the concept of time-reversal and does wildly imaginative things with it, crafting puzzles around nearly every possible eventuality; if something COULD occur as a result of the game rules, odds are it is exploited for a puzzle
• Owes its simplicity of function to the platformers it parodies
• Whole levels are built upon individual concepts that seem to grow at an appropriate pace
• Mixing thematic elements with actual gameplay in a way that could not be done in another medium, which is very rare for a game (e.g., puzzle pieces, turning back the clock on your mistakes)

MEMORY:

• Zen-like feeling of calm and satisfaction as I walk away from this game; very few games can make you feel good about yourself, but this game does it by dialing down the pressure, dialing up outside-the-box thinking, and creating satisfying rewards
• The art and sound direction, combined with the lack of real punishment and simple control scheme, make this a game I would recommend even to people who don’t normally play or enjoy games; the game transcends the usual expectation of gameplay
• Reliance less on your experience with ‘raw gameplay’ (twitch, button mashing, etc.) and more on ‘refined gameplay’ (using intuition and judgment to solve a problem in a fun way)