Braid

Xbox 360 Live Arcade
Timeless
Time can be a funny thing. Invisible, intangible, it flows like a river with many currents, pulling us along towards our ultimate game of chess. I used to think it didn’t exist until Einstein’s theory of relativity set me right and showed it also travels at different speeds (head up a mountain with an atomic clock if you don’t believe it). Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, understand’s this all too well, too.
Like a melancholic Mario Bros, Braid is a platform game with one big twist and dozens of subtle turns.
Added to the usual running/jumping/bouncing on foes action is the ability to rewind time. With a simple button push you can erase your mistakes and try again. Of course that’s pretty handy when you miss-time a jump but what this really allows for is a distinctly genius game of puzzling in search of pieces of jigsaw and a lost princess.
Each world employs different twists on time – there are objects impervious to your rewinding powers, there’s a ring that if dropped can slow time within its spherical influence and there’s a land where even walking left and right changes the direction of time. And with these variations come differing puzzles of mind-melting magnitudes, continually challenging your concept of the 4th dimension, often dumbfoundingly (that’s impossible!), always satisfyingly (so that’s how you do it!).
The art direction is superb too, repainting the simple landscapes of Mario et al with impressionist brushstrokes, underpinned by the melancholia of a beautiful soundtrack, all continually playing and rewinding at the touch of a button as you continue to piece together the story that holds it all together.
At first the story is a secondary concern (platformers aren’t noted for their narrative merits), but as you progress, a sadness dawns as the tale is revealed. Through completed jigsaws and pages of text, we find that Braid’s time manipulation is merely a metaphor for the protagonist’s journey to unmake mistakes, rewrite memories and somehow get the girl back.
10/10