Yes, it’s Braid and yes, I really should have played it ages ago, but I just kept putting it off. One reason is that it’s a puzzle platformer and I really hate platformers. Another is that I read that famous Atlantic portrait of Jonathan Blow as well as the equally famous parody of that article, and the guy does come across as being incredibly pretentious. The more time passed, the less important it felt to go back and play it, no matter how great it was.

I was ultimately convinced when retrospective discussion on Broken Forum talked about how the time travel mechanic in this game was a true innovation and how rare it is to see a genuinely new mechanic be invented in a game. I was less interested in interpreting the game’s meaning since I’ve pretty much read all the spoilers about it already. It’s pretty hard to avoid spoilers for such a high-profile game that people like to talk about that was released so long ago (in Internet time anyway). That’s why I won’t talk about that, though of course, like everyone else, I really liked the time reversal twist at the end there. I do note that there’s no gameplay there. If you stop reversing time at that point, nothing happens.

I will say that the time travel stuff is very cool even now and that alone makes this a must-play for everyone. I was especially impressed by how each world introduces a new rule into the mix. I do think that, game mechanics-wise, it peaks early. Having time move at different rates is basically a variation of bullet-time and that isn’t terribly interesting. That’s why my favorite world is Time and Place which links the passage of time to horizontal movement. My favorite single level is probably Fickle Companion and the finicky key.

I confess that I wasn’t smart enough to solve every puzzle by myself. I didn’t realize that you could bop on Goombas from underneath them! But most of my frustration was when I knew exactly what to do but found it hard to actually pull it off because of my lack of the required twitch skills. I’m amazed when I see on YouTube videos how easily people can repeatedly bounce off the head of a single Goomba, going higher and higher each time. Maybe it’s also because I’ve never actually played a single Mario Bros. game.

Anyway playing through it myself was really a worthwhile experience that I think every gamer should go through. I just wonder why more games haven’t copied the ideas here, beyond superficial flashback mechanics. What if you had a combat game in which you could rewind time to perfect just the right sequence of moves to defeat an army of mooks but particular enemies would be immune to time manipulation and would keep attacking you? Or the enemies could be rewound in time but their bullets couldn’t? There are all kinds of possibilities to play with.