Game Report: Braid

I’m taking a class called “Virtual Worlds, Gaming and Communication” this quarter with the Masters in Communication in Digital Media program. (I’m able to take 4 classes outside of the MBA program, and I will be taking all 4 with the MCDM. They are great!) One of my assignments was to write a report on a video game. I chose to do “Braid” specifically because when Scott played it and finished it, he woke me up and spent a good half an hour telling me about it. That was a rare occurrence, so I figured there was something about it that I should check out.

Here’s my full report!

Braid was developed by Jonathan Blow along with artist David Hellman. The team also used character animator Edmund McMillen, effect programmer Sean Barrett, and sounds effects programmer Harry Mack for short periods of time. Blow is an independent game designer who is very active in the video game industry, and is especially interested in experimental game play. Blow regularly participates in the Indie Game Jam and writes for Game Developer Magazine.

The original version of Braid took three years to develop, funded by Blow’s personal savings. It was submitted to the Independent Games Festival in December 2005, and won that year’s IGF award for Innovative Game Design. This earned Blow a small prize of $2,500. After winning the award, Blow and his team spent another two years refining the game to be released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2008. It has subsequently also been released on the Playstation Network and as a PC game.

Braid has been very successful, especially considering its limited budget. (Although it is unclear if the team broke even on their investment.) The Xbox Live Arcade version of the game debuted with 28,500 downloads in its first three days. It has earned a 92% ranking on GameRankings.com, bringing it on par with big budget games such as Halo 2 and Legends of Zelda. Blow is quoted as saying,

I have been a proponent of indie and experimental game development for a while, but the attitude toward it always seems to be that they are interesting toys, but not real games. Well, perhaps that is changing. And perhaps some of the indie developers out there who are making cheap clones of PopCap games will realize that if, instead, they go out on a limb and do something interesting and different and important to people, their work will be recognized.

Game Play

The game play in Braid is inextricably linked to the emotional journey the main character, Tim, is embarking on and the emotional journey Blow wants the game’s players to embark on as well. The goal of the game is to “save the princess”, however, as the player goes through the game it becomes clear that there is a higher purpose of self discovery interwoven into the story line. This idea motivates the game’s players to persevere, even as the puzzles get more and more difficult. One game walkthrough author states,

Don’t read this game FAQ! Seriously. Braid is a meticulously crafted work of art, a game whose beauty is only surpassed by its complexity. And while you may simply want to rush through and discover the ending, you will also find that such a method is the only way to lose this game. In the end, the only true definition of “beating” Braid is to discover, on your own, the location and solution to the puzzle pieces. Only then will you feel a sense of accomplishment, and only then will you have made your purchase worthwhile.

The game FAQ author does go on to give hints to help players get through some of the more difficult puzzles in the game, which anecdotally is used by many players. Blow himself created an “Official Walkthrough” of Braid, which actually gives players no hints on how to win the game. Instead, he continually encourages the players to not give up, and to not use a walkthrough. His idea is that “Braid is about the journey” and if players are able to get through the game without help they “will feel cool and smart”.

The main game mechanic of Braid is a time shifting element, which not only allows players to never lose, but is required to use in order to solve all of the puzzles. This creates a sense of safe exploration and discovery and makes the game very approachable.

Blow recognized that the time shift element is not the way players usually think, so he chose a simple backdrop for the rest of the game by utilizing the familiar platformer setup. In fact, the game play clearly mimics that of the most famous platformer game, Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers. This makes many elements of the game very easy to understand, such as the need to jump on the heads of mushroom-like characters and avoid the plants that rise out of pipes. Time shifting comes into play with the need to perfectly time events, or move through the puzzle in a backwards order.

Tim, the main character, is tasked with finding keys and puzzle pieces in each world which help unfold the storyline. There is also a metagame with 8 stars hidden throughout the worlds in Braid. The main character moves through each level by running, jumping and climbing on the elements in the game.

In each world, the main character is faced with a different time shifting game mechanic, including:

• Time and Forgiveness: player discovers that he or she may rewind to undo their actions
• Time and Mystery: player discovers green objects that are not influenced by rewinding time
• Time and Place: as the player moves left or right, the time moves forward and backward
• Time and Decision: player discovers a shadow of himself that he can use while rewinding time
• Hesitance: player discovers a magic ring that warps the time around it
• World 1: player discovers that all time is flowing in reverse

One major element to the game is that is it not timed, and there are no resource requirements to be gathered such as food or health. This allows the player enough time to figure out what needs to be done in each puzzle. While the puzzles are initially easy to figure out, the time shift elements get more and more complex and the puzzles more difficult to complete. The ability to try and try again is a refreshing concept to other games that require the player to rewind to check points or start the level over when they lose.

The player is also not able to complete the worlds in a linear fashion, creating a greater desire to explore each world, move on and then return later. The very first world, for example, includes a frame with a few puzzle pieces inside of it as part of the world you are exploring. In order to obtain a far off puzzle piece, the player has to obtain another puzzle piece from a future world and put it in the frame in the first level. Blow is quoted as saying that the entire game is “about vagueness and revision”, which is clear in the character’s non-linear movement throughout the game.[iv]

Each world has a boss battle, with the same boss character and similar level setup. However, the way to beat the boss is different for each world, depending on the different time shifting game mechanics. For example, in the “Time and Decision” world, Tim uses the shadow feature to beat the boss by hitting him with two chandeliers at once. When Tim beats the final boss on all of the levels except for the last one, he is directed to a castle where a dinosaur tells him that, “the princess is in another castle”, again mimicking Super Mario Brothers.

In addition to using elements from Super Mario Brothers, Braid includes elements of another popular video game Donkey Kong in its “Jumpman” puzzle. The level looks exactly like a Donkey Kong puzzle, which requires the player to move left-to-right-to-left again, but with a time shifting element to add complexity.

One major complaint in the game community about Braid is that it is too short. XboxWorld.com notes that “the average gamer should probably be able to complete Braid in 5 hours”.[v] As a game that is somewhat casual in nature in terms of its game play, this seems reasonable. However, the main customer base for games on Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network are “hard core” gamers, who are used complex games taking up to 30 hours. However, given the platformer nature of this game, and the level of complexity that builds with each puzzle, it is hard to imagine the game taking any longer than it already does while maintaining the attention of its players. Anecdotally, there are already many players who quit playing when the puzzles gets too difficult.

Art and Music

Blow originally planned to release Braid using no music and “programmer art”, which is very simplistic in nature and not meant to impose any meaning on to the game. Instead, he employed webcomic artist David Hellman and licensed music from Magnatune.com to purvey a sense of wonder and exploration in the game. Many players say that the theme of the game reminds them of the hit movie, “What Dreams May Come” with Robin Williams.

The overall theme of the art in Braid varies between “highly detailed artwork and impressionist” landscapes, according to Hellman. This is very purposefully, again to help the player understand the time shifting elements of the game. Hellman wanted to make sure the player knew intuitively what the character could touch and not touch, and what would rewind or not by using color and texture. For example, Hellman uses green and purple halos around characters and items to delineate their time shifting abilities.

The impressionist backdrop to the game is set up in such a way that is it always moving and morphing. As the player moves forward in time, the scene moves in a certain way, and then reverses when the player is rewinding time. This is somewhat distracting at first, as when in reverse it looks as if the screen is being sucked into a time warp. However, ultimately the movement of the scene and the changing colors depending on the direction of time, help the player understand what is going on. There were many small touches to the movement of the backdrop that showed Blow and Hellman’s attention to detail, including the rain drops moving down and upward depending on the movement of time.

All of the songs in the soundtrack of Braid are very similar, although they were created by different people at Magnatude. The set of 5 or so musicians helps the sound flow cohesively throughout the game. Blow is quoted as saying that he licensed the music because,

I knew that (a) I could find music of the mood and texture that I wanted [though it was still very difficult!], and (b) the music was made by artists who really cared about the music they were doing, a lot; and that feeling makes its way into the final game.

I didn’t want to try and commission game musicians to make songs, especially with a very low audio budget — the result is just not the same emotionally, even if it’s a high quality song, because they aren’t invested in the same way. And even just a high-quality song is hard to get, because there are a lot of not-so-hot game musicians out there.

Blow also said that he wanted to make sure the music tracks were long, so that when players were spending the necessary time to solve puzzles, the music didn’t repeat. The music also had to sound good going backwards when the players used the rewind feature. The music is especially organic and continues on Blow’s theme of exploration and self discovery.

Players of Braid have been very interested in the music. Blow and Magnatude created a compilation album to celebrate the PC release of the game in response to demand from game players. Gamespot.com writer Sophia Tong also wrote an entire article on Braid’s music alone. One commenter on the Braid Game blog said,

I just wanted to say thanks for putting an excellent soundtrack to go along with an excellent game. I haven’t played a video game where I swell up with emotion [and] where both the music and story hits me in a long, long time.

Storyline

Warning! Spoiler!

There are a number of differing opinions as to the real story and meaning of the Braid game. The non-linear story line leaves itself up for interpretation, and is part of the fun of playing the game. Blow himself recognizes that the game is more about discovery than an end goal.

The basic idea is that Tim is searching for a princess who has been stolen by a monster. Like its thematic parent Super Mario Brothers, very little history is given about Tim, the princess and the monster. At the end of the game it becomes clear that Tim was not chasing the Princess to save her, but instead that the Princess was running away from him. The exact reason for this is unknown, but many people believe the story has an underlying theme of nuclear war. Or, more innocently, that of a broken relationship.

In support of the nuclear war theory, text in the epilogue of the story eludes to Tim being a scientist, and that his search for the princess was actually a search for a specific scientific goal. At one point someone in the background says, “Now we are all sons of bitches”, which is a famous line by Kenneth Bainbridge after the detonation of the first nuclear bomb. This theme also explains the burning city scene of one of the final puzzles in the story.

Whatever the point of the story, the emotional journey taken as Tim ventures through the six worlds in the game is unique, engaging and worth the time to master!