Braid [XBL/PSN]

[Eight Rooks]

Over-rated, to my mind. I don't entirely regret the money I spent on it but it's not doing much to make me miss owning a 360 (I still have my Live account on a housemate's machine). It's extremely impressive from a purely technical perspective and has scattered moments of utter genius, I'll happily admit, but it's too abstract, full of itself, unfocused, murderously unbalanced and just... rather empty. I know I speak as a towering Fumito Ueda fanboy (even if the man is reportedly a bastard) but how anyone can compare this to Ico or Colossus is beyond me. I got through worlds 2 to 6 and, uh... nothing? Was I supposed to collect all the puzzle pieces before I received an ending? I'm sure there's some ludicrously obtuse cognitive leap I'm supposed to make that'll have it all make sense and make me, too, fall down and kiss Blow's feet in wonder but I'm at a loss as to what it could be to stop making me feel he's just the guy at the party standing in the corner, quite happy no-one wants to talk to him because he's just smarter than they are.

[prinnysquad]

Did you climb the ladder on the stage select screen for the extra level and ending?

[Eight Rooks]

But you can't climb that ladder.

(Obviously you can, but i r dum, so gave up in disgust after ten minutes of fiddling around trying to get up there. )

[prinnysquad]

I'm not sure if you need all the pieces to do it. It's good though!

[Paulos G]

You have to collect all the puzzle pieces before you can climb that ladder iirc.

[Family Fry]

NEED to play that last level, its so well done the end.

[Brats]

Over-rated, to my mind. I don't entirely regret the money I spent on it but it's not doing much to make me miss owning a 360 (I still have my Live account on a housemate's machine). It's extremely impressive from a purely technical perspective and has scattered moments of utter genius, I'll happily admit, but it's too abstract, full of itself, unfocused, murderously unbalanced and just... rather empty. I know I speak as a towering Fumito Ueda fanboy (even if the man is reportedly a bastard) but how anyone can compare this to Ico or Colossus is beyond me. I got through worlds 2 to 6 and, uh... nothing? Was I supposed to collect all the puzzle pieces before I received an ending? I'm sure there's some ludicrously obtuse cognitive leap I'm supposed to make that'll have it all make sense and make me, too, fall down and kiss Blow's feet in wonder but I'm at a loss as to what it could be to stop making me feel he's just the guy at the party standing in the corner, quite happy no-one wants to talk to him because he's just smarter than they are.

It sounds like you've just run through the levels without collecting many of the pieces. If you've only done that, you've experienced about 10% of the game.

[Eight Rooks]

I did/do like the game; it did pull me back quite a few times, and it is the sort of game the industry needs more of. Just that it so did not live up to the hype - nice soundtrack, nice backdrops, nice gimmick very snappily implemented, some extremely smartarse puzzles and... that's about it. Game design principles exist for a reason, Mr. Blow - I hadn't a clue about the time wells until I started stabbing all the buttons in frustration, and it took several rounds of annoying trial and error to work out what they did. Not fun. Why is there no visual clue as to how the doppelganger works - how long can it record for, why does it stop being able to go forward the instant you rewind, so on? Not fun. Why are there one-shot throwaway puzzles that are never repeated anywhere else through the game (the spoiler above)? Clever, sure! I did actually work it out for myself, too. Still not fun - I agonised for ages over what the hell I could possibly be missing that would let me get that particular puzzle piece.

It's good - it's occasionally very good - built on a fantastic premise, too. But it's like Echochrome, to my mind, in that gameplay-wise it seems to have been built around forcing you to adapt to a mindset created by an arrogant prick; sometimes things that really ought to work flatly don't, sometimes things that seem like the most idiotic leap of half-baked logic do. And - aside from this brilliant, amazing, Godlike ending I haven't yet seen - emotionally it feels pretty vacuous.

Seven or a very generous eight, to my mind. Must try harder. I'll be interested in anything else the guy does but why he's hailed as the second coming escapes me. It's a re-invention, nothing more.

EDIT: Oh, I see. Fair enough. More reason not to bother finishing it then. Sorry - the way my mind works, you don't force the player to bleed for the privilege of finishing the game, unless your ending's the Sermon on the Mount or you're making an especially cruel bullet-hell vertical shooter. If you're Making A Statement, too, you don't assume only the hardcore deserve to see it. Thank you, no.

(For the record, I only finished one world, but I went back looking for puzzle pieces in all of them. Got several, couldn't be bothered to find them all. There just wasn't enough there to keep me going - no sense of progression, no real sense of achievement, nothing.)

[toythatkills]

Would you give up on a Mario game after collecting 13 stars, frustrated that you were expected to collect more to see the end of the game?

I'm struggling to understand your criticism of this game. Collecting the puzzle pieces and completing the game isn't for the "hardcore," it's the entire point of the game for everyone

Also - what ought to work that flat out doesn't? I don't remember anything such

[prinnysquad]

I think I got the sense of achievement from working out how to grab the pieces, an occasionally arduous and teeth-gnashing gig. I can totally see how it might not be some people's type of game. But I'd say the mechanics were sound - people either find the way they don't hold your hand in the initial stages of a new ability fun, or it annoys the hell out of them.

[Charlie]

I agree, the mechanics, on the whole, were sound. Apart from that level (Fickle Friend I think it was called) where you automatically dropped the key when facing/jumping/climbing left. That level was bull****.

[toythatkills]

Fickle Companion. Yeah, I didn't much like that either (messed up many a speed run there), but it still makes total sense in relation to the mechanics of the world so you can't criticise it for that.

[Lebowski]

Fickle Companion. Yeah, I didn't much like that either (messed up many a speed run there), but it still makes total sense in relation to the mechanics of the world so you can't criticise it for that.

how dose it make sense it seemed very buggy to me? in that what you were supposed to do was quite clear when you worked it out but didn't work all the time, i didn't really get how it fitted in to the rest of an otherwise excellent game care to explain?

[Charlie]

Yeah, Fickle Companion. I don't think it did make sense because the automatically-dropping-the-key-thing only happened on that particular level, it didn't happen on earlier or later levels in the same world.

[toythatkills]

The important thing to note is that the key is not green, and is therefore affected by time. In that world when you move right, time goes forward and when you move left, it goes back. If you grab the key and move right then it sticks with you because you are progressing through time normally. If you move left, though, the key goes back in time, which means it follows whatever route it took to get to where you were. That's why it pings to the bottom of ladders and such. It takes some getting used to, but it does make sense.