GAME REVIEW: Braid — sfsignal.com

Braid is a sidescroller puzzle game released by Number None in 2008. It’s gotten a lot of buzz over the last few years, including placing #94 on G4TV’S Top 100 Video Games of All Time in 2013. That ranking surprised me as I watched that list, considering that, at a glance, it appeared to be using Super Nintendo era technology. Not that I mind an older look (I love me some retro gaming), but that kind of list tends toward the new and trendy and whizbang hardware-limit-pushing stuff. So I wondered, what exactly made this game so special? The unique twist in the game is an ability to roll back time. If you die, no problem, just roll back before you made the fatal mistake and take a different action. If you miss a jump and fall to a lower level when you didn’t want to, just roll back and retry it. That’s about the extent of what G4TV explained about the game. That alone makes a handy gimmick, a timesaver convenience that could make a platformer puzzle game less frustrating, but it’s hardly something to base an entire game around, I thought.

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