Braid, Anniversary Edition

nice game

nb

(Played to death on PS5) Jonathan Blow said this game sold like ass, and that's a shame. It's definitely worth a pick up, even if you know Braid by heart like I do. The enhanced graphics are probably the least interesting aspect of this re-release. They look nicer, sure, but until you start toggling between the old and new versions, you might not even understand what's different about the visuals. There are some new assets that give more life and story to the individual areas, but most art hews very closely to the original work, albeit with finer detail. Since the original aesthetic was very painterly, the lower resolution never detracted from it too much, so this part of the re-release feels the most redundant. More interesting is the enhanced music and sound effects, which really do feel generationally ahead of the original. The sound design is modern, crisp, and professional, whereas the old game sounded very much like a lo-fi indie game before indie games were even a thing. The music, meanwhile, has been processed and modified using many of the original licensed music's stems, and thus feel less like background ambiance and much more tied into the on-screen action and art. Some of the tracks dramatically change the tone of different worlds to make them feel more appropriate to the original's vision. By far the most interesting part of this release is the commentary world. It's a two-for-one concept: you get nodes to activate similar to other in-game commentaries like Half-Life 2 for example, that discuss art, music, sound, design, and programming, but you also get a fresh batch of puzzles. While the commentaries are hit-or-miss, there's roughly 12 hours of them, so there's bound to be something you connect with. They also have a nice interface that allows live visuals that show you any number of things. The sound designer, for example, actually shows himself manipulating the software he's using to create the audio, which is the kind of granular stuff you'd only expect to find in videos targeting audio producers. Jon Blow spends 10 minutes sketching out pages of algebra to explain the math behind player character acceleration on world 4's clouds where the player's movement affects time. Did I understand it? Absolutely not. But I pretended I did to impress my wife. She didn't give a ♥♥♥♥. She plays Disney's Dreamlight Valley. The 16 new puzzles, meanwhile, are all top-notch. They don't introduce any new mechanics, but they do use the old mechanics in ways that the original game didn't, and a few of the more clever puzzles make you feel like you're manipulating the systems in ways they weren't intended for. None of them are particularly difficult for people who understand the original game well, but they're fresh and fun and will take players at least a half hour to an hour to solve completely. I can nitpick the package a little bit. Most disappointing for me is the lack of a speed option on the commentaries. You can skip forward or backwards by 10 seconds, but you can only play at 1x speed - ironically, since this is Braid. I would have appreciated a way to plug my brain into the Matrix and absorb the audio faster, since many of the talks are delivered pretty slowly. I had to skip many of the nodes because they just weren't moving fast enough to hold my ADHD-addled modern brain's attention. My other nitpick is the visual design of the commentary world. It uses doors as links to other areas to listen to nodes, and oftentimes you get several links to the same area from different locations, and there are just doors.... everywhere. It looks cluttered and messy compared to the main game, and unnecessarily so. That's a shame, because some of that world's design is truly brilliant and better than anything in the original game. (For those in the know, my favorite was leading our courageous goomba friend across 6 different screens of traps.) Hopefully now that I've posted a glowing review, this game will sell millions of copies and Mr. Blow will fly out to my house to personally thank me. But I think it more likely that nobody will read this and Mr. Blow hates my guts for skipping some of the commentary nodes. I'm sorry Mr. Blow, I feel bad.