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zabriel_goss 24 hours ago [-]
The Humble Indie Bundle in 2012 included an all-star lineup: Bastion, Psychonauts, Super Meat Boy, Limbo. And even so, Braid was a standout inclusion. Reminded me of playing Portal for the first time in the way it made me rethink an entirely unconventional mechanic. Then, for the time mechanics to later be revealed as a major twist for the plot. Remarkable title!
zokier 23 hours ago [-]
That bundle also included Amnesia: The Dark Descent as additional star. Crazy times, it must have been one of the peak bundles in terms of quality
giancarlostoro 18 hours ago [-]
I dont think I ever powered through that one from beginning to end. 2012 was a golden year otherwise.
zabriel_goss 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, right! Another landmark title. It was a hard lineup to beat. _And_ I just recalled that it was pay-what-you-want!
zokier 14 hours ago [-]
And drm free with native linux ports
ccppurcell 20 hours ago [-]
I still listen to the bastion soundtrack from time to time.
V__ 21 hours ago [-]
That purchase really ruined my expectation of future bundles.
dt23 18 hours ago [-]
It really was a fantastic bundle
emil-lp 22 hours ago [-]
And FTL and Superhexagon and Osmosis.
dejected_frog 24 hours ago [-]
I adore Braid. I had a particular interpretation of this game, considering the game mechanics on each world Tim ventured in: the princess is not a woman, and the castle is not a place.
The game mechanics always spin around the notion of regret. Tim must undo his actions in order to overcome his challenges. In every stage this deals with the irreversibility of actions, so instead of fixing things, Tim strives to undo them.
In a few puzzles the solution involves killing yourself before fiddling with time. Perhaps Tim, at some point, contemplated suicide as a solution to his problems. This is rather dark, but what was he chasing after all? What is this princess he is obsessed with?
The princess in my view was the personification of an ideal of perfection. Tim was chasing a situation where he would be free of shame and regret, unburdened by responsibility. He looked for it in a variety of places: in a girlfriend, in marriage, in work, in his own past. But the princess is nowhere to be found. Whenever he reaches a castle, the princess is elsewhere.
The more he pursues this ideal, the more it eludes him. Like the girlfriend he wanted to protect, but she took his actions as suffocating - "you're going the wrong way and you're pulling me with you". Like the engineers who worked in the first atomic bomb, brilliant men that did their best, but in the end, they were all sons of bitches.
What Tim was chasing doesn't exist, like princesses in fairy tales. In his view, there's a knight in shiny armor that gets the princess, but never himself.
In that sense, the ending of the game is positive. He realizes that each step of his journey is a building block in his castle, and finally admits that while he needs many more blocks what he has is a good start.
His goal was always there. The perfection of life is the journey, not the destination.
collinmcnulty 23 hours ago [-]
The mechanics also work on a second level: they represent real physics concepts being studied around and leading up to the time of the Manhattan project. The reversibility of time, the effect of gravity on the spacetime continuum (the ring), time and space as part of the same fabric.
I also took the "final" text about a good start as an indication that the level of understanding of the mechanics required to get the stars to actually reach the princess (which is possible in the game) is quite advanced.
MetallicDragon 21 hours ago [-]
If you aren't aware, there's a secret ending if you get all the hidden stars. I'd recommend looking it up. I think it might change your interpretation of the game somewhat.
xoxxala 21 hours ago [-]
The newest puzzle game from Braid's designer Jonathan Blow releases today:
So is the OP being submitted to HN a submarine to advertise this release?
I hope so because it worked! I loved The Witness and this game looks promising. I had no idea it came out today.
alexashka 9 hours ago [-]
I've just played it for a couple of hours today - it is very good.
The graphics, the voice acting, the puzzles - top notch. It scratches that chess itch really, really nicely. The need to plan ahead a bit, seeing forced moves, moving different pieces to the right places.
bigstrat2003 20 hours ago [-]
Is that the game he's been making with Jai?
leecommamichael 20 hours ago [-]
Yes.
bigstrat2003 20 hours ago [-]
That's pretty cool, I will have to check it out. I know it doesn't make a difference what language it was written in, but I respect being able to complete a very ambitious project like that.
20 hours ago [-]
zetanor 1 days ago [-]
>It's old, I guess, which means either you've played it already or you haven't and never intend to.
Strange sentiment, which is well past the massification and gamesjournalismification of video games. By then, cover shooters were just a bad memory and most serious hobbyists had for a long time embraced both indies (Braid, in 2009) and older titles (Braid, in 2015, when the article was published).
bryanrasmussen 19 hours ago [-]
In English, and indeed in all human languages I am familiar with, it is common for people to make what seem to be absolute statements but are in fact understood to just be stating what they consider to be the most statistically likely state of things, disregarding outliers.
dfxm12 22 hours ago [-]
I think it's worth giving the author some benefit of the doubt that he knows his audience and is not speaking to the entire world, including future generations, all at once.
It's also obvious given the context of the very next sentence that he doesn't mean this as literally as you've interpreted.
RobRivera 23 hours ago [-]
Right?
When people are arrogant enough to claim predictive trends in something as complex as human psychology, I get doubt.
I enjoy the technical insights tho.
jdlshore 16 hours ago [-]
How much arrogance is needed to assume a rhetorical flourish is a deep personality flaw?
georgemcbay 22 hours ago [-]
> (Braid, in 2009)
Braid had already made a pretty big indie-game splash in 2008 on the Xbox 360 as part of Xbox Live Arcade though the PC release was in 2009.
I was lucky enough to have played it before the Xbox release back in June 2008 on PC as a beta tester (Jonathan Blow was on the quartertothree forums and recruited testers there in the run-up to the Xbox release, iirc).
Apparently I was using Windows Vista at the time because some of the bug reports I can see in old emails are about how Braid's DirectX fullscreen mode was broken in Vista.
NooneAtAll3 23 hours ago [-]
I don't understand what you're trying to say?
"serious hobbyists" would've already heard about Braid and be in the "played it already" category
zetanor 23 hours ago [-]
Even if you're putting in 10-20 hours a week, you still have to pick what you play. When Backloggery was more popular, it was quite common to see profiles with dozens or hundreds of "I want to play this when I have the time".
Asserting that you will not play a game ever if you haven't played it in the 5 years following its release is ludicrous.
NooneAtAll3 16 hours ago [-]
there's a reason why such "watch later"-style lists are so long
chance of any individual game on that list getting played by you approach zero
and that falls exactly into the second outlined category
either the game grabbed your interest on the first try, or it won't push you over the "interested, but not now" hump in every next encounter
ant6n 23 hours ago [-]
>It's old, I guess, which means either you've played it already or you haven't and never intend to.
It's in my Steam library. I'll get around to it eventually. Or perhaps my kids will do so before me.
salviati 1 days ago [-]
I just recommended lena [0], a short story from the same author, to a friend.
I really liked it. He liked it too. I recommend looking around on that website a bit.
I recently started playing through Braid for the first time. Fun to see this posted on the day Order of the Sinking Star comes out.
christophilus 22 hours ago [-]
I don't generally like Sokoban games, but the Order of the Sinking Star demo was a lot of fun.
mariusor 23 hours ago [-]
Probably not a coincidence. :)
Ariarule 21 hours ago [-]
Ha! It is actually _some_ funny serendipity. I just stumbled across this in my saved pile and thought it would be an interesting oldie to share, and did not realize that release was going to be today at all until I saw these comments here now.
It was actually submitted three days ago originally. I don't know if whoever second-chanced it had the timing with the new game in mind, so it may or may not be a complete coincidence that way.
spike021 22 hours ago [-]
I always wish more games were clever when using time travel as a mechanic. Prince of Persia did a pretty good job and I enjoyed one particular mission in Titanfall 2 that incorporated it.
teamonkey 22 hours ago [-]
Dishonored 2 also has an amazing mission based around a time travel mechanic (A Crack in the Slab).
There are various games that have a ‘time freeze’ mechanic, where you speed up or slow things down, which allows you to manipulate them in some way. Dead Space 3, Psychonauts 2, Dishonored again, at least one of the Prince of Persia sequels.
There are timeloop games where a core mechanic is to repeat the same scenario multiple times, gathering more information each time until you work out how to escape the loop (Outer Wilds, The Forgotten City, 12 Minutes).
Deathloop and its predecessor Prey: Mooncrash have a twist on that where you need to perform the loop multiple times, but the order you do things affects future runs.
And Eternal Threads is a game where you go back and forth along a timeline, viewing scenes and making small changes that affect how future scenes play out.
gucci-on-fleek 9 hours ago [-]
Portal Reloaded [0] is another really fun (but also really hard) game that has time travel as a core mechanic.
Braid is the video game that made me realize I like art. Not just the beautiful visuals, but the core concept of art. The way the mechanics represented both the internal mental state of the protagonist and the physics research being conducted was mind-blowing to me at the time.
JohnKemeny 1 days ago [-]
Beautifully written. Beautiful game. I never completed the game, but it has stuck with me since 2015.
And the "Inventing on Principle" video by him around timestamp 10:21 has a Braid-like demo.
chrisweekly 19 hours ago [-]
Yes! Thanks - that's what had cemented the association in my memory.
zoky 23 hours ago [-]
It seems like over the years Braid has gone through alternating periods of being praised as an absolute masterpiece and being derided as pretentious self-gratification by an arrogant and particularly insufferable developer.
In any case, anyone who like Braid should play Baba is You. Both games present the same sort of enjoyable mindscrew.
ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago [-]
I programmed alongside Blow back in the halcyon 1990s, and even briefly knew him in-person, and my soul swelled with admiration and respect for the guy’s skill, talent and wit. He was clearly a standout in the TinyMU* hackers gang, and it’s no surprise that he has made a name for himself after choosing such a thankless, competitive career. My own wouldn’t have been the same without guys like him.
JuniperMesos 20 hours ago [-]
Braid is a very good game that stands the test of time; Jon Blow is a kind of acerbic guy with some anti-progressive political opinions which makes him a figure a lot of people like to hate, and I think this drives (unprincipled) sentiment against Braid.
smrq 22 hours ago [-]
It can be both. Said developer can be arrogant and insufferable and also brilliant and insightful, with some deplorable opinions and some admirable ones. The world would be a better place if people as a whole were more able to embrace dialectical thinking.
+1 to Baba is You, fwiw. In my own humble opinion it's the best puzzle game ever made, full stop.
bigstrat2003 20 hours ago [-]
I think Braid is brilliant as a puzzle game. As a narrative, it's pretentious as all hell. I think smrq is right: it can be both.
latexr 24 hours ago [-]
> I actually severely dislike Mario and Mario games, so this game has that going for it as well.
The game mechanics always spin around the notion of regret. Tim must undo his actions in order to overcome his challenges. In every stage this deals with the irreversibility of actions, so instead of fixing things, Tim strives to undo them.
In a few puzzles the solution involves killing yourself before fiddling with time. Perhaps Tim, at some point, contemplated suicide as a solution to his problems. This is rather dark, but what was he chasing after all? What is this princess he is obsessed with?
The princess in my view was the personification of an ideal of perfection. Tim was chasing a situation where he would be free of shame and regret, unburdened by responsibility. He looked for it in a variety of places: in a girlfriend, in marriage, in work, in his own past. But the princess is nowhere to be found. Whenever he reaches a castle, the princess is elsewhere.
The more he pursues this ideal, the more it eludes him. Like the girlfriend he wanted to protect, but she took his actions as suffocating - "you're going the wrong way and you're pulling me with you". Like the engineers who worked in the first atomic bomb, brilliant men that did their best, but in the end, they were all sons of bitches.
What Tim was chasing doesn't exist, like princesses in fairy tales. In his view, there's a knight in shiny armor that gets the princess, but never himself.
In that sense, the ending of the game is positive. He realizes that each step of his journey is a building block in his castle, and finally admits that while he needs many more blocks what he has is a good start.
His goal was always there. The perfection of life is the journey, not the destination.
I also took the "final" text about a good start as an indication that the level of understanding of the mechanics required to get the stars to actually reach the princess (which is possible in the game) is quite advanced.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/499170/Order_of_the_Sinki...
I hope so because it worked! I loved The Witness and this game looks promising. I had no idea it came out today.
The graphics, the voice acting, the puzzles - top notch. It scratches that chess itch really, really nicely. The need to plan ahead a bit, seeing forced moves, moving different pieces to the right places.
Strange sentiment, which is well past the massification and gamesjournalismification of video games. By then, cover shooters were just a bad memory and most serious hobbyists had for a long time embraced both indies (Braid, in 2009) and older titles (Braid, in 2015, when the article was published).
It's also obvious given the context of the very next sentence that he doesn't mean this as literally as you've interpreted.
When people are arrogant enough to claim predictive trends in something as complex as human psychology, I get doubt.
I enjoy the technical insights tho.
Braid had already made a pretty big indie-game splash in 2008 on the Xbox 360 as part of Xbox Live Arcade though the PC release was in 2009.
I was lucky enough to have played it before the Xbox release back in June 2008 on PC as a beta tester (Jonathan Blow was on the quartertothree forums and recruited testers there in the run-up to the Xbox release, iirc).
Apparently I was using Windows Vista at the time because some of the bug reports I can see in old emails are about how Braid's DirectX fullscreen mode was broken in Vista.
"serious hobbyists" would've already heard about Braid and be in the "played it already" category
Asserting that you will not play a game ever if you haven't played it in the 5 years following its release is ludicrous.
chance of any individual game on that list getting played by you approach zero
and that falls exactly into the second outlined category
either the game grabbed your interest on the first try, or it won't push you over the "interested, but not now" hump in every next encounter
It's in my Steam library. I'll get around to it eventually. Or perhaps my kids will do so before me.
[0] https://qntm.org/lena
It was actually submitted three days ago originally. I don't know if whoever second-chanced it had the timing with the new game in mind, so it may or may not be a complete coincidence that way.
There are various games that have a ‘time freeze’ mechanic, where you speed up or slow things down, which allows you to manipulate them in some way. Dead Space 3, Psychonauts 2, Dishonored again, at least one of the Prince of Persia sequels.
There are timeloop games where a core mechanic is to repeat the same scenario multiple times, gathering more information each time until you work out how to escape the loop (Outer Wilds, The Forgotten City, 12 Minutes).
Deathloop and its predecessor Prey: Mooncrash have a twist on that where you need to perform the loop multiple times, but the order you do things affects future runs.
And Eternal Threads is a game where you go back and forth along a timeline, viewing scenes and making small changes that affect how future scenes play out.
[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1255980/Portal_Reloaded/
https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
In any case, anyone who like Braid should play Baba is You. Both games present the same sort of enjoyable mindscrew.
+1 to Baba is You, fwiw. In my own humble opinion it's the best puzzle game ever made, full stop.
Dorkly would like a word.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc26EKhZNyM