Braid for Mac

Even without the gameplay, I could just sit there and relax to the music and just stare at the screen. The graphics are so beautiful they could hang in a picture. I love the ability to manipulate time, but unfortunately some of the secrets are impossible to figure out on your own without resorting to going online. When getting the first star, how would anyone know without help, that you're supposed to sit on the cloud bridge screen for 2 hours? This is one of my favorite games of all time and I'm 41 years old.

This game has some great things in its favor. It is extremely creative, graphically beautiful and fun to play with some very unique puzzles to solve. The ability to rewind time eliminates the frustration of many games, where you have to replay from the beginning of a level when you fail. It also provides for some of the best puzzles I've ever seen! That said, it suffers from some very serious problems. First and foremost, it's way too short. I'm disappointed to find that the $15 I spent yesterday only lasted me until today. And the replay value is very limited... once you've solved the puzzles, the only thing to do is to run the levels faster. That sort of thing - trying over and over to get your timing just exactly perfect - is something I find to be mind-numbingly boring and frustrating rather than fun. Some of the puzzles were also a bit more difficult than they could have been with some basic instructions... yet the only documentation consisted of what the keys were for movement and jumping. There's a lot of experimentation involved with learning about what you can and can't do. I won't post spoilers, but I will say that each level can be solved before going to the next... for a long time, I thought maybe I needed to gain some power or item and come back to solve some of them, and that is not the case. More annoyingly, I find my $15 wasted even worse because I can't get to the ending. I'm right there, on the last level, and not far from the end according to walkthroughs... but because the ending requires such perfectly precise timing from the very beginning of the level, I can't manage to finish it after over an hour of trying. Even with the ability to rewind time, so that I can try over and over at the spot I'm stuck without having to replay from the beginning of the level every time I fail, I still can't do it. Since it has reached the point where trying is not even remotely fun, I've given up. I guess I'll just have to live without seeing the end. That also won't be much of a hardship, as the storytelling is surreal and confusing to the point of not being interesting. So missing the end of a story I don't really get isn't the end of the world. So, long story short... the puzzles and gameplay are extremely creative and can be very fun, but this game also has some pretty big frustrations.

This game reboots the platformer genre, keeping the setting and controls familiar while adding really interesting brain teasers, the likes of which I've never seen, especially not in a platform game. The resulting chimera is full of temporary frustrations that, when solved, provide an enormously gratifying sense of accomplishment. Play the demo. There's a moment in world 2 where you realize just how awesome the game is, how well-implemented, intricate, and awe-inspiring the game design is. For anyone who thinks that gameplay is king, this is worth a look. It was definitely worth my $15.

Absolutely brilliant game from an independent developer! I own the version for Xbox, but this is really some of the most fun I've ever had with a game. I would almost hesitate to even call it that; it's more like an interactive work of art! Easy to pick up and very rewarding to finish.

I played this game on the Xbox when it was released, and it was one of my favorite games of 2008. Gorgeous and original art direction, and clever puzzles. It will keep you busy for about 5-10 hours.