Braid: A Story of Screen shots and demos

Site, after site...after site praises the glory of Braid aside some of the worst screens of a game I've ever seen. The colors looked muddled, the game play generic. Now before you flip on me saying that I have committed the crimes of a thought criminal, I would like to remind you that many, many games in this world receive an inadequate amount of hype when their actual game play is taken into consideration.

My biggest example is that beautiful death Assassin's Creed, that was so bright you could fry something on your television the poor unit was working so hard, and the game play was really not standing up to the ridiculously bright world you run around in. I remember screens being something I could not really determine, the world too bright, too 'detailed' in a sense. I knew that Altaire had a fantastic outfit, but beyond this it is not really something digestible.

For Braid the reaction was similar, at least on the screen shots side of it all. Any screen I saw of Braid was a mixture of color to the point I could barely find the character, and the backgrounds had a weird transition appearance to them. There was something off about it in my mind. I could not see the brilliance, and I doubted any picture would give me the evidence I needed to combat the waves of praise the game seemed to create.

Demos are very useful tools. They can show you how well an idea on paper transitions, especially if you are like most of the gaming public that live vicariously through journalists. Braid has a demo on live, so I bit.

A demo can give you the entire atmosphere of the game, something a picture and a fanatic description cannot. The first thing I realized was the beautiful transitioning of color, something that left the screens looking muddled. The color and its usage is something that had my jaw hitting the floor, my eyes lost in the viciously bright backgrounds of world 2 that somehow seemed less harsh than Assassin's Creed.

Though I praise demos for their uses, I am forever hesitant about their accuracy in delivering a good feel for a game. Too Human bombarded me with the overall complexity the game seems to be designed around and was not particularly enjoyable. I was not left with a desire to buy Too Human after watching poorly animated expressions and faces with curious color pallets. As if in an effort to completely dispel Too Human, the demo of Braid trapped me in its world, in its blinding brightness and the excellence of the music. From presentation alone I was nearly completely sold on the game.

I love Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for the sands rewind feature. When Braid based its game play on the concept of being able to rewind through the puzzle levels I was dancing for joy. And the near unlimited rewind is a wonderful function and makes the puzzle-solving gameplay much, much, much more practical and enjoyable. My only problem is how the rewind function distorts the beautiful music.

Braid is brilliant, adorable, intelligent and excellent for its price. Considering that like games with its level of complexity and craft would cost much more, I do not understand the complaints at the price.

For those who are doing similar things with Braid, as in saying the screens are horrible and the game play looks childish, give the demo a shot. It is ridiculous now, looking back at all the negative feedback the game is raking in from the uninformed. I was not going to write a thing here until I was sure of what I thought of the game.

Now I know it is certainly worth its price, if for nothing more than the precious little dinosaur that talks to you.