Braid, Anniversary Edition Review - Rewinding To Move Forward (2024)

In the 15 years since its release, Braid has loomed large over the indie game space. As one of the first small games to enjoy major success in the Xbox Live Arcade era, it earned a reputation as the Sex, Lies, and Videotape of video games, helping to usher in a new era for the medium in the same way that classic drama fired the starting gun for ‘90s cinema’s independent explosion.

Taking Mario To The Fourth Dimension

At first glance, Braid — a short 2D platformer you can finish in an afternoon — is a strange game to cast such a long shadow. You run left to right, jump on monsters that are basically Goombas with the serial numbers filed off, and end each level finding out that your Princess is in another castle. So far, so Jump Up, Super Star.

While it looks like 2D Mario, it plays like 4D Mario. Braid’s primary mechanic, and the innovation that made it a breakout indie hit when breakout indie hits weren’t really a thing yet, was its rewind mechanic. Any action you perform can be undone by holding a button; press it long enough and Tim, the suit-wearing protagonist who looks like Mario if he majored in philosophy, will zip back to the very beginning of the level. But this rewind feature isn’t used solely to undo mistakes, the way it would be in, say, a Digital Eclipse remaster aiming to make an old game more forgiving. In Braid, rewind is the engine behind every puzzle.

And those puzzles are, by and large, fantastic. The game is split up into five major worlds, and each has a unique spin on the rewind ability. In one, time moves forward when you’re walking to the right and backward when you’re walking to the left. In another, rewinding creates a double of your character that repeats the actions you performed before the rewind. Every world offers a new take on this mechanic, introducing new ideas at a quick clip and pushing you to learn new skills that test the limits of your understanding. There were moments when I was stumped but, whenever I consulted a guide, I came away admiring the game's mechanics more. “Oh, that’s really cool,” more than, “How would anyone ever figure that out!”

The story is a bit of a miss. Until the game’s final moments, the narrative is conveyed exclusively through books on pedestals. You walk up to them, read a bit of self-consciously esoteric text about Tim and his girlfriend and the Princess, and then move on to the level where the real fun begins. It’s easy to ignore, but it makes the game feel bifurcated between brilliant mechanics and a mediocre story.

All of this was true of the original game, and it’s true here, too. Anniversary Edition does add a lot, but maybe not in the ways you would expect. Graphically, the remaster feels more like a step sideways than a step up; less like an improvement, and more like a slightly different take on the original art style. I played through the vast majority of the game with the graphical update enabled because it adds detail. But there were also multiple times when I had to toggle back and forth repeatedly before I could tell which one was which. There’s a new soundtrack, too, and I felt similarly ambivalent about the update.

Innovating In Behind-The-Scenes Features

The real meat of Anniversary Edition’s new features has nothing to do with the original game. No, the selling point is a new commentary, which adds over a dozen hours of discussion about every aspect of the game and a bunch of new levels to explore as you uncover it. At time of writing, I’ve only listened to about four hours of it, but I’m deeply impressed with how thorough it is. There are dedicated areas for Design, Programming, Visuals, and Sound & Music, so you can jump between levels while sticking to a topic. But you can also just turn commentary on for your playthrough and progress through the base game normally, while encountering the commentary nodes as you go. In the hub from which you enter all these areas, there’s an empty frame like the ones you fill in with puzzle pieces throughout the game, which suggests that there are new pieces to find and assemble by playing the levels that house the commentary.

Braid Original (Left) And Anniversary Edition (Right)

The crown jewel of the commentary is the alternate takes on levels it opens up. In one area, Blow was describing how he would have designed the level now, and a portal appeared, allowing me to go play that version of the level right now. In another, Blow discussed the iteration that led to a puzzle being implemented in the game, and a portal materialized to take me to a level where I could sample all three versions of the puzzle. This is far more work than one could reasonably expect a developer to put into a rerelease of an old game. It’s a dream for big Braid fans, but also a huge resource for any student of game development.

Ironically, Blow’s heavy involvement is the thing that may make Anniversary Edition less attractive for some players. Though he’s been an important figure in the indie space for two decades, Blow has increasingly voiced some pretty alienating opinions on social media. He’s stated that he thinks COVID was made in a lab, that he plans to boycott conferences who disinvite speakers for their opinions, calling it cancel culture, and once tweeted that women were naturally less interested in programming than men. He’s a smart guy in his area of expertise, as evidenced by the insight on offer in the commentaries and the brilliant puzzles that have made Braid stand the rest of time. But that just makes the areas where he’s wrong stick out all the more. Braid, Anniversary Edition isn’t a case where I can recommend that you “separate the art from the artist” because the things that make it so worthwhile stem from Blow’s involvement. And, in fairness, in the hours of commentary I’ve listened to, I haven’t heard anything that detracted from my experience.

Ultimately, if you like Braid, it’s hard to imagine a better, more thorough, more lovingly crafted reissue of the original game. Though I completed the main game fairly quickly, I’ll be uncovering the secrets of the commentary levels for many more hours to come, and learning a ton more about the medium I love in the process.

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4.0/5

Braid

Reviewed on PS5.

Pros

• Brilliant puzzles.
• Incredibly thorough commentary that hides secrets of its own.

Cons

• The story is underwhelming and poorly integrated with the gameplay.
• Your mileage may vary on creator Jonathan Blow, and he is a huge presence here.