Scenes from GDC

Entry #4, 10:15 a.m.: Remember Sammy Jenkis

As a game, Braid doesn't look like much. At first, it looks like a sort of dumpy take on Mario Brothers. The main character is a little stunted fellow who, as near as I can tell, is wearing a suit and tie. He roams around rudimentary dungeons that look like they belong on an NES. The monsters are lumpy frowny faces with bad hair. The main thing that seems to distinguish Braid from a no-budget Mario clone is a time rewind feature, but even that's nothing special these days. I mean, sheesh, even Full Auto has rewinding time.

The game is the creation of Jonathan Blow, a former writer for Game Developer magazine who has apparently rolled up his sleeves to actually get down to the business of game development rather than the business of merely writing about it like the rest of us. His creation does show a bit of promise. He explains that Braid isn't a platformer, but a puzzle game. The time rewinding is unlimited, so you don't have to do stuff like fill your dagger with sand. And there are some really nifty tricks with parallel time lines and objects that interact differently in different time frames. Too bad the guys who did Blinx didn't think of some of these.

But it's not until the very end of the presentation that I realize how special Braid actually is. Blow apologizes for spoiling the game as he shows us the last level. In it, your little stumpy hero finally catches up with the princess. She frees herself from the clutches of an ape who has abducted her. While showing us the end level, Blow plays like a sort of split screen co-op mode, like Cookies n' Cream with an AI princess on top and our suited hero below. She's running along the top of the screen, opening doors, lowering bridges over pits of spikes, and dropping platforms so he can jump higher. Finally he gets to the end of the level, where she has closed herself in her bedroom and you're on her balcony.

And then nothing happens.

Blow explains that at this point, there's nothing to do but rewind time, at which point you see the action going backwards. I'm not sure it would have been clear if Blow wasn't explaining it as he went, but the point is that you're seeing events unfold a bit differently. The princess is trying to drop platforms on you, she's raising bridges to stop you from crossing pits, and she's trying to close doors in front of you. It's a subtle recasting of everything you've just play. And when you get to the end, it's not an ape, but a knight who says he'll save her. She leaps into his arms, and he spirits her away. This was no abduction and you were no good guy. It turns out you were the antagonist all along.

It's a wonderful twist, and Blow confesses he didn't hit on it until he'd already been working on the game for a while. "Once you start playing with really far out ideas, once you start playing in that space, it's easy to find some really fertile ideas," he says. Hence Braid's place in a fascinating seminar on experimental game design.

And although it's one of the most memorable games I've seen at GDC, I have to wonder how viable it is to save a masterstroke like that until the very end. If I were playing Braid for fun, I likely wouldn't have gotten through all the levels to see this finale, which Blow confesses is the point of the game. It would have been a shame for me to miss it, but I think this points more to the nature of games than to my short attention span. In Memento, I'm okay not knowing for two hours who Sammy Jenkis is, because I know the payoff is on the way within a certain timeframe. But as a medium, games can't afford to hold back like this.