95 points | 3d ago | Discuss on Hacker News | Back to Radar
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 in my Steam library. I'll get around to it eventually. Or perhaps my kids will do so before me.
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.
"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.
It's also obvious given the context of the very next sentence that he doesn't mean this as literally as you've interpreted.
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.
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.
Dorkly would like a word.
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.
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.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/499170/Order_of_the_Sinki...
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JohnKemeny 7h ago on HN