Braid is a lovely cake layered with gameplay metaphors, to be metaphorical myself.
At first, this can be offputting. There's lots of raspberry sauce and icing and strawberry metaphors which are the first thing you notice, and they seem ... well, a little obvious. 'Sure, I see what it did there,' you say to yourself, 'But anyone can drop strawberry and raspberry sauce metaphors on top of a cake, so what's so great?'
At that point, charming though the taste is, it's hard not to accuse Braid of showy pretentiousness with no real flavour. However once you get through that layer you get to much more subtle, clever layering of metaphors, the kind of delicious ones that it takes a true chef to concoct - the type you can't just fake. Then, the final bite delivers a taste so finely crafted and so sweet that you can't help but applaud the whole effort, strawberries and all.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: Buy Braid, and eat... er, play it to completion.
5 comments:
Hi. Came here via the "That ending was so clever." thread on GameFAQs, a thread I honestly dreaded reading due to the usual level of intellect on display in a GameFAQs thread.
I was pleasantly surprised, however. It was a thread largely filled with intelligent discussion, and even the possibility of a troll in Evil_TGB turned out to be a genuinely confused good-faith user.
As I say, it was an intelligent thread with a lot of well-thought-out posts, of which yours stood out especially. I think I agree with pretty much everything you say (especially the early worry about forced metaphors and over-pretension, which was later dispersed), so well done.
I enjoyed reading this post, and will likely enjoy reading all prior ones, and all future ones also. Thanks for the read! :)
(P.S. you couldn't enable anonymous commenting, could you? I hate logging in/registering for things like this...)
Hi, thanks for the comment, good to know that a couple of people are finding their way here. Yeah - I know what you mean about the forums, though.
As for anonymous commenting, I was a little worried about just getting random spammish comments. What I'll do is enable them for now and see how it goes, but I might have to reverse that if it gets to be a problem.
Thanks!
Hopefully spam shouldn't be an issue, as you need to enter a captcha for each post (in this case, it's kudvovuw) whether you're logged in or not.
By all means, if spam does become an issue, feel free to disable it again, and I'll just use my LiveJournal username, which I don't exactly use for much else.
But anyway, I was right about the quality of writing. I read through a few more pieces this morning, and they're great. I've not played LostWinds (I don't own a credit card - I pay for most things in cash, and there's no way to buy credit in-store for either PSN or the Wii), but after your write-up, I'm seriously tempted to borrow a friend's credit card just for it.
So thanks again, and keep up the good work! :)
Thanks again -
Yeah, I noticed the captcha thing when I went to disable it, so I'm not too worried now.
Anyway, re: LostWinds, I stand by it being a very good game, but after getting some distance from it, I'll admit that it hasn't had as lasting an effect on me as other games. Don't get me wrong, I remember it fondly and enjoyed my time with it, but that time did feel slightly too short (unlike Braid and Portal which were fairly short but felt just right) and after playing Braid I can imagine that they could have been more creative with the puzzle mechanics. I could talk about Braid and Portal for hours with someone (I'm not sure why I mention those as comparison points, but it seems appropriate), but all I can really say about LostWinds now is 'it's fun and charming, you should play it!'
I offer those up as reasons that you might hesitate before getting the game - but nevertheless still recommend it as it is still nowhere near as mediocre as that Gamespot reviewer suggested.
(addendum to that - I just went back and looked at my comments about LostWinds, and I'm glad to say I stand by everything I said about it. It's just that for me it was more like a brief and memorable fling than a lasting relationship that becomes part of you. If that makes sense.)
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