Idiot Productions

Hello guys, its been a while.

Things have been a little busy since the last post i made on here. I’ve moved house and moved jobs. To pretty big events and probably two things that shouldn’t be undertaken simultaneously, but I’m brave / stupid like that.

Because of all this chaos over the last month or so I’ve not had a great deal of time for anything else, although over the last few weeks I’ve found some more time for the xbox 360, more specifically a game called “Braid”.

For some years now games have been getting a bad rep from the press and parents about content, and what is subtle for children, with the likes for GTA grabbing headlines and getting daily mail readers knickers in a twist.  The gamers retort is usually “these are adult games, there not for kids” which is true, however braid is very different.

It’s not violent, or graphic, there isn’t any swearing or sex or nudity but it is the most adult game i’ve ever played. You play as Tim, you don’t really know a lot about him apart from he’s trying to “find his princess”. The princess is ambiguous, it might be a real person, it might not, its never really clear what is real and what isn’t. The game play is a puzzle game disguised as a platformer. The games main mechanic is that Tim can rewind and fast forward time. This changes from world to world. Some times time will move when he moves (i.e time moves right, time goes forward, he moves left, time is reversed) or he will have a ring that slows down time near to it, but everything else runs normally. Its around this idea that all the puzzles unfold, in the form of jigsaw pieces.  Some lull you into a false sense of strait forwardness whilst others will have you scratching your head for hours.

The genius of braid doesn’t lay in its graphics (although they are beautiful) or its game play (which is pitched perfectly between simplistic and pad crushingly annoying) but its the intelligence that under pins the whole package.  The story of Tim is told through text heavy dialogue before the start of each level. This is normally abstract and open to all kinds of interpretation. It is because of all these elements that Braid should be held up as the shining example of “Video Games as genuine form of Art”. No other game (that i can think of anyway) has every attempted something like this, something so ambiguous and cerebral  but so confident in its delivery, that you simply have to take notice of what it is doing. This game isn’t for “kids” this is for people want to experience something, similar to reading a good book, or watching you favorite film. After almost 30 years, this game brings us one step closer to accepting videogames as a valid form of media.