Why Braid Sucks, Pt. II: The ‘A’ Button

Building off my rant from yesterday:

One of the single most frustrating parts of Braid‘s design is in its opening moments: teaching players the game controls. Tutorials are notoriously tough to do well in games, and designer Jonathan Blow had noble intentions of letting the player learn the controls on their own instead of flashing “PRESS ‘A’ TO JUMP” across the screen. Instead, he did this:


A box near a ledge with a picture of the Xbox 360’s ‘A’ button on it. The player can’t jump over this little ledge without pressing ‘A’, so it forces them to learn that ‘A’, in fact, makes the character jump.

But this helpful box is completely unnecessary. It’s the ‘A’ button–the most cardinal of all video game controls. Even the original Nintendo Entertainment System featured the ‘A’ button to jump in most of its games. Braid

About Jake Shapiro

Music nerd, hockey nerd, film major from Washington, D.C.
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