WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT THE END OF THE GAME
After a couple hours of playing Braid I said to myself, “I hate this game. There’s too many ways to fail.” And while I do think this is true for inexperienced gamers, like myself, I forced myself to consider this idea from an experienced gamer’s perspective, and in that sense the game is incredibly rewarding because there’s so many ways to win. That having been said, a lot of the puzzles in this game are extremely difficult and require you to manipulate time in such a precise way that the kinds of people that are able to achieve these rewards are such experienced gamers that the reward of solving a puzzle has lost its novice (and therefore, excitement). I think Blow is trying to reach these kinds of gamers in particular, the ones who solve puzzles just to get to the end of the game. I think further evidence for this can be seen in how many references Blow makes to popular games like Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong. Blow is trying to discourage the analytical process that many gamers go through in order to reach a predictable, vaguely-satisfying end.
I, being an inexperienced gamer and incredibly impatient (possibly the reason I’m so bad at video games), was forced to go online and look at several video walkthroughs (which Blow adamantly discourages) and the Wikipedia synopsis of the plot to get a better understanding of the game as a whole. Several walkthroughs revealed the narration-suggestive puzzle-portraits and the ambiguous end (or endings) of Tim’s search for the Princess. I found the puzzle portraits particularly interesting, as they all included some kind of beverage -implicitly alcoholic- and Tim’s emotional state within several different worlds (which seem to get progressively worse as they become less magical and more urban). Its somewhat ambiguous as to whether his surroundings or the beverages are connected to his emotional state, but I do think the consumption of alcohol is supposed to represent Tim’s development in age, and we can conclude from this that he was happier when he was younger. There are several other aspects of the game that suggest this idea, such as one of the alternate endings of the text at the epilogue in which the princess is somewhat of a maternal figure to Tim and she encourages him to remain a child by consistently walking by a candy store. I think, here, Blow is suggesting that video games are more fun for younger audiences because the experience of the game is rewarding and entertaining enough. Kids often don’t make it to the end of a video game, because its not their initial goal. As adults with more experience with the idea of video games, we can expect that a game has an ending that will give us more satisfaction than the experience of the game itself, and thus we are completely distracted by this goal.
There have been many reactions to Braid by experienced, adult gamers who are frustrated by the text-heavy yet morally ambiguous ending of the game. Their argument is best displayed in Braid: Why it Fails. I’m actually not sure if this reaction is intentionally ironic, because so many people (especially gamers) are adamantly opposed to text in general. Blow calls attention to this in the fact that he places so much dependence (creating incredibly difficult puzzles as the only way to reach the end) upon the text at the end. He almost sets up the audience to be disappointed by their expectations of extravagant graphics and a tangible purpose of the game.