In Another Castle

While playing Braid, I was struck first by the similarities between it and Legend of Zelda. In both games, your hero must rescue a princess by completing puzzles that can be extremely complex. You have to use keys to unlock doors and there are monsters there to get in your way. Braid, however, introduces a whole new complexity in the form of time manipulation. This aspect of the game makes it incredibly challenging. It was challenging to me, in any case. Like a lot of the interactive fiction we played before, such as Bronze, there are obstacles you have to pass in order to reveal more of the story lines. In Braid, it appears that you have to collect puzzle pieces, put the pieces together, and then a picture will be revealed to you and will show some sort of story element. Unfortunately, I myself have not been able to put an entire picture together yet, however, in some of the picture frames, I see an image of a man (sometimes more than one) and  a woman drinking wine in a field. These pictures appear to be related to the narrative told in the little green books before each adventure behind the doors.

What also strikes me is the fact that there are several narrative outside of the game narrative (the game narrative being the one in which you have to rescue a princess who always seems to be in another castle). Tim, the character in the game, also seems to correspond to Tim in his primary world. If we think of the game (the one we play in as Tim) as a secondary world, then the primary world would be TIm’s world in which his girlfriend and family exist. In this world, it seems he is struggling with issues such as stressful parents and an increasingly fraught relationship, but in the game he escapes into a world where only a princess exists. I found it difficult to separate these two worlds, however, because we are told that he tells his girlfriend that he must go and rescue the princess, and this obviously upsets her. Is Tim going off to play a game existing in a secondary world or is he going on a real adventure in his primary world? Did the princess exist in his world? Is Tim’s girlfriend just mad at him for playing a game because the princess do not really exist? I think that, like time in this game, it’s more than a little fuzzy.

I have played for a few hours, and I’ve only gotten through six worlds (I’m really trying to get all of the pieces before moving on), so there could be a lot more that I am missing out on that better players have already seen.