Braid, Anniversary Edition Review

What does Jonathan Blow know? More than you and me, I would guess. Listen to him talk, and you catch someone eager to haul us along on the hooks of his experience. He often caps his sentences with a tentative little “right?” An odd habit, it’s as if he’s checking in with you, after each line – a quick muscle-memory clack of Ctrl + S, insuring that we keep each layered thought in our memory as we go. In Braid, Anniversary Edition, a radiant reissue of his 2008 puzzle-platformer, Blow makes a compelling case for what he doesn’t know. “You don’t want to retreat back into what is known,” he says. “But that’s what almost everybody does all the time.”

Indeed, and that urge to retreat, presumably, is what will cause many to purchase this updated version of Braid. Not that it isn’t lavished with unknown sights. The artist on the original, David Hellman, has applied a fresh coat of his talent for colours that burn and writhe; he is one of the few painters of landscape to whose work you could pin the word “moving” as a statement of mere fact. I’m pleased to report that the sunlight in World 3 still looks as though it were oozing through honey and falling stickily on the forest behind. But there are new details to savour. The Anniversary Edition has been redrawn for resolutions beyond the previous limit of 720p, though, in a pleasing irony, this renovation can be undone. What better way to celebrate Braid, a game about the capability to rewind your shortfalls, than by clicking back and forth in time between now and then?

Nonetheless, no small part of the pleasure here is in the familiar. Braid centres on Tim, a young man in a dark blazer and red tie, with black shoes and a flopping comma of hair. There was always something bookish about him – hidebound and dusty, despite his ability to bend cause and effect – not least because each of the game’s six worlds was prefaced by a row of books. These would flip open as you passed: a clue that what you were about to play was at least as much about moving from left to right as it was about learning. I’ve often thought of Blow as an underrated maker of educational software; his games feel less like statements than like questions, entreaties that bid us to trace unbroken lines of inquiry across weird terrain, in the hope of unlocking a different outlook. You could hardly run a school on the Blow curriculum, unless you want your kids taking intense classes on self-deceit, the perils of nostalgia, and the toxifying effects of power.

Then again, maybe you could. In any case, Tim’s quest, primed with his looping gift, is to rescue a princess. Simple stuff, made famous by fairy tales and practically fossilised by Mario. However, to say that this isn’t the whole story is an understatement; when the flow of progress can be reversed, and something as basic as a beginning may, in fact, turn out to be the opposite, what hope is there for simple stuff? The premise comes pre-loaded with uncertainty. How many attempts had Tim already made before we showed up? We can’t even be sure of once upon a time.

Braid, Anniversary Edition doesn’t mess with the setup. We get unadulterated Braid, and your first point of order should be to play it straight through, drink in the artwork and the remastered sound (Martin Stig Andersen, the composer on Limbo, Control, and Inside has made ambient tracks for the game, which drip and hum alongside the old score) and then return, dreamily, to the start. Then you can go through it again while listening to the commentary. Of this there is over fifteen hours, with contributions from Blow, Hellman, Andersen, and a fleet of other experts. There is Frank Cifaldi, the founder of the Video Game History Foundation. There are game developers, including Marc ten Bosch, Brian Moriarty, and Casey Muratori. And academics, such as Cris Moore, resident faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and Hans Christian Kock, the Emeritus Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Copenhagen.

That may sound daunting, more than a little Tim-like in its scholastic air and its fussy mission to preserve. And it’s true: you are unlikely to see an Emeritus Professor of Rhetoric delivering a close textual analysis of, say, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz. (Everybody’s loss.) But any charges of worthiness or pretension are headed off by Blow. “It is very easy when talking about ‘Art’ with a capital A to crawl too far up your own asshole and be lost up there and never get out.” Indeed, many would consider that to be Blow’s last known location; he has a reputation for being staid and prickly, but you’ll find him here in high, self-deprecating spirits. As in the level entitled ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet,’ which, as Blow notes, was named for the Salman Rushdie novel. “It’s a very amateur thing to do,” he says, mocking his own nerdiness. “When you don’t have that many of your own ideas, it feels like ideas.”

Elsewhere, Blow cautions up-and-coming developers on the importance of tough conversations. “Because they’re uncomfortable and may cause drama,” he argues that many would sooner avoid them. “When it’s the right thing for the game, you should really do it.” The full commentary is sliced into puzzle pieces that float in each level; stand near them, press a button, and their insights slot into place around you. We also get annotations on the screen, pictures of book covers, crudely sketched level plans, and images from other games. Best of all are the newly whipped-up levels, thirty-nine in total. One of which, an alternative to ‘Leap of Faith,’ recalls the Atari game Adventure, from 1980, with its cut-off corridors and its answers lurking offscreen. Only, here the blind alleys are no longer a frustrating means to an end; when rewound, each blocked pathway is just another end to your means.

All of which is to say that there may be enough here to coax you to download GameMaker, suffuse yourself with flat whites, crank open your laptop, and get to work. Even if you don’t feel the creative urge, some of Blow’s perceptions and edicts rub off on you in a similar way to those of a staunch grammarian. To hear him talk about a key popping out of a defeated boss and declare “That’s bad game design” is, as much as anything else, funny. According to Blow, you need to see a locked door along with the key in question – around the monster’s neck, in this case – otherwise “you’re not really proceeding intentionally through the game.” Not that you need to start looking sniffily down at The Legend of Zelda from now on; these judgements are equally fun to disagree with as they are purely to bear in mind.

Commentaries like this should be standard-issue for the video game remaster, as common as they are in movies. Imagine if this approach were adopted for BioShock, for Resident Evil 4 or Metal Gear Solid. (With Kojima on board, fifteen hours wouldn’t even get you off that cargo dock.) If Braid is especially deserving of this treatment, that may be because it was always at least partially about itself, keen to coil inwards as much as press ahead. That it still harbours mysteries and has wisdom to impart, sixteen years on from its first release, is no surprise. Some games have the knack of feeling new forever. Typical of Braid, and of Jonathan Blow, to give us the answers and show us the way by getting us to go back.