I started playing Braid last week and finished the game in six hours, also getting all the puzzle pieces, because, as many obsessive gamers, I want to finish everything and see all that I can experience in a game. I was really surprised by the visual atmosphere of the game.
I appreciated the references to Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong, as well as to many different mini games online. It was as if I rediscovered childhood through a portal of pop culture references. Nevertheless, I had more and more difficulties getting the different puzzle pieces and had to watch different Walkthroughs over and over to get them (Don't boo me, you did it too).
The gameplay revealed itself to be complex, with the time rewinding and the slowing ring. There is also a very specific and esthetic thing about the music and the visual effects of the game when one rewinds time. It is not only a game mechanic, but also an artistic effect.
But what interests us here is the story, right? In the beginning, one is the hero who comes to save the princess, even though while reading the different books I had this weird feeling that something was wrong. The more I read the less I understood, until I arrived at the final level to discover that the entire story was in reverse (I'm slow, okay). This is very interesting and not so much used in gaming plots. At the end, of course, there is this twist about the princess actually running away from the hero, who becomes the enemy of the story.
There it becomes interesting. To me, a game has to touch you emotionally and, in the best case, make you feel empathy for the characters of the game (I'm sure I'm not the only one who had goosebumps or tears going up while playing a game). But now I felt empathy for the bad guy. I was the stalker, the "nice guy", the creep. While it is interesting to make me feel like being a bad person because of my acts, I am not sure I would have liked to be duped that way. Of course, it made me think about harassment, and other important subjects linked with it. I'm still not sure of the objective of this game though, why would he do that except for the interesting twist?
And then I tried Problem-Attic. Now, did I tell you I was an obsessive gamer? I thought "one hour-ish long game at 11 PM is a good idea". It wasn't. It was long. Because I wanted to end the game myself. It starts rather abruptly with a pixelated game made out of weird and abstract drawings. It takes some time to understand the mechanics of the game and a non-gamer would without a doubt have a hard time there. The more I played, the more the decor and the Platforms became abstract, colorful, but also obstructive. I felt more and more imprisoned by my surroundings. The game play makes you feel the same, by making your character immovable, or invisible. This game is hard! By chance I fell on this YouTube video with a very good commentary of the game:
The feelings I had playing that game were diverse, but the most I got out of it was frustration. Sometimes, gamers talk to themselves while playing alone and I said aloud, that "this game makes me sick". And then I understood. I read the caption below stating that this game is about "prisons, real or imaginary". So being angry because of the constant blocking and changing of rules in your surroundings is actually the point of the game. This made me think about it as a "meta game" : Your character feels the same way as you while you play.
Finally, I compared both games and read Liz Ryerson's article that we had to read and saw this sentence:
https://boingboing.net/2015/07/30/the-other-side-of-braid.html
"(Talking about Braid) The way that it's centering Tim's story, and attempting to rationalize or justify his guilt without really delving much into its source." It is true that the game stays on the surface of some social and historical issues without really explaining or analyzing them, which makes it less deep and more chaotic (for example: the story around the Atomic bomb, I don't really know why he put it in the story in the first place.)
On the other hand, Problem Attic is very difficult to access. It is very complicated to understand everything she expresses through the game, because of the complexity and depth of her ideas. It is therefore the exact opposite of Braid, in many aspects.
So this made me think about the purpose of videogames:
With Braid, I had a cool story, reflection, and fun.
With Problem Attic, I had a cathartic experience that resulted in thinking about games.
Both are videogames that are completely different, so what would be the purpose(s) of a game?
Having fun, a reflection on life, learning, feeling, I don't know.
Maybe all of the above.
I agree with you that “the game stays on the surface of some social and historical issues without really explaining or analyzing them, which makes it less deep and more chaotic”. It can be frustrating and confusing that the designers are only presenting the issue to gamers, but never share their thoughts or judgment. We could never know what exactly Jon Blow wanted to express with the metaphor of “Princess” and its changing referents; nor would we fully empathize with Tim’s obsession with the “Princess”.
But as an afterthought of this game, I personally could appreciate this ambiguity in reference and not-so-specific representations in Braid. Rather than going through an entire piece of critique on the Manhattan Project, I would…
I think you just briefly touch on this, but I think a lot of us got confused and had to go through walkthroughs just to get a sliver of the way further through the game. I always try not to rely on reading walkthroughs or watching playthroughs, but after getting stuck and staying stuck and continuing to remain stuck on some of the levels or stages, I had to resort to asking for help. If we want to get really meta, we can even say that we're gaming the system of the game, since we could in theory otherwise have approached the game exclusively as its own thing, outside of context, to try to see what we could make of…
For the point made on how it is complicated to understand what Ryerson is implying, I think that the lack of understanding is the point! In my experience, the lack of explanation for the game and its strong emotion-evoking mechanics make it more of a powerful representation of what Ryerson experiences in her life. It seems to convey that a convoluted messages such as the one presented in Braid is the exact opposite of what the maker of this game wanted for this more feeling-focused art game (which means I agree with what you have said).