Problem Attic is an unwieldy mess of a game. It’s supposed to be. I get that. I can respect what we can take out of this game. We should take things out of this game.
But I think there’s a mutual hatred here.
This is entirely intentional, if we are to consider “The other side of Braid”, and while it’s nice to say the author is dead, it’s also nice to consider Liz Ryerson as a sort of auteur as well; sometimes, there really should be meaning ascribed to something that was meant to have meaning ascribed to it, setting aside proceduralism and play-centrism for a moment, and focusing on messages alone.
In order to unpack the “problem attic” nature of Braid, as coming from a viewpoint of privilege and only superficially serving to undermine patriarchal power structures in social inter-gender interactions, and therefore only perpetuating status quo, Ryerson explains the sort of need that arose to expose Braid for what she saw it as.
“She saw this as the real truth of Braid. The two games were mirrors of each other. The calm, quiet house in Braid is replaced by the highly abstract and disturbing hub rooms of Problem Attic. The smooth visuals and music of Braid is replaced by jagged, abstract solid-color forms that look like a half-remembered old Atari nightmare. It’s Braid problematized, put into a different light. It’s what Braid might look like without the filter and the videogamey shell.”
This mostly addresses the game visually, and its aesthetics on the whole. Regarding the visuals, the Red Room in particular stood out to me. The background reminds reminds me a lot of Earthbound - a particular, somewhat infamous moment you can see here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD3pEszoqsg - around 4:18 or so. (In addition, if you would like to see the Red Room specifically, or any of the stages, I found a bunch of snippets here - https://intermittentmechanism.blog/2017/04/09/a-practical-guide-to-problem-attic/ - when the game was being too unwieldy and I got stuck and googled a playthrough guide). The Red Room also had the kind of sound design that someone can only put in a game if they hate you. The Red Room hates you. There are gurgles, thunderbolts and lightning (very very frightening me), and when you leave the room, you are greeted with static sounds and other unpleasant noises abrasive to the ear. And you can’t even jump all the time! This marks the first place that the controls really start to hate you and not work with you.
Of course, the jarring aesthetics are only a part of the totality of Problem Attic as a game.
There are no clues, and when there are clues like in the Orange Room, they are completely devoid of meaning because we completely lack context.
It seems like a clear allegory can be made: the game is like a society that doesn’t want you in it. What should work doesn’t always work. Sometimes you fall, as in the Orange Room, and get hurt and are expected to reach the same heights, and you could randomly get assigned a much easier or more difficult task to complete at any point that you being the level. And arbitrarily, the game will take away your agency when you just need to jump. The lack of order and meaning allowed to a societal outsider, or someone who fulfills some type of “Other” function, seems like a fair interpretation of some kind of message that Ryerson is trying to push with this game.
And Problem Attic is also possibly the notation of the presence of an issue with, as well as the remedy for, Braid.
The wonkiness of the controls in Problem Attic, for instance, calls attention to itself, and this wonkiness is present throughout the game, not only noted at the end, which was something Ryerson took issue with in Braid. “It's as if the whole game is constructed around trying to find ways to exonerate Tim's wrongdoing,” Ryerson writes. “Look at all the stuff he's done, and how smart he is! It’s the most common argument made for successful artists and thinkers who have done bad things throughout history.”
If we consider Lisa Nakamura’s argument in “Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital”, we as players of Braid, then Problem Attic, are jumping from a game made to reflect an easier difficulty, to a game made to reflect something more difficult.
And both Nakamura and Ryerson find fault in typical gaming culture. Ryerson writes, regarding the trend of indie games after Braid, “The culture of independent game-making seemed to become more and more concerned with status and hero-worship and the legitimacy of massive commercial success than with being artists with things to say.” This reminds me of two things Nakamura brings up: the flood of “thousands of mostly-angry responses he received specifically from white male readers” that John Scalzi received only suggesting that straight white men have privilege; and the difficulty of non-(straight white men) to enter into the world of legitimacy, particularly in gaming culture.
So maybe the game doesn’t hate you, but it wants you to know what it’s like living in Hard Mode.
I’ll just leave you with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8zWlmxKZAs