Time as a Narrative: Braid Untangled

When I first started playing Braid, I had an idea of how the game mechanics would work. It was a puzzle platformer with twist: instead of dying and having a limited amount of lives, you could simply rewind time and undo your actions. While this mechanic allowed players to continually reset levels and try different strategies, the real appeal of Braid comes from its story line, which also uses time in order to convey a narrative. The protagonist, Tim is searching for an unrequited love who left him. Throughout the worlds, you read books that lay out his backstory, and how their relationship fell apart. However, after viewing the ending of Braid and seeing the game play in reverse, we discover that Tim is in fact the one chasing the Princess as she continually tries to get away from him. I thought that it might be useful to look at the backstory from this lens - reading the books (in the World 2 clouds) in reverse. While it didn't reveal any hidden information, the new story told captivated me more than the original - primarily because of the new perspective of everything initially being fine and dandy and then descending into the chaos of Tim's quest - to rescue the Princess. In this way (either intentionally or unintentionally), Blow is able to move past the linearity of time to tell a narrative. You can read the story line from left to right, as normal, or start to think about the story in fragments that can be read from right to left. Like the ending of the game, this reading of the story allows the player to see a new perspective, which allows them to further immerse themselves in it. The final cloud level also is able to capture the dichotomy of perspectives - Tim's when he is on screen, or that of the princess when he is hiding behind a statue and is no longer in the foreground. Blow's use of perspectives with time and foreground focuses add to the narrative of the game, which is one of the main reasons why players kept trying to find derive meaning and understand the game from the creator's perspective. This makes Braid walk the line between game art and art game, since aspects of both are conveyed through not only the story given, but also how the player chooses to interact with that narrative.