Braid has a very familiar plot by videogame standards. What it does differently, though, is how it builds that narrative and creates something else entirely. You play as Tim, a small man that has tasked himself with saving a princess of an enchanted kingdom. Along the way, Tim will come across books that reveal more and more to the backstory when they are touched. What starts as an innocent rescue tale deftly evolves into something much more complicated. As Tim collects puzzle pieces throughout his quest, paintings are made with the pieces and hung on display in the main house. Each painting has a different meaning behind it and explains a bit of the level and story at the same time. As the story unravels, players are left with one of the most head-scratching yet inspiring endings in recent memory. Playing through until the end does not guarantee that you are done with it either. All of the levels start off with story books that tell a little prelude to the story and trying to fill in all the missing pieces of the story becomes a puzzle in itself.
The gameplay takes a basic idea and adds a unique mechanic to it. Braid is a basic platformer with one new addition; Time manipulation. Tim can rewind time whenever he feels with no limit. Prince of Perisa had a cool time mechanic as well, but it was limited in the amount of time that could be rewound. Braid literally lets you rewind all the way back to the beginning of the level (sometimes you need to for certain puzzles). The platforming is also where all of the puzzles take place. The only reward system in Braid is to collect the puzzle pieces, but because of where they are placed throughout the worlds, the trick is to figure out how to reach them. It starts off simple and slowly adds new mechanics to use in reaching the puzzle pieces.
The time mechanic in Braid takes the forefront for nearly every puzzle. Each of the five worlds has their own laws on how time works. There is a simple rewind mechanic at first, but then you are introduced to certain items that are not affected by time at all. There is a world where as you move forward so does time, but as you move backwards; time goes in reverse. One world uses a shadow version of Tim that is activated when you rewind, but then he continues the actions that were last set before the rewind. The last world has a time ring that slows everything around it to a crawl and can be placed anywhere on the level (provided you can reach it, of course). It may sound confusing at first, but all the tools are given one at a time, and Braid is paced well enough to the point that each ability is mastered in order to focus on the new ones.
