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Original post by ChandlerT You don't really have to fill in story gaps, you just have to make sense of it until the end where it gives you the big clue (and the best level ever). Tough puzzles yes, but each puzzle uses game mechanics beautifully. Monotony, kind of, but in the end it's completelyyyyyyyy worth it.

Monotony is "worth it"? Monotony has no place in a well-designed game.

Are so many mainstream games so shockingly poor that "Braid" seems a truly groundbreaking slice of entertainment by comparison? I don't think so. This particular Emperor has no clothes. Here's why...

Braid has nice music (which J. Blow merely licensed, so that's just money); it has decent graphics, but "good graphics" and "good gameplay" aren't mutually exclusive anyway; it has a novel game mechanic, but that novelty soon wears off through the lack of direct reward mechanisms above and beyond the story-as-reward game design cliché. I felt like I was being forced to jump through pointless hoops simply in order to turn the pages of a rather mediocre storybook. If you're going to make the writing the reward, your rivals are professional authors and novelists, not other game designers. The writing quality bar was set a long, long time ago.

What do I get to learn? Where's my reward? What new things am I discovering? Once you realise every puzzle is centred on controlling time in some way, new variations on the same theme cease to be a reward in themselves.

If the key element of the gameplay was the puzzles, Mr. Blow should have had the courage of his convictions and focused on making solving the puzzles the point of the game. He should have made the puzzle game inherently rewarding, instead of relegating it to a mere chore.

"Braid" is an example of how a great potential design mechanic can be ruined by timid design choices.

it's good but does not do it for me as "World Of Goo" which is innovative and creative....all hail the Wii

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Original post by stimarco Monotony is "worth it"? Monotony has no place in a well-designed game.

World of Warcraft gets away with it to the tune of 11 million subscribers.

Monotony can actually be used as part of good design it makes the break from it all the more evident and will be the reward for the player. The break from monotony is just another part of the payoff mechanism. The longer you can maintain the monotony without boring the player the greater the payoff.

So many games actually have monotonous elements, and are not necessarily bad. In chess you spend the entire game trying to set up one move, checkmate; if you play by the true spirit of the game, surely that could be considered monotonous in some way; its still a great game, and has truely stood the test of time.

Chess is based on every changing strategy. By it's very definition it's not monotonous v.v

And WoW sucks. It bored me after 5 levels and I'm hard to bore.

Oh don't get me wrong i don't find it monotonous at all but that one move is the sole aim of the game and everything else is just build up; if you could get fools mate, quickest checkmate, all the time it would probably be monotonous :p. Maybe it wasn't the best example but the same could be said about WoW by a fan.

I suppose monotony is maybe a little too subjective to be clearly define. But I think its an essential part of a lot of games and is in no way indictive of bad design unless it becomes overwhelmingly so.

I don't have an Xbox, so I can't play it.

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Original post by Guthur Oh don't get me wrong i don't find it monotonous at all but that one move is the sole aim of the game and everything else is just build up; if you could get fools mate, quickest checkmate, all the time it would probably be monotonous :p. Maybe it wasn't the best example but the same could be said about WoW by a fan. I suppose monotony is maybe a little too subjective to be clearly define. But I think its an essential part of a lot of games and is in no way indictive of bad design unless it becomes overwhelmingly so.

That implies I like chess. I don't.

I also like games that are very much like WoW.

WoW is just boring and chess is not monotonous.

I would dare say that Gravitron 2 (PC, $5) is the epitome of game design. Braid is simply the epitome of 2D art.

hhh that just highlights the problem in that its a subjective thing, some people would find chess monotonous.

I found WoW overly repetitive, which just accentuated the monotony

Monotonous (dictionary.com)
1. lacking in variety; tediously unvarying: the monotonous flat scenery.
2. characterizing a sound continuing on one note.
3. having very little inflection; limited to a narrow pitch range

If a player had limited ability in determining abstract strategies then chess would indeed fulfill 1 and probably 3 as they would most likely move every piece individual rather than part of an overall strategy, hence it would quickly become limited and each game would probably vary very little. But as you pointed out a player with understanding will recognised the differing advantages of each piece and how they can fit together into an overall strategy to acheive the goal of check mate.

By the way boring is just another word for monotonous :)

[Edited by - Guthur on January 4, 2009 7:30:04 AM]

Braid was fun, and I appreciated the implicit commentary on 2D platformers. In other words, it is as if in the early levels the game is saying "The only reason Super Mario Bros was hard is because you had to make this stupid jump, or that you had to avoid all the enemies or you had to start that world COMPLETELY OVER." And I agree.

I didn't find it monotonous. I finished it in one afternoon. There was one particular puzzle that was really hard to solve, but I think that was more due to the twitchiness of the control of that ONE puzzle than the puzzle itself. I understood the mechanic of the puzzle but executing it was very hard.

Now, the writing. I agree with the poster who said the writing was deliberately vague and with purposely open holes. Very true. And it does lessen the accomplishment. The story is a vague reference to history, but also perhaps a vague reference to the main character's own life in being part of that history. You could argue that the story was designed to intentionally leave interpretation to you.

Is that good? Only in a highbrow sense. Generally I think it is a gap in the storytelling. But let me say this. I haven't played a 2D platformer that at least made some point... maybe ever. It certainly is a far cry from Super Mario Bros.

The final level was exhilarating, not in the challenge, but in the quality design so when you reach what I can only call "the reveal", I at least marveled in the quality of the setup.

It's worth playing, even if it only takes you an afternoon. I mean, I could spend $15 going to a movie and grabbing some dinner, and it would cost more than that.