Braid Message Board

Wow.

I did not expect to stumble across a game of Four Sided Fantasy‘s clear caliber and inventiveness while lazily sipping coffee on a random mid-week evening/morning (depending on your timezone), nor did I expect to be interested in another puzzle-platformer in approximately the next ever again. But here I am. This one heralds from the level designer of student-made mindbender Perspective, and it’s about folding space, and goodness. Just go watch the trailer. It’s below.

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Bootleg games are nothing new, but most of the time they're either brazen clones or inept scams. This one falls somewhere in between, and as a result has a strange charm all of its own.Read more...

If nothing else, The Witness—the next title from Braid creator Jonathan Blow—is going to be meticulously detailed. After offering insight about the footsteps, a new development blog post talks about the trees going into the puzzle-exploration game.

For all the articles and interviews about The Witness, people have been wondering what the experience of playing the next game from the creator of Braid would look like. You can get a glimpse of The Witness in action in an interview on the official PlayStation Blog. In addition to the gameplay snippets, Jonathan Blow talks about his upcoming first-person open-world exploration game and discusses the benefits of being an independent game-maker. Every once in a while, it's nice to hear someone involved with video games say that making a profit isn't the most important priority.

In a fascinating article written by Wired, a couple of independent games developers spoke out about their experiences working with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

Jonathan Blow, the independent game developer behind Braid, revealed his new game The Witness at Sony's PlayStation 4 reveal. And while it's not a PlayStation 4 exclusive, it will be on Sony's platform first. Speaking with Edge Online, Blow notes that the new, still-unknown Xbox 360 successor is "not strictly about games," leading him to PlayStation 4 as a result.

Apparently “PlayStation 4 will be the only console that The Witness is on” when it first launches. Which is a very un-clever way of saying, “and also, it’ll be on PC,” but whatever. We get an actual, factual trailer of Braid creator Jonathan Blow’s latest out of the deal, so Sony’s inhumanly lengthy, droning “pppfffthrp” of a commercial‘s no skin off my nose. But I digress. The Witness, if you’ll remember, is set on an open-world island full of laser puzzles. It also looks exceedingly attractive. I’m not sure what to think about the puzzles themselves, but it’s tough to get a bead on these things when you’re not, you know, solving them. Anyway, trailer ahoy!

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#thewitness You take millions of footsteps in video games and the sound accompanying those movements is probably something that becomes white noise after a while. There's a good chance that won't happen in The Witness, though. More »

Julian Benson asked if we’d like to see Braid transcribed into musical notation, and vice versa. We said yes. Here’s how he got on.

Gaming is one of the few media without an instructional notation. The other arts have tools to relate concepts into symbols that can be digested at a glance, allowing great detail to be condensed into a conventionalised code. Musicians use musical notation, movie makers – story boards, writers – short hand, linguists – phonetics, and so on. If musicians were stuck with the same methods we use – strategy guides, walkthroughs, and videos – each composition would be an interminably long tome that lost all immediacy and comprehension – “Pluck the G-string on the third fret, then immediately after the A-string on the fourth fret, pause, play the G string again”. The other arts developed their own notation systems, yet we haven’t. Why?(more…)

The long-awaited documentary about the creators of Super Meat Boy, Braid and Fez is out now and available for download from its own site, iTunes or Steam. Here’s Mr Brendy C to tell you a few things about it before you spend your digi-groats on this much-feted film. Warning: could be said to include spoilers, if a documentary about some guys making videogames can be said to be spoilable.

Indie Game: The Movie is in the unusual position of being able to say it was using Kickstarter “before it was cool, man.” So it’s already vulnerable to the kind of folk who shout ‘hipster!’ at every twenty-something in a pair of milk-bottle glasses. Of course, our readers know better than that. As children, most of you will have undoubtedly been told the tale of The Boy Who Cried Hipster, the moral of the story being ‘don’t lie about there being a dickhead around, in case a real dickhead should actually show up one day to subtly insult your decor, or eat you.’ Being so well brought-up, I believe we can look at Indie Game: The Movie somewhat more fairly and see it for what it actually is: a good documentary which occasionally lapses into artificiality.(more…)

Grumpypants time: I worry slightly that focusing on Super Meat Boy, Fez and Braid risks painting an extremely narrow picture of indie gaming, and as such Indie Game The Movie might be suffering from some of the same echo chamber issues that some felt this year’s IGF did. But hell, let’s celebrate that it has successfully brought an image of videogaming that isn’t guns/boobs/guns/boobs/guns/boobs/guns/boobs into another medium and be happy about it.

After what feels like years of promotion, the movie is finally out. But not in cinemas! No, right on your monitor. You can grab it from its own site, from iTunes or, a little later today, the Steams. I hear mixed reports, but I shall be in all likelihood watching it tomorrow and can report back more usefully then. Oh, and check back on RPS in a few hours to read young whippersnapper Brendan Caldwell telling you just wot he thinks of this here film.

I’ve got a mighty fine idea. Why not point a camera at a bunch of creative sorts and let them speak their minds? That’s how Indie Game: The Movie was made, although I suspect editing the hundreds of hours of footage into something watchable, fascinating and entertaining was the hard part. Perhaps that’s why Swirsky and Pajot’s film won World Cinema Documentary Editing Award at Sundance 2012. Everyone will be able to watch it soon, or at least anyone near an internet connection, as it will be available for download on June 12th. What’s most intriguing about this is that one of the download services carrying the film will be Steam. This leads to the obvious questions: will every film in the world soon be available on Steam and will Episode Three be a cinemovie?

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#thewitness When we last saw the upcoming game from Jonathan Blow this summer, The Witness already looked like an intriguing experience. The way that Blow's game design interwove puzzles and environmental cues created a hypnotic level of immersion where you had to pay attention to a gameworld like never before. More »

#speakuponkotaku In today's spiteful edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Dracosummoner wonders if you have to love the game's creators in order to love the game. More »

#thewitness Jonathan Blow is a video game developer whose critics call pretentious and grouchy. More »

There's still a ton of unanswered questions surrounding Braid, the more philosophical of which will likely remain unanswered for a long, long time. However, if you're perplexed by the technical side of the time-bending indie darling, check out a video of Jonathan Blow's Game City panel below.

#screengrab Indie hit puzzle-platformer Braid has come to retail in Russia, thanks to MumboJumbo and Russobit-M/GFI, giving us the box art giggles with its delightfully inappropriate and mischievous take on Tim and gang. Thanks, Maritan! More »

#jonathanblow Some gamers who loved Jonathan Blow's Braid were perplexed when early footage of his team's next game, The Witness, debuted on Kotaku last month. To those alarmed or confused, Blow offers some encouraging words. More »

#pax Unattended, unlabeled, unmarked... the new game from the small team led by Braid creator Jonathon Blow was stealthily present at the Penny Arcade Expo this weekend. The adventurous — and those who recognized Blow standing off in the shadows — got a delightful surprise. More »

Casual PC game retailer MumboJumbo games recently announced a partnership with Number None to distribute puzzle-platformer Braid to retailers. No specific date has been given for the game's arrival at retail, but we do know it'll have a $19.99 MSRP and will be available at "Walmart, Target, Best Buy, GameStop, Amazon.com, Fry's, and a number of regional retailers as well." A representative from MumboJumbo also told us that the game has shipped and should be on retailer shelves "by February 1." We're not exactly sure how a $20 release of Braid with a cardboard box is going to compete with the (at very least) less tactile and often cheaper digital equivalent, but we suppose it can't help to get the game into more markets. Now Target and Walmart game shoppers can be just as confused by its story! Oh we're just joshin' -- we kid because we love, ya know. Gallery: Braid [Via CasualGaming.biz]

To hold you in time.

If I could turn back time, I'd give it all to you.

The time-bending journey finally arrives on the PlayStation 3.

Relearn the concepts of time.

The art game sensation arrives on PlayStation.

The mind-bending platformer is finally ready to hit the PS3.

It only took 15 months, but Braid has finally found its way to the PlayStation Network. Jonathan Blow's critically acclaimed puzzle-platformer may be late, but its time-shifting gameplay mechanics certainly make the old adage "better late than never" all the more apropos. The Hothead-developed port will be available on the North American PlayStation Store on November 12th, "with a European version to be announced shortly thereafter." The PSN version of Braid will cost $14.99, the same price as its XBLA equivalent.

Hothead Games Bringing Beloved Indie Game to New Platform