This game is absolutely amazing. I downloaded it last night and while the price might be a little steep (1200 points), the game is 100% worth the tag. Everything from the art style to the music makes this game amazing. Now add in these crazy ass puzzles that have my head spinning like the exorcist and you got a winning formula. Any fans of 2D platformers are going to fall in love with Braid and I mean love Braid.

Here is a description of the game from Xbox.com:
Braid is a puzzle-platformer, drawn in a painterly style, where the player manipulates the flow of time in strange and unusual ways. From a house in the city, journey to a series of worlds and solve puzzles to rescue an abducted princess. In each world, you have a different power to affect the way time behaves, and it is time's strangeness that creates the puzzles. The time behaviors include: the ability to rewind, objects that are immune to being rewound, time that is tied to space, parallel realities, time dilation, and perhaps more. Braid treats your time and attention as precious; there is no filler in this game. Every puzzle shows you something new and interesting about the game world.

* Forgiving yet challenging gameplay: Braid is a 2-D platform game where you can never die and never lose. Despite this, Braid is challenging—but the challenge is about solving puzzles, rather than forcing you to replay tricky jumps.
* Rich puzzle environment: Travel through a series of worlds searching for puzzle pieces, then solving puzzles by manipulating time: rewinding, creating parallel universes, setting up pockets of dilated time. The gameplay feels fresh and new; the puzzles are meant to inspire new ways of thinking.
* Aesthetic design: A painterly art style and lush, organic soundtrack complement the unique gameplay.
* Nonlinear story: A nonlinear fiction links the various worlds and provides real-world metaphors for your time manipulations; in turn, your time manipulations are projections of the real-world themes into playful "what-if" universes where consequences can be explored.
* Nonlinear gameplay: The game doesn't force you to solve puzzles in order to proceed. If you can't figure something out, just play onward and return to that puzzle later.

Now I'm off to find that Princess!

...wait what?

Is it possible to get all the puzzle pieces in the first world of the trial? I couldn't seem to figure out a way to get to some of the hard to jump to places.

Yeah it's possible to get all the puzzle pieces in the trial. The two puzzles pieces on the last stage of world 2 are ingenious...

This is not a spoiler, but a hint:


Stuck on this one puzzle piece on stage 3, where there is a cannon shooting the troll looking things and the puzzle piece is underneath the cannon which is hovered over a spike pit. This one is driving me crazy...

Really loving this game!!!

Yep, read a review on 1up and didn't even bother with the demo, I just downloaded the whole thing. Very impressive. I like how it makes you think outside the box. And by outside the box, I mean the box is on earth, and you are on Mars. This one will definetly get some serious play time on the XBLA rotation. I'm really impressed by some of the XBLA titles that are rolling out these days. Probably will have this sucker finished up right around the time Bionic Commando Rearmed heads our way.

pretty much this

i havent had a chance to play this one yet but I am downloading it right now. so excited!

WTF?! I'm on "The Hunt" in World 4 and I get to one monster left to kill, but I can't get to him unless I walk backwards and then everything reappears!
I'm starting to break, any tips please?

Also stuck on "Fickle Companion" in World 4 as well...

So far I've 100% World 2, 3, and 5, but World 4 is giving me all kinds of trouble. Love this game!

Yeah, the hunt on 4 is giving me troubles as well. If I get it, I'll let you know.

This game reminds me of a mix between Prince of Persia Sands of Time and I Wanna Be The Guy.

Lol, no way!!! "I Wanna Be The Guy" shouldn't even be legal to play. It should be banned from the internet.

Yeah, you can thank Beeslo for introducing me to that game and then drawing a comparison between it and Braid. But you see where I'm coming from though, right? Braid is just a tad bit easier. Well, tad isn't quite the right word.

I think Beeslo owes me ten bucks because I hammer fisted my keyboard and had to buy a new one thanks to IWBTG.

Haha, yeah I know where you're coming from.

I never took IWBTG too seriously, because if I did I would be out of a keyboard as well.

Also, did you get to the "Fickle Companion" stage in World 4 yet? This stage is seriously making me feel extremely dumb at the moment. Actually World 4 in general is just making me feel incredibly dumb.

I bailed on the game a couple hours back. I can't play that game for more then about an hour at a time because most of that time I'm rewinding the same part over and over until I figure out how to correct the mistake.

That's kind've like me, I'm always rewinding. Sometimes it gets so crazy that I just exit the door in the beginning and re-enter so that everything resets.

I think a co-op mode for Braid would be awesome. The possibilities would be insane.

I just 100% the game (well, I didn't find any of the hidden stuff) yesterday. It was short (obviously, because I just BOUGHT the game yesterday as well), but sweet. Well worth the purchase. A lot of the puzzles were quite memorable, making me have to think hard. I really like this sort of minimalistic style the puzzles have. Instead of giving you a bunch of abilities and you have to test them all on everything, going from point a to b to c to d etc, you only have a couple and you only need a few steps to succeed. Not only does it make the puzzle more challenging, but it also prevents the player from trying to guess her way through the puzzles.

The twist at the end was great too. I won't spoil it, but it was kind of shocking.

Woot, finally 100% Braid today and wow was that last stage epic. However, I still don't understand the ending / epilogue what so ever. Did I miss something?

Question about World 1:

Yeah my bf ran into that on Penny Arcade comics and now we know what it is, looks pretty intense, I'mma have to check it out

With those 1200 points, I would have prefered just buying an xbox original game. Microsoft just seems to be testing how high they can get people to buy arcade games at. Which to be honest, is extremely annoying. They used to be 800 at the highest, and now arcade games are becoming the price of a xbox original? I dislike that, because of how braid sold, castle crashers will probably end up being at the very least 1200. I'll end up waiting till it is 800 points.

Yeah, ew points. I dont like the whole ratio they have going on

You know, I was having a problem with this myself. What finally convinced me to buy it was rather then think of it as the price of a XO, I thought of it as the same price I used to pay for really good shareware games back in the day. $10 -$15. When I thought of it that way, it didn't seem so bad.

I know what you mean though, this is just the beginning. I'm just glad Capcom said and is sticking with the $10 offering for Bionic Commando Rearmed.

I found Braid to be worth every penny in my opinion. Every puzzle in the game was well thought out and very rewarding once figured it out. Add that with the beautiful graphics and soundtrack and you'll realize that the game is worth the 1200 MS if you're into that type of game.

There are plenty of over priced games on XBLA, but Braid is not one of them. However, that's only my opinion.

Heck, the last stage of the game is just amazing in itself, pure cleverness. It was such a great twist that after finally realizing it, I felt like all those puzzles weren't shit compared to what I just found out.