I just clocked Braid, and whilst the puzzles are fairly straight-forward, there are a couple of instances where there’s no reasonable way you could know that the game will react the way it does. This blog post should hopefully cover all the niggles that people will have when playing the game:
- You start off in World 2. World 1 is actually the cellar and you play it at the end. I don’t think that gives anything away, just don’t run around looking for World 1 at the beginning, you can’t play it.
- You can’t actually finish World 2 on the first pass. There will be exactly two puzzle pieces you can’t collect, and they’re on the level where the puzzle is displayed. Play all the levels in World 2, then play the level with the puzzle board on it again. Needless to say, the puzzle board and it’s configuration is important on that level. Every other world can be finished in one shot if you want (at least that’s how I did it).
- For some levels, you have to rewind all the way to when you started the level. That is to say, sometimes you’ll kill a monster you’re not meant to kill and you have to rewind to before you killed that monster. The cannons which generate monsters won’t always be there to create new monsters so you can try again without rewinding time.
- Sometimes you won’t even be able to finish a level if you do something like kill a monster you’re not meant to kill. That is, sometimes you’ll kill a monster with the time ignoring field thingie, and you weren’t meant to kill it, and rewinding won’t help, so you have to leave the level and come back.
- Towards the end of the game (World 6) you’ll feel like you’re actually breaking the game because of the timing of things. At least, that’s how I passed the levels. Maybe there’s an easier way, but when I did it the sound of the game actually broke for me a couple of times when solving the levels.
The only general advice here is: This is a puzzle game, not an action game. Sometimes you’ll have to do a series of moves with absolute perfection. Normally, you’d try, die and try again, but because you can rewind time you can do every little thing right, so it’s not that hard. However, sometimes, due to the way things are (rules of the particular world, or a particular monster being under a particular condition), you won’t be able to rewind time, so you will need to execute the move with some degree of skill, but the game won’t outright torture you Mario Brother’s style.
Hope this helps.