Singular artistic vision
If all Jonathan Blow ever publishes is this game, he has still succeeded in making his mark on the industry. I have played platformers that made vague stabs at updating the genre, but they fell short in comparison to Braid; the presentation, the music, and the mechanics all speak volumes of the thought and effort that went into this title. Braid is the first modern 2d platformer.
Braid begins simply. It offers no menus or cheesy logos, or anything to even indicate you are already playing except a bit of text telling you the left stick is move. Your avatar is silhouetted against a painterly burning city on the first screen and a starry skied cul-de-sac on the next. A melancholy story of loss greets you at the outset of level 2, the first you are given access to. As it is sometimes in life, the 'villain' of Braid appears to be your own past mistakes.
The metaphorical plot of the game is that by reliving your mistake, you will be able to move on. A poignant analog for the time-based gameplay, and an origin story that hearkens back to another masterpiece: Planescape: Torment. Unlike even the great Torment, Braid offers us something exceedingly rare and perhaps even singular in games--an artistic statement that is inseparable from the game itself.
There is a strong undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in video games. Every day we are presented with images, stories, and gameplay mechanics that insult our intelligence. Games can be abusive and insulting on many levels, and we endure it because there is something there we still enjoy long after outgrowing the rest. We are regularly asked to husk games, carefully separating the juicy parts from the inedible garbage.
Because of this, games are a guilty pleasure for many of us. When we play them in front of others we feel tempted to qualify our approval. Braid requires no qualifications, never underestimates us, and constantly provides us with new challenges rather than empty filler content. We should, like we did with Portal, hold it up to the light and show everyone what games can be.