Braid Forum

SpaceInsomniac said:

"This is how I saw things:

Early on, Tim is very concerned with the mistake he made, and the story seems to suggest it is something that could not be undone. We learn about the princess, and how the mistake caused her removal from Tim's life. Near the end of the game, we a told of the ring, and how it made Tim feel unapproachable, how others felt distant, and how it made him feel like everything was moving in slow motion. This is the first major clue. Another comes in the form of the dino character telling Tim "The princess isn't here, are you sure she really exists?" or something like that.

When you enter the final level, you see the princess as running from a knight of some sort, and she helps you in your quest to reach the castle. This only happens until you reach the window, which is where you learn the truth. The fact is that the mistake Tim made didn't cause the princess to leave, the mistake made was Tim leaving her.

Now you're forced to see what happened in real time. No more rewinding, as this is the one mistake you can't undo. You got up one night and left as she was sleeping. She ran after you, and did everything she could to stop you. She finally gives up and her cries for help lead to her meeting a new man, and leaving you alone to your desire for another chance.

Tim left the princess because he's unhappy with mistakes and demands nothing less than perfection, but as the dino points out, such a flawless relationship doesn't exist. Tim was unhappy with her, but knowing he can't have her anymore, that gives her worth once again. The ring likely meant that Tim was either engaged to married to the princess. It's a classic tale of not wanting what you have until you can't have it anymore."

This.

oraknabo said:

"I missed this in my earlier post, but I don't see any reason the "princess" couldn't just be the wife Tim left and he is just an alcoholic runaway husband returning to stalk a wife that is now "in another castle" than the home they made together."

This. Notice that at least three of the first four puzzles involve tim and a beverage.

As far as the nuclear stuff, I think alot of that is just metaphor for the relationship stuff. Otherwise Its a second thread sometimes intertwined metaphorically to the relatiionship stuff.

Both the relationship, and the nuclear bomb represent things which once happen, can never be undone. The main theme of the game i took, is that you shouldnt be punished by your mistakes. In the gameplay, this is how it plays out, yet in the story its eventually shown that things just dont work that way.

"Tim left the princess because he's unhappy with mistakes and demands nothing less than perfection, but as the dino points out, such a flawless relationship doesn't exist."

I just finished Braid as well and did a Google search on the epilogue...this thread was the main link.

WOW.  I knew the game was amazing, but i never expected to see so many conversations about post-modern interpretations in a game forum.

So many great ideas, but there is a name in the credits that many folks are missing:  Italo Calvino.

An amazing writer who played with the very notions of time and space, the relationship between author/reader, etc.  I would recommend reading his novel IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, which tells the story of YOU the reader and your relationship to a novel that consistently changes tone, style, and more.  After seeing his name in the credits, I'm pretty convinced that Blow is a fan of this book--especially in that Tim can be viewed as a cypher for you, the player. 

Also, I don't know if it means anything, but another post-modern writer, Renaldo Arenas, in his book FAREWELL TO THE SEA, had major messages brought to the characters by dinosaurs... for what it is worth.  :)

DrRandle said:

"Now I remember why I hate interpretations... They take away what I wanted the game to represent and make it less interesting to me, personally. Here I took to heart as being a great game about a love-interest, something I can relate too, and has turned it into the A-Bomb, no doubt some gloating pretentious concept by some hippie types. I say that having visited the Braid blog. Those fellows are a dangerous level of liberal.

In any case... Thanks everyone for ruining the game for me! Your logic is too damned sense-making that it has to be about the A-Bomb and not about what I wanted it to be.

Sure I could still try and water the basic idea down but... Dude the lady EXPLODES.

Oh well. I suppose the truth is what I want, so the truth is what I get. I just hate how the truth tends to be less fun than I want it to be. You win, again, reality. You win again."

No offense, but I think that's really stupid to just surrender your own personal opinion about the story just because of some dumb argument on the internet.  I really don't think Braid was supposed to just have one true meaning.  Braid's story includes so much vagueness that one could make a strong argument for it representing a LOT of things. 

How's this for example:

The game takes place either in hell or purgatory.  Tim finds himself in an endless loop trying to fix the one mistake he can't ever take back.  This is his punishment.  The atom bomb talk refers to the end of the world.  The princess represents Jesus Christ.  The game is really about Tim's dissatisfaction with his faith, and his ultimate rejection of Christ before the rapture / apocalypse.

Now the Bible is a REALLY complex book with a lot of symbolism, and I'm sure I could find things in there to support this argument, but really it would just be carefully picked sections of the Bible that just happen to mirror carefully picked sections of Braid.  it wouldn't make them true. 

There is no single truth to the story of Braid, and that's one thing that makes it unique.

A friend of mine came over this past weekend and we played through the entire game again (and yet again, I collected all of the stars after bitching about how insanely difficult they would be to get) and he noticed a few things that I'd missed.

In the bedroom  of  the "princess" and near it:

1. Several of the items from the puzzles exist. The table with the wine bottle from World 2 is the easy one to see.
2. There are stuffed animal versions of the Goombas and the Dinosaurs.
3. There is a mailbox with specific numbers on it- has anyone looked them up? Meaningless numbers or another clue?

Something that I had completely missed, however, was the Aleph-one that is in the background of 4-7. This would seem to support my hypothesis of Tim traveling through infinite worlds and the multiple versions of his life that he sees.

Interestingly,  a Google search on Aleph and Braid produced an article describing the book "The Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges.
I suggest reading the whole plot summary, but here's the heart of why it seems to apply here:

http://www.novelguide.com/a/discover/ssfs_17/ssfs_17_00012.html

"An Aleph, he explains, "is one of the points in space that contains all other points," and he needs the Aleph to help him compose his poem. Because the Aleph is "the only place on earth where all places are—seen from every angle, each standing clear, without confusion or blending," its loss will mean an end to Daneri's poem."

Then later:
"Because he can no longer say for certain whether or not he did, indeed, see all things in Daneri's cellar, he is doubtful of all human memory, including that of the face of his beloved Beatriz."

This seems to fit in with the piecing together of human memory as well, and even the "forgetting the fact" part could apply. Not only does Tim speak of the "Princess" as having a Braid while she clearly does not, he never describes her in any specific terms whatsoever. Is this because he's seen her in an infinite number of incarnations?

By the way, the reason that "Aleph and Braid" in Google pulled that article up?

"The cognitive-science professor Douglas Hofstader's 1979 book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid examines the mathematical theories of Kurt Godel, the drawings of M. C. Escher, and the music of J. S. Bach to explore (like all of Borges's work) the nature of matter, the composition of the universe, and the workings of the human mind."

I just don't have time right now to follow all of these strands along, but wow. I really don't think these are false leads.


On a completely different note, I just saw the April Fools joke by David Hellman- what a great one:

http://www.davidhellman.net/blog/the-art-of-braid-part-5/

I hadn't heard anything about this game before before the demo, so I'm just getting caught up...

There is a 1up FM podcast where they talk to the creators of the game for 2 hours. The guy who did the paintings said that he made them with no intention of connecting them or adding anything to the meaning of the story. Also, the second guy said that he did not mean for the city to appear to be on fire. It was supposed to be more of a sunset on the city.

Illmatic said:

"There is a 1up FM podcast where they talk to the creators of the game for 2 hours. The guy who did the paintings said that he made them with no intention of connecting them or adding anything to the meaning of the story. Also, the second guy said that he did not mean for the city to appear to be on fire. It was supposed to be more of a sunset on the city."

I found it really dissapointing that the paintings were created without having anything to do with the game except "feeling right". Im not sure why, but to me that just doesnt sit right with what they are doing.

It just seems against what they are doing.

Like hey this is game is art, everything is here for a purpose to make you think!

Then they are all like, O yeh those pics, we just threw them in because they looked right.

It makes me worry that there is less depth to the whole thing than what they want you to think.

Like hey im being vague and ambigous, this is art!

Tangentially related, but I just wanted to post this:

Blow specifically stated that he wanted the game to focus more on thematic elements to put people in a certain mood, rather than having the whole thing be an allegory that has a specific "answer" waiting to be unearthed.  I'd say they pulled that off pretty well, and it really doesn't bother me in the slightest.

I like it better that way, because if there's 1 definitive answer to everything, that pretty much implies that people's interpretations of it could be wrong.  This way, it's just sort of an experience.

I have to say, as I first got into the game I was completely taken by its presentation.  I loved how there really was no opening menu, it just kind of through you in.  I loved the music, I was intrigued by the its name.  As I played through longer I found myself becoming even more and more hooked into what was going on.  By the second puzzle I kind of thought I might know what the story was unraveling to become.  I took it (as some have posted on this particular thread already) as a man who was in a relationship he deemed unhappy and that he was away often, because of work perhaps, and was almost always on the constant lookout for someone better...his "princess" if you will.  Continually being told by strange creatures that the princess was in another castle just further strengthened my belief that the story was about the never-ending chase of perfection (the kind we all want in the person we choose to spend our lives with).  On this note, the game really struck a chord with me.  And not to sound hokey in any way, but I would often stop during playing and think about my own life, as I was able to make parallels between what Tim was going through and what I have been experiencing in my own life.  In short, I never really felt this way about a game before...it was transcending the medium to become something much more grand in scope...

Then I came on here to read what others were thinking.  And I truly have been enjoying everything that everyone has had to say to this point.  I find it to be a fascinating thread, and again, one that I have not seen as it pertained to a video game before.  However, some things have come to bother me. 

1.  I sincerely hope that the main story of the game is not about Tim and the Manhattan Project.  While it is without question plausible, for me it would just ruin the emotional impact of the game.  I find it much easier to relate to lost loves and mistakes made in pursuit of that special someone than I can a scientist working on an atomic bomb to kill millions of people.  I just feel that story is overdone, and like I said, oddly enough just not as emotional.  Of course, I realize that perhaps not everyone has had experiences that would connect them to the way I thought the game was going from the beginning.

2.  I too am disturbed by the potential admittance that the paintings of the puzzles really have no connection to the story.  That would really be cheating the audience in my opinion.  If this is really the case, then I become worried (like stated in another post) that this game really is a bunch of loose ends that don't mean anything, not even to the creators.  That kind of narrative is not "art", its flat out lazy.  Basically, we have no story in mind so we'll include a bunch of vague images/texts that have nothing to do with one another and we'll just leave it up to the player to basically make up something.   I really, really hope that this is not the case....the creators have to have had something in mind....even if it is multiple meanings, they must be there...

....and finally, on a different note, I really am intrigued by the paintings of each puzzle and what they might mean individually...I'm going by memory here so bare with me

1.  I took the first puzzle to show Tim with the woman that he was now unappy with.  This was them at a younger stage in their relationship when things were more care free...I like the idea of how it seems like she can't get enough of him and is literally dragging him down to her while she is smiling.

2.  The second one is really odd to me...I took it as showing a holiday or party of some sort where Tim? is giving some sort of toast...but he looks older there, and obviously unhappy about something...maybe he's unhappy where his life has gone to that point.

3.  The third one, and I dont know why, but I immediately took it to be an ominous situation.  One in which either Tim is in the bed as a child, or it's Tim in the doorway looking upon a child.  This could be referencing some sort of abuse (sexual or physical), or could simply be just the moment after the light was turned off and goodnights were being exchanged.

4.  Someone, Tim perhaps, waiting at an airport for someone who has never shown?  Maybe a girl that was supposed to meet him but ended up not coming through?  This one too is so sad and melancholy to me...

5.  This one I really was at a loss.  To me it almost looks like its the 4th of July and Tim (again perhaps as a child) has set fire to a bunch of items in his room or elsewhere...kind of like an acting out for abuses that he has been through in his life?

I agree with someone else who said that its interesting how when you complete a puzzle there really is no sence of accomplishment, it just seems to further pile on the grim feelings...I'd be interested to see what others feel about each individual picture and how they might fit in....

I apologize for the length of this, its just that after reading all of the threads my mind really started filling up even faster! 

Just another note here. 
 
Having played and enjoyed the game I felt that it was trying to show different ways of approaching various puzzles. 
 
Simple example (with some small SPOILER in it but I think this thread is way past that now) you have a Key and a Magic Key and you are faced by a Door and a Magic Door. Habit and Order dictates that the Magic Key go with the Magic Door but in order to solve the puzzle you must change your approach and abandon old habits. 
 
However upon completion of the game it is revealed that in simple terms You / Tim are the 'badguy' and in your quest to solve the puzzle you have brought about distress to others. 
 
Personally the revelation that you are the antagonist, combined with the feeling that the game had challenged me to think in new directions, carried another message: 
 
'Just because there is a puzzle to be solved it doesnt mean it SHOULD be solved.' 
 
Does anyone else wish that the Princess had just been waiting in the first castle for Tim in a very real and non explodey sense so we could have a happy ending? :D

Well, I believe everyone should be entitled to enjoy things the way they want. If someone wants to discuss and attach a lot of theories over something (a game, a book, a movie) that is intentionally open-ended, I think they can. If someone wants, like you do, enjoy it some other way, just by appreciating it and leaving it like that, I think you should do that. 
If you like to see your movies dubbed instead of subtitled, or vice versa, you can. I don't think you're "ruining" the film by not seeing it the way I like too see them. I prefer them subtitled, by the way.
But this conversation should be on another topic.
 
I haven't read the whole topic yet. I am loving how you guys find things i would NEVER notice by myself (the flags' meaning, for example).
By the way, Something that struck me as powerful was the fact that the only time you can't rewind is after you meet/touch the princess.  That was really heartbreaking. The fact that after something that big is done, is it irreversibly done and can't be rewound.