Braid: Anniversary Edition Review (castoridae)
1. The commentary is good, but the format it's presented in is annoying. I much prefer listening to it via the podcast. Primary reason is that here it's incredibly disorganized, it's spammed all over the levels, there's doors within doors that sometimes open up portals that sometimes open up portals that sometimes open up sequential doors... basically it's hard to understand what is even meant to be communicated and any train of thought is merged with the gameplay it's being presented alongside. I'm not sure what's important and what's not.
A lot of times it seemed quite repeatative and un-insightful, could have used an editor. Personally, I would like it if the commentary speed could be increased; my personal preference would be to listen at 2x speed. Another thing is that there's no dearth of "Jonathan Blow Opinions" available on the internet, although for what it's worth the commentary here is generally less ranty. Also, it's nice to hear from his inspirations and his artist, but it's not worth the format-related annoyance of the whole thing.
2. I played on the Steam Deck, and on that size of screen, the visual changes were more a side-grade than and up-grade. It sometimes seems like the artist just took the existing art and made a bunch of additional brush strokes over it. It might look sharper on a big screen, but it's not that significant of a format change (720->1080p) to justify such an increase in visual noise. On the other hand, the new art, cleaner animations, and significantly altered parts were mostly great.
3. The music and sound changes are mostly an upgrade, but I thought the Epilogue felt a lot more impactful when it was silent. Now there's some music over it, which changes the unique stark feeling of it.
4. The new levels were alright but seemed like they were not thoroughly tested. The way I solved one level felt like an exploit... I wasn't looking for a cheap solution, but the way I did it was the most obvious method (I later re-did it using the intended method). Maybe this kind of stuff will be patched, but given how obvious this one was, it doesn't seem like there was enough effort here. Also, the new levels suffer from the same issue that the commentary does - they're randomly placed in levels-within-levels-within-levels, and is not always telegraphed where to find them.
5. To be honest, I specifically wanted to see more x=time (blue) levels. That was the most mind-blowing thing in Braid, and seemed under-utilized in the original game, the exact sort of think this kind of expanded release would be perfect for. To be fair, the times it showed up here (such as the layout of the music commentary level) were really cool, but the times they showed up were so limited that they mostly just made me think of the missed potential. For example, I don't think there were any levels which had both the ring and the x=time... maybe this was a programming or design issue? It seems like it would have been an awesome combination. For that matter, nor were there any x=time + shadow levels. Missed potential.
There used to be one canonical version of Braid, now there's this version, and it isn't strictly an upgrade to me. There's a lot here, and it's not a low-effort cash grab... but as a complete package, it's not really worth it.