The Maw: Gobble It Up

Knothole Island left me satisfied, but not really feeling full.   Like eating pancakes or Chinese food; it’s delicious, but you’re hungry fifteen minutes later.

The Maw, an Xbox Live Arcade title that dropped yesterday, is chock full of goodness so far.  I’ve only played the first two levels, but my impressions of it are that it could be the year’s biggest surprise hit.  It puts you in the role of an alien creature solving environmental puzzles using another alien creature, one that devours everything in sight and takes on the traits and abilities of some of the bizarre animals he gobbles up.  The characters are cutesy, the game play is intuitive, and it rewards you with the same sense of feel-good accomplishment that Braid dangled in front of you

Well, maybe not Braid.  Finishing a level in Braid felt like you just finished a really tough school assignment; finishing a level in The Maw is…well, like finishing a level in a video game.  You have a smile on your face and you want more.  What’s great about this game is that it strikes gold when it comes to difficulty  (or comes near, at least).  One of the statements that Jonahtan Blow was trying to make with Braid was that contemporary games string the player along; it was a throwback to the unwavering challenge of games of yore.  Blow had a point; how many times has it felt like we were spectators to what was happening on the screen, with minimal interaction?  How many times has the solution to a puzzle been dropped in our laps?

The Maw strikes a compromise between hand-holding and blank-slate problem solving.  The gamer is given just enough instruction to know how to manipulate the environment, but they are not given enough details so that they know what to do with the tools at hand; that part, you have to figure out on your own.  When you hit that “ah-HA” moment, it feels great.  There is no dialogue, but the characters (especially the titular canine-like thing) are endearing and fun.  Oh, and the production values are earth-shattering for a downloadable title.

I’ll be playing more of the game over the weekend, when I’m not playing with my new Blackberry, which I will be getting tonight.

It’s going to be a good weekend.

Braid: A Game with a Beautiful Mind (XBLA)

It’s rare that a small game distributed as downloadable content has so much hype leading up to its release, but Johnathan Blow’s Braid was one of this year’s most talked-about games.  Finally released as part of Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade promotion, this title more than lives up to its hype; and proves that video games can be just as much about emotion and self-exploration as they can be about concrete challenges and objectives.

The structure of the game is inherently simple: the player-character, Tim, is on a quest to find The Princess.  To reach her, he must traverse six different worlds populated with bizarre creatures.  In each world, there are puzzle pieces that Tim collects to assemble them, jigsaw style, and make a picture that helps to advance the story (and is necessary to unlock the final world).  Each level itself is a puzzle, with a unique design and solution based on logic and reason.  There is no tutorial mode and limited hints given; the player is encouraged to explore and discover on their own, to experiment and find solutions to the puzzles based on trial-and-error and good, old-fashioned critical thinking.

Tim has the power to rewind time, and has no limitation as to how much he can do so; this means that essentially, Tim never dies.  The player can simply rewind time back to a point before they made the critical error that resulted in player death.  While it’s easy to say that this eliminates all sense of challenge and removes any kind of penalty that the player must face for a mistimed jump, Braid does not pretend to be a side-scrolling action game with puzzle elements (as it may appear to be at first); it is through and through a puzzle game, and when the point of the game is to solve puzzles as opposed to reaching a set goal, it makes sense to not penalize the player with death.  Indeed, the enemies are not the obstacles themselves but merely another element of the puzzles one must solve, adding another layer of depth and complexity to the game play.

Speaking of depth and complexity, those are two things that this game is full of, both in game play and more abstract elements of the game.  Each puzzle is extremely well thought out, with a logical solution that may not be obvious at first, but after some experimentation and spending more time planning your approach than executing it, the solution to each puzzle presents itself.  Such mental work makes for a satisfying experience and a sense of accomplishment, something that is not always present with games that involve intense combat or more physically-based challenges.  Each world presents its own form of puzzles, becoming less and less like a traditional platformer and growing more unique as objects unaffected by Tim’s ability to rewind time and a constantly-changing flow of time is introduced.  The level and puzzle design is genius, and is punctuated with whimsical graphics and contemplative music.

What the game is really about, however, isn’t solving puzzles or killing monsters: its about discovery of self.  I have never seen a game delve so deeply into the metaphysical, not Ico or Shadow of the Colossus or the Metal Gear Solid series.  The game itself is a metaphor for happiness and forgiveness; the story even serves as a puzzle with numerous unanswered questions and a sprawling narrative (told by old-fashioned text) that goes off on tangents and asks big philosophical questions.  It’s not even clear if the events of the game are indeed happening.  Are we just experiencing Tim’s inner turmoil personified and made physical, so that he may more easily deal with it?  Is the game all just a dream?

Blow says he has no plans on doing a sequel, and that’s fine with me.  Braid is a beautiful experience that is just fine on its own, a near-perfect game with no glaring flaws that engages the player on a mental level not seen before; It moves gaming forward and pulls us right along with it.