Indie games are a rare treat for gamers today. Sometimes, when one of them comes along, they make such an indelible impression on the industry, you can only hope that larger companies learn from it. Braid landed on the Xbox Live MarketPlace recently and hopes to prove that gaming can be a viable storytelling and artistic medium.

What Braid does well is to call back nostalgic memories from the past with simple, yet familiar visuals. The hand-painted art style is so meticulous that it almost carries a 16-bit feel to the whole package. The art direction pays many tributes to the various inspirations that helped create Braid. There are giant monkey statues that shoot barrels down a tiered platform. There are castles in the background with flags that must be lowered to end the levels. There are even cute little dinosaurs that tell you that the princess is in another castle. The nostalgia is thick, but it works out for the best.

The background music that plays is an elegant blend of wind instruments and classical tunes. The sweet melodies and harmonies play off of the art style to create what Jonathan Blow (the creator) hopes people will see as interactive art. Every little facet of the audio has been thought through. Each enemy has a distinct sound and nearly everything else feels natural enough to not create any distraction from the puzzles.

Braid has a very familiar plot by videogame standards. What it does differently, though, is how it builds that narrative and creates something else entirely. You play as Tim, a small man that has tasked himself with saving a princess of an enchanted kingdom. Along the way, Tim will come across books that reveal more and more to the backstory when they are touched. What starts as an innocent rescue tale deftly evolves into something much more complicated. As Tim collects puzzle pieces throughout his quest, paintings are made with the pieces and hung on display in the main house. Each painting has a different meaning behind it and explains a bit of the level and story at the same time. As the story unravels, players are left with one of the most head-scratching yet inspiring endings in recent memory. Playing through until the end does not guarantee that you are done with it either. All of the levels start off with story books that tell a little prelude to the story and trying to fill in all the missing pieces of the story becomes a puzzle in itself.

The gameplay takes a basic idea and adds a unique mechanic to it. Braid is a basic platformer with one new addition; Time manipulation. Tim can rewind time whenever he feels with no limit. Prince of Perisa had a cool time mechanic as well, but it was limited in the amount of time that could be rewound. Braid literally lets you rewind all the way back to the beginning of the level (sometimes you need to for certain puzzles). The platforming is also where all of the puzzles take place. The only reward system in Braid is to collect the puzzle pieces, but because of where they are placed throughout the worlds, the trick is to figure out how to reach them. It starts off simple and slowly adds new mechanics to use in reaching the puzzle pieces.

The time mechanic in Braid takes the forefront for nearly every puzzle. Each of the five worlds has their own laws on how time works. There is a simple rewind mechanic at first, but then you are introduced to certain items that are not affected by time at all. There is a world where as you move forward so does time, but as you move backwards; time goes in reverse. One world uses a shadow version of Tim that is activated when you rewind, but then he continues the actions that were last set before the rewind. The last world has a time ring that slows everything around it to a crawl and can be placed anywhere on the level (provided you can reach it, of course). It may sound confusing at first, but all the tools are given one at a time, and Braid is paced well enough to the point that each ability is mastered in order to focus on the new ones.

As a puzzle game, Braid is expected to be hard. It isn't "hard" as much as it is "challenging." It may just seem like I am exchanging synonyms, but that distinction in semantics is important. Any game can be "hard" just by having enough enemies and traps, but Braid challenges players to discover new things. Since there is no way to die, Braid focuses on how to guide the player into the right solutions for its puzzles without being too unforgiving. The most difficult challenge is knowing when to quit.

Nearly all of the puzzles in Braid can be solved as soon as they are found. It doesn't seem that way at first, but each puzzle can be solved right away. The only problem is that it doesn't present itself in that way, but relies on the ability to solve certain puzzles in order to use those tricks later on. It is a little counterintuitive, especially at a nasty three plant puzzle (hint: brute force will cause headaches), but it rewards the player with a sense of accomplishment that no puzzle piece can give.

Braid isn't a very long game either. Running through all of the worlds will take around an hour and collecting every last puzzle piece could take another two. After beating the game, there is a time trial mode which has five levels and then the entire game. While many people will complain about how short it is, remember that Portal was short as well and it proved that a game need only be as long as it has to be to achieve its desired effect.

Braid is as simple a game as it can afford to be. You move Tim around with the left stick and jump with the (A) button. When the need arises for a bit of time reversal, you simply press (X). While rewinding, you can change the speed at which time unravels with (LB) and (RB). In the one world where Tim has an item to use, it is activated by pressing the (Y) button and that is all there is to Braid's control scheme.

Understanding each world's special rules on Time is essential to succeeding, but it is still possible to "accidentally" solve some of the puzzles too. If at any point, Braid feels too complicated, take a moment and look around the level. There are visual cues to solutions and controls everywhere. There are some signs that explain what needs to be done in certain areas, and there are hints in the enemy patterns to help with some of the puzzles, but the one part where there is no hint is what you take away from it.

Braid is not going to win everyone over. Some people already feel that it is a little pretentious for charging fifteen dollars on XBLA. The only thing that can be said is to play the game and decide for yourself. You may love it, you may hate it, but you cannot deny how unique it is. It is just a shame that Braid will probably go the same route as Okami and Zack and Wiki with critical acclaim, but with low sales numbers. Please play this game... or at least the demo for me.