The Music of Braid: the Game
A few weeks ago, Garry, Mark, Sanny and I stayed up until the obscenely wee hours of the morning to play this fantastic and ingenious game called Braid, on the XBox 360. The game is conceptually profound, created by indie game developer Jonathan Blow (no kidding!), with artwork by David Hellman. It follows a protagonist, Tim, through various puzzles that explore the flow of time, in different worlds in which time behaves according to different rules:
- Time and Forgiveness
- Time and Mystery
- Time and Place
- Time and Decision
- Hesitance
- World 1
By the way, Braid is quite possibly the most depressing game ever--at least the overarching themes. The look is a bit like Zelda or Super Mario Bros., but the mood and feel of the game are on a whole different plane, and I attribute that in part to its haunting, gorgeous soundtrack. It's a bit Celtic or new-age in style, but not super cheesy like a lot of new-age-y music is. And in the context of the game, it is simply otherworldly, mysterious, and multi-dimensional. And it's especially bemusing juxtaposed against the relative simplicity of the graphics, yet totally befitting the complexity of the gameplay.
Here are a couple of my favorite tracks, but the whole list of songs from the Braid soundtrack can be found here.
Maenam by Jami Sieber
Downstream by Shira Kammen
