On the recommendation of Chris Dahlen, by way of his excellent review in the A.V. Club (world’s greatest publication), I downloaded Braid, a 2-D platformer that allows the player to manipulate time in increasingly marvelous ways. Speaking of time, the game was released in August, and I am a stupid dumb jerk for going so long without playing it.

Braid’s basic trick is the rewind button, which allows your character, Tim, to travel back in time as far as you’d like. In fact, the game will not let you die. If your character gets hit by a monster or lands on some spikes, Braid freezes the action and demands that you rewind to a point in time before you mucked things up so badly. It reminds me very much of the tool-assisted speedrun process that I documented a few months ago. When you’re making a TAS, you use the emulator’s savestates to preserve your mistake-free progress. If you screw up, you back up to the previous savestate and try again. Braid has taken that dynamic and made it part of the game.

And that’s just the first few levels. As you progress through Braid, the time trickery gets more ornate. You encounter small parts of the world that exist in their own immune timeline, such that when you manipulate time, they stay right where they are. A shadow Tim appears, repeating any past actions that you erase with the rewind trick. It all sounds very sci-fi and mindblow-y, but the game introduces the new concepts carefully, so that you know what’s going on, and wordlessly, so that you feel like you figured it out yourself. Once you discern how time is warping in each environment, you have to apply your new skills to some fantastic puzzles. One puzzle, “Crossing the Gap,” tortured me for hours, but I refused to let myself peek at a walkthrough. Good thing, because that made the eureka moment that much better.

Maybe the game would have been good enough with the time gizmos and puzzles, but as Dahlen writes, “This isn’t a game about time, it’s about memories, and how they can be repeated and eventually rewritten.” Of course, memories are themselves about time—they are how we perceive time. Braid narrates itself with a short written prologue to each level that frames the platformer action in a larger narrative of distorted self-perception. This story culminates in a final level that runs forward, then backward, to the most startling ending to any game I have ever played. In a heartbreaking instant, it all makes sense—Dahlen again: “understanding this isn’t meant to make you feel like a hero, so much as a liar.”

A common tactic in game reviews is to judge a game’s value on the amount of time you can spend playing it. Here again, our technical conception of time fails us. In dollars-per-hour terms, Braid, at about 6 hours of play (give or take) may not be the greatest value at $15. I can’t remember any game since Ico that has moved me like Braid has, though. It would be better to judge this game by the time you spend thinking about it rather than the time you spend playing it. I’ll never forget Braid. Play it. (Also, read Dahlen’s review.)