Any gamer worth their salt (…) was probably playing Braid back when it first landed in 2008. It was followed up with a port to nearly everything else a year later. We know because we were playing Braid when it first landed on Windows all those years ago. If you missed out – we’re sorry. But not that sorry. See, Braid is making a comeback in the form of Braid, Anniversary Edition. Finally.
Get your Braid: Anniversary Edition on
Jonathan Blow’s masterpiece of a puzzle platformer was initially meant to get the remaster treatment over two years ago after an announcement for Anniversary Edition was made in 2020. It’s obviously missed that deadline but on Thursday, developer Thekla Inc. announced a new release date: 30 April 2024. It’s currently slated to hit the PS4, SP5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC (Mac and Linux will come “at a later date”), and surprisingly, Netflix. They do games now, you know.
Truth be told, we didn’t necessarily think that Braid needed all the special attention. It was already breathtaking fifteen years ago – thanks to its uniquely brilliant art style that’s never quite been recaptured by anyone else. That’s on top of the already inventive time-warping feature that made for such a compelling puzzler. Once we got a look at the trailer though, we had our minds changed.
It’s not just the “hand-repainted graphics” that caught our eye, though. There are a couple of quality-of-life changes to make the experience smoother, like the option to switch between the new graphics and the old. Expect “improved sound” and “new mixes and variants of the soundtrack,” too. As if that original soundtrack needed any work.
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Probably the biggest addition is the more than fifteen hours of developer commentary – featuring a ton of the game’s creators. Most prominent among them is original creator Jonathan Blow and Frank Cifaldi from the Video Game History Foundation. It all sounds rather extensive, according to a statement from Blow himself:
“You can follow particular threads of commentary spatially, through wormholes that go from level to level to see evolutions of particular concepts; the commentary has lots of markup so we can circle stuff on the screen, point arrows at whatever visual detail we are talking about, show diagrams, play back recordings of gameplay to show what happens if you try doing this or that in a particular level, and many other capabilities.”
Really, we’re just excited to give this one a go again. Which, again, will be doable from 30 April 2024 on the PS4, SP5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC, and Netflix. Mac and Linux release dates will be announced “at a later date.”