Booting up Braid, Anniversary Edition was, dare I say it, a bit like going back in time. Its opening moments — from the flickering, fiery logo to the foreboding opening track — instantly transported me back to 2008. Nostalgia can be a powerful drug but also a sobering one. As I flew through the game’s opening levels on autopilot (a side effect of having played through the original a dozen or so times), I began to realize just how much time had passed since Braid made its mark on the world. While it might be standard operating procedure at this point, Braid was one of the first few games that showcased the viability of independent, digital indie projects, ushering in a wave of new classics such as Bastion and Super Meat Boy.

Much like how the original made us rethink the fundamentals of distribution and project scope, Braid, Anniversary Edition tries to do the same with what we’ve come to expect from remasters and re-releases. While it’s become commonplace to take a last-get game, dial up the graphics settings, add some “new” content salvaged from the cutting room floor, and charge full price for it, Braid, Anniversary Edition isn’t content with simply rehashing the basics. In fact, this might be one of the most fully-fledged re-releases we’ve seen in years — more on that in a little bit.

For those who aren’t familiar with the original release, here’s a bit of a refresher. Braid is a puzzle platformer of sorts, though, depending on who you ask, trying to neatly fit it into a single box is a bit of a fool’s errand. When I first played it, back when I was a teenager and hadn’t forayed into the world of games media and game dev, I’d have described it as a neat little indie game that marries traditional platforming with time manipulation. More than 15 years later, I could probably spend hours waxing poetic, but I’d also sum it up as a brilliant deconstruction of Super Mario Bros. that, above all, respects the player’s time and intelligence.

There’s also the matter of the game’s “story” (though I use that term rather loosely). A cursory Google Search will yield countless essays and critiques about Braid’s “meaning” and “metaphors,” and to be fair, a lot of these analyses do hold water. I won’t do a deep dive into what Braid means to me, largely because it’s one of those games that will mean something different to each person. To me, it’s a reflection on the circular nature of the choices we make, the consequences of those choices, and how our regrets and (oft-warped) memories shape our future choices. On the other hand, some cultural luminaries, such as the venerable Soulja Boy, have completely different interpretations of developer Jonathan Blow’s timeless classic.

Regardless of what Braid might mean (or does mean) to you, my recommendation is simple: if you have yet to give it a go for yourself, Braid, Anniversary Edition is the best jumping-off point for you to dive in. For those who’ve already embarked on their own journey of bending time and saving princesses, I still strongly recommend giving this one a go, but for wholly different reasons.

The massive jump in resolution, new environmental effects and animations, as well as the remixed sound, would be enough of a reason for most to shell out for a remaster, but Braid, Anniversary Edition takes things even further. After trying to shoehorn in commentary nodes into the game’s existing levels, Blow went in the complete opposite direction, adding 40 or so brand new levels that were designed in tandem with the detailed behind-the-scenes commentary he and his team were looking to add.

These new pack-ins are available from the get-go, and it’s hard to overstate just how in-depth the developer insights are. While some are relatively straightforward and shed light on the origins of the game and its mechanics, others take the form of technical deep dives, digging into bitmap compression and unpacking, the physics, and math that govern the game’s rules and systems, and so much more.

Admittedly, some of these topics won’t be as easily digestible by all players, but the dozen or so hours of developer commentary to dig through is well worth the price of admission, and there’s a satisfying interplay as you play through a level that reflects the commentary you’re actively listening to. Admittedly, the way it’s all organized and split up can be a bit confusing to navigate, and a simplified checklist would have gone a long way in making sure you don’t miss any of it.

Putting aside that minor issue, the most divisive thing about Braid, Anniversary Edition might be how little of the core package has changed. Aside from the visual facelift, the core mechanics and gameplay are just as they were back in 2008, and that more or less dictates who this remaster is for. Those who were turned off by Braid’s strictly linear progression and uncompromising puzzles are unlikely to have a change of heart all these years later. For longtime fans or those who have yet to experience this timeless classic for themselves, Braid, Anniversary Edition is a must-play.

Disclosure: Review copy was provided by Thekla.

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The critical darling Braid originally launched 2008 on Xbox Live Arcade, then hit PSN in 2009. It counts among the first digital-only titles to truly showcase the strength of indie projects. The puzzle-platformer remains a high watermark for the industry in general, too. Thankfully, it will mount a return sometime in early 2021 on the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 as Braid, Anniversary Edition. This release from Thekla, Inc. will come packed with a bevy of graphical enhancements, environmental revisions, and developer commentary.

Braid, Anniversary Edition’s announcement came during the most recent State of Play stream, courtesy of the following trailer:

To reinvigorate the title, original artist David Hellman has “hand-repainted” Braid’s gorgeous world, with the environment looking like a painting in motion. On top of that, many of the environments are undergoing revisions to make them appear even more unique. The team at Thekla also added improved animations for fluidity of movement, as well as enhanced the audio and music, all of which you can see demonstrated in comparison to the original in the trailer above.

In terms of sound, it seems the crew is taking things up a notch for the Anniversary Edition. Martin Stig Andersen (Inside, Control) and Hans Christian Kock (Max: The Curse of Brotherhood) are helming sound design, studio President Jonathan Blow says in a PlayStation Blog post. Players will be able to toggle back and forth between the Anniversary Edition and the classic 2008 edition at any time to see and hear the differences.

According to Blow, the aforementioned developer commentary will span many hours. Fans will gain insight into Braid’s “programming, art, design, video game history, and many other things, using in-game hyperlink portals so you can jump between levels to follow the various conceptual threads.” In the PS Blog post, Blow notes the developer commentary will be “a lot;” though, he can’t divulge how long it may last just yet. As of now, the content for it is still being written and recorded. He says it dives into the game in “deeper detail than you’d get from blog postings, or gaming news sites, or the usual kind of in-game commentary,” with the player having full control over how deeply they explore specific aspects and mechanics.

Braid, Anniversary Edition launches in early 2021 for the PS4 and PS5.

[Source: PlayStation Blog]

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Jonathan Blow, the game designer behind indie gems Braid and The Witness, very rarely speaks publicly. His latest comment, brief as it may be, is likely to spark a bit of interest, however. A recent live stream on Twitch saw the developer make mention of next-generation hardware. In doing so, he touched on where his own interests lie. Apparently, only “some” of the next-gen consoles excite Blow, one of which does seem to include the PlayStation 5.

According to Wccftech, Blow told Twitch viewers the following: “I’m excited about some consoles in the next-generation, let’s put it that way. PS5 is pretty good.” Naturally, this could be construed as a low blow (no pun intended) to certain platform holders, particularly if the platform holder is not Sony. However, Blow’s comment about the PlayStation 5 could hint at a semblance of clarity. Perhaps he merely commented on the consoles he’s received a devkit for? Of course, without the developer offering clarification, no one can quite no for sure what he meant.

Blow’s words also seem unclear because of his mention of “some consoles.” Does this serve as a reference to systems other than PS5 and next Xbox platforms? Or, might he have additionally taken into account other models for the next Xbox, such as the reportedly less powerful Lockhart device?

Jonathan Blow’s most recent title, The Witness, launched early in 2016. At the time of writing, his next project lacks an official title, but did receive a short tease during Reboot Develop 2017.

The PlayStation 5 will hit store shelves on an unspecified date during holiday 2020.

[Source: Twitch via Wccftech]

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If you’ve seen Indie Game: The Movie, you’re at least familiar with Jonathan Blow himself. He received a lot of praise for his puzzle platformer, Braid. Its charming art style and fun time travel mechanic won over many, and, having been shown off in that documentary, it’s considered by many to be a “classic” indie game. The Witness, a 3D puzzle game, was even more highly praised but definitely more niche. Those who love it cite it as one of the best games of the generation while others bounced off of it due to difficulty or their own personal taste. All of this is to say the idea of Blow working on another puzzle game is guaranteed to conjure excitement among fans. We got a little taste of this game at the Reboot Develop conference back in April 2017, and at that time “there were already 25 hours of gameplay.” That’s not to say the game in anywhere close to done but rather to emphasize just how much work Blow has put into this game already.

There’s no working title for this new game, but it’s inspired by “Sokoban, the old Japanese game about pushing boxes in specific orders to cover all the marks on the floor.” Blow showed a “brief demo” of the game during his talk at Game Lab 2018 regarding creating Jai, a new language for programmers. It starts around minute 27:33 in the above video. The game’s perspective is top down and involves controlling multiple characters. In the video Blow describes the game as follows:

It’s a puzzle game and it consists of many levels. Many of the levels are one screen levels although there are some that are bigger than that. It’s the sort of game where you can run characters around. The puzzles [involve things] like how do I get this crystal out of this room without locking a character in. [And]… different characters have different abilities. There’s [also] an undo button for when [the player] make[s] a mistake.

A shared interview with Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese and Venture Beat’s Dean Takahashi, following this year’s Gamelab talk, revealed the following information from Blow:

We haven’t really officially announced the game yet so I don’t want to say too much but we’ve shown it in these talks. It’s weird. It’s a level-based game. There’s a lot of levels. We have a lot more levels than we had last year.

So when can we expect an official announcement and/or release date?

With this game it’s even harder than usual because it’s in this experimental programming language. I really can’t say yet. I can’t even tell you when we’ll officially announce it. Probably closer to release than we have in the past because the current game environment – we used to announce stuff really early and people would look forward to it. Now it’s so noisy out there. Maybe once it’s mostly playable and we know a release date, we might do the full thing.

Considering how long The Witness was in development (approx. 8 years) we shouldn’t expect this game any time soon but it’s safe to say it’ll be up to Blow’s standards and that means a lot.

[Source: Eurogamer]

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A listing on Amazon Italy indicates that Jonathan Blow’s The Witness will be receiving a physical release. Details are extremely light as the store page just shows temporary box-art and doesn’t include a price, but this is good news for those that passed up the puzzle game due to its digital-only nature. The Witness originally released in 2016 to critical acclaim, as its maze-like puzzles and overall world managed to impress players and critics alike.

For even more on the puzzle game, check out our The Witness review. Here’s what reviewer Chandler Wood had to say when it released:

The modern era of gaming has done away with that kind of tactile connection to a digital experience. Everything is either stored within the game or freely available on the internet. The Witness uses an asset long available but largely forgotten to most developers: the player’s mind.  It requires discovery, perception, and real power of the mind, something decidedly missing from modern gaming as we gain more and more technological capability. This primordial approach is both The Witness‘ biggest asset, and what will inevitably turn some players away.

I realize that I’ve written a lot about The Witness, seemingly without saying much about it at all. That’s for the best. I can’t say much about it, and I certainly can’t go into detail. It’s a brilliant, beautiful, masterfully crafted work, and the more you discover, the more apparent it is.

The Witness is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and mobile.

[Source: @ManuelStanislao]

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Jonathan Blow and Rand Miller are arguably two of gaming’s most brilliant minds, one having created The Witness, a highly lauded puzzle adventure, and the other bringing Myst into the world, a clever puzzle adventure that drove adoption of the CD-ROM format in 1993. In a fascinating twist on the traditional developer interview, the PlayStation Blog brought together these two intellectuals to talk about puzzle game development as Rand Miller’s latest title, Obduction PS4 with PSVR support, releases next week.

Blow begins by asking Miller about the advancement of technology since Myst released in almost 25 years ago, and having to change how developers force player perspective with full locomotion 3D games. Miller explains the difficulty.

“The nature of exploration/adventure games is that you want the player to feel like they have complete freedom, but at the same time provide some kind of path guidance that insures that the player gets the story/information they need. I think we’ve learned as we’ve transitioned to realtime 3D that the path guidance that we might have previously achieved on a “per frame” basis, we now have to do on a different scale.”

Miller then goes on to talk about specific examples from Riven, a frame-by-frame game, versus how he handled drawing the player’s attention in Obduction, which is both fully 3D and in VR. In regards to VR, he likens drawing the focus of the player to keeping the attention of a three year old, because the ability and desire to look around is so natural and effortless.

Later in the discussion, Miller asks about the frustration of watching early players try to solve puzzles. Blow reveals that The Witness did not have early testers, and the first time people really got to go hands on with it was at PSX 2015, after the game was largely done being designed. Obduction’s creator then went on to talk about how he solved puzzle problems subtly.

“The subtle clue solutions are the most fun for me – just a little tweak that has the perfect psychological effect – a flash of light on the other side of the world, a small 440 volt sign, a license plate on a desk, using consistent colors, etc. I love when those work to fix little issues, and even if they don’t work for everyone, they make the experience more about paying attention then just trying to get into our (the designers’) heads.”

They go on to discuss core mechanics of the puzzle games, and how they each go about intersecting those core mechanics with story and environment to create an intelligent puzzle game that feels engaging to the player.

The discussion is quite interesting, so I recommend you read the whole thing over at the PlayStation Blog. You can also read our Rand Miller interview from PSX 2016 where we talked about what it’s like to be involved in three decades of advancements to video game technology.

Obduction PS4 releases on August 29th with PSVR support.

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Braid and The Witness creator Jonathan Blow showed off an early version of a new title he is currently working on during his presentation at the recently concluded Reboot Develop conference in Croatia.

In his talk at the conference where he spoke about making game programming easier, he showed of what looks like a grid-based game where a character is able to push around blocks. Blow made it clear that the game is still very early into development as he has shifted focus to making the game’s in-game editor and engine. He also mentioned that the engine would be available for free to use for developers.

You can see the game at the 5:32:45 mark in the video above.

Blow refrained from showing more of the game as he said he didn’t want to officially announce it yet. It will probably be awhile until Blow’s next game comes out. His last game, The Witness, started development in 2008 and was released just last year, around eight years later.

[Source: Reboot Develop (Twitch) via GameSpot]

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As announced back in September, Jonathan Blow’s The Witness will now be supporting PlayStation 4 Pro. We can confirm that the patch went live this weekend so if you haven’t already, you can download it now.

In case you missed it, the update brings the following two modes for 4K TV owners:

(a) 1440p 2x MSAA rendering of the game world, upscaled to 4k, text and UI rendered at 4k, 60fps
(b) 4k 2x MSAA rendering for everything, 30fps

If you have a PS4 Pro and are are outputting to a 1080p TV, the game will render at 1080p, 60fps, 4x MSAA, which is “substantially higher than the base PS4’s 900p, 60fps, 2x MSAA.”

In case you don’t have a PS4 Pro, you can still benefit from the patch as it supports HDR. As long as you have a compatible TV, the game will start in HDR mode.

[Source: The Witness]

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While we’ve known that Thekla Inc’s excellent first-person puzzle game The Witness would be getting a patch to support the PS4 Pro, we now know the exact specs. This comes from a blog post by the talented designer himself, as creator Jonathan Blow went into detail on how The Witness PS4 Pro will offer a better experience.

For starters, the game will now feature HDR support. Although, this update will actually add it for regular PS4s as well as the Pro model. Blow says that as long as the game detects an HDR TV, that the game will boot in the HDR mode. PS4 Pro owners playing on a 1080p television can expect improvements as well as the game will now render at 1080p, 60fps, 4x MSAA, which Blow notes is “substantially higher” than the regular PS4’s 900p, 60fps, 2x MSAA.

The most interesting news, however, was what the update will bring for owners of a 4K television. The game will feature two separate modes, one focusing on framerate, while the other focusing on visuals. I’ll let Mr. Blow describe the specifics:

If you have a PS4 Pro, and are outputting to a 4k TV, then you get a choice of two modes from the options menu:
(a) 1440p 2x MSAA rendering of the game world, upscaled to 4k, text and UI rendered at 4k, 60fps
(b) 4k 2x MSAA rendering for everything, 30fps

The Witness PS4 Pro patch is expected to arrive sometime in November, although the “exact release date for the patch” is currently unknown. Blow states that once the release date is finalized. he’ll announce it on the game’s website, but they are currently “nailing down all the little details.”

(Source: Jonathan Blow)

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Jonathan Blow, front man and lead developer behind indie darling The Witness, announced on the game’s website that his team is hard at work on a PS4 Pro patch for it. Blow does stress that they are doing so to improve the visual quality with the game.

The Witness already runs at a consistent 60fps on the base PlayStation 4, so rather than increasing frame rate, our patch is about visual quality.

Once the patch goes live and you try to play the game on your PS4 Pro, the game will boot up in one of two modes, depending on the TV or monitor currently being used.

When using PS4 Pro with a 4k display, we will render at 1440p or possibly higher, all while keeping a consistent 60 frames per second. This image will then be upscaled to 4k, and we will draw text, menus, and other UI at native 4k resolution. (This is similar to what happens on the base PS4, where we render the 3D scene at 900p, then upscale to 1080p and draw UI at 1080p). We might be able to achieve resolutions higher than 1440p based on various engineering tradeoffs (for example, if we boost the resolution of the main scene to a greater degree than we boost the resolution of the reflections in water, which tend to be distorted anyway. Also, we’ll evaluate checkerboard rendering — we’re not sure if it’s the right way to go for this game, but we’ll see.) We’ll post again when we finalize these specs.

When using PS4 Pro with a display that is 1080p or lower, we will render the scene at 1080p (instead of the old 900p), and increase antialiasing quality from 2x to 4x MSAA, again while keeping a solid 60 frames per second. We are exploring additional visual quality increases, like increased streaming distance for high-resolution meshes, or decreasing the noticeability of the fade-in between faraway LODs and high-res close-up meshes. Again, we’ll post details when this is finalized!
We’re also working on HDR support. Here in the office we just got a new LG B6P television, which is very bright and has low black levels, providing a lot of dynamic range, and it’s been fun so far tweaking the look of the game on HDR displays like this.

Blow went on to say that Sony surprised his team with the announcement of HDR support for all PS4s, and so they will implement a patch for HDR support across the board as well.

They plan to release the PS4 Pro patch on November 10, 2016 when the new console releases.

[Sources: The Witness Blog via IGN]

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