Braid is an indie puzzle-platform video game developed by Number None. The game was originally released in August 2008 for the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade service. Ports were developed and released for Microsoft Windows in April 2009, Mac OS X in May 2009, PlayStation 3 in November 2009, and Linux in December 2010. Jonathan Blow designed the game as a personal critique of contemporary trends in video game development. He self-funded the three-year project, working with webcomic artist David Hellman to develop the artwork.

The basic story elements in Braid unfold as the protagonist, Tim, attempts to rescue a princess from a monster. Text passages laid throughout the game reveal a multifaceted narrative, giving clues about Tim's contemplations and motivations. The game features traditionally defining aspects of the platform genre while also integrating various novel powers of time-manipulation. Using these abilities, the player progresses through the game by finding and assembling jigsaw puzzle pieces.

A preliminary version of Braid (without the final artwork) won the "Innovation in Game Design" award at the 2006 Independent Games Festival, while the final version received additional accolades. The game received critical acclaim and praise for its mechanics, puzzles, graphics, and soundtrack. While some criticized the game's price relative to its length of play, it eventually became the highest rated title on Xbox Live, and is considered to be one of the greatest video games ever made. It is seen as a keystone title in the growth of indie game development, and Blow and its production were documented in the 2012 film, Indie Game: The Movie. The game had total revenue nearing $6 million, , which Blow used to fund his next game, The Witness, a 3D puzzle game released in 2016.

A remastered version of the game titled Braid, Anniversary Edition, featuring new levels, commentary, overhauled visuals and remixed sound was released in May 2024 for Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

Gameplay Braid is played by solving physical puzzles in a standard platform game environment. The player controls the protagonist Tim as he runs, jumps, and climbs across the game's levels. Tim jumps and stomps on enemies to defeat them, and can collect keys to unlock doors or operate levers to trigger platforms. A defining game element is the player's unlimited ability to reverse time and "rewind" actions, even after dying. The game is divided into six worlds, which are experienced sequentially and can be entered from different rooms of Tim's house; the player can return to any world previously visited to attempt to solve puzzles they missed.

Each world has its own time-based game mechanic:

2. Time and Forgiveness plays as an ordinary platform game, except that the player may rewind time to undo their actions. The section includes several challenges that would be unplayable or unfair in an ordinary platform game, but become feasible when the rewind mechanic is available. 3. Time and Mystery introduces objects surrounded by a green glow that are unaffected by time manipulation; for example, switches will remain flipped even if time is rewound to before the action occurred. Rewinding can thus be used to change the synchronization between objects that can and cannot be rewound, the basis of many puzzles in this section. This theme is also used in later worlds to denote objects unaffected by the player's time manipulation. 4. Time and Place links the passage of time to the player character's location on the horizontal axis. As the player moves toward the right, time flows forward, while moving toward the left reverses the flow; standing still or moving vertically will pause time. The player's location must be carefully managed in relation to enemies and objects. 5. Time and Decision involves a "shadow" of the player character appearing after the player rewinds time and performing the actions that the real player character rewound; if the timeline expires, the shadow will complete any initiated falls and jumps but will otherwise stand still before disappearing. Things coloured in violet can interact both with the main character and his shadow at the same time. Puzzles in this section revolve around using this mechanic to carry out multiple actions at once. 6. Hesitance provides the player with a magic ring which, when dropped, warps the flow of time around itself; the closer moving objects (including Tim) are to it, the slower time passes for them. The regular rewind control remains available. The final world is labeled simply "1." In this world, time flows in reverse. Rewinding time returns the flow of time to its normal state.

Each stage contains puzzle pieces that must be collected to create jigsaw puzzles that tell the story, and to unlock the last stage. On completing the main game, a speedrun mode becomes available for select levels and the entire game. There are also eight stars hidden throughout the world of Braid that correspond to the stars in the constellation of Andromeda just outside the main character's house.

Plot Tim is a man searching for a princess who "has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster." His relationship with this princess is vague, but made a mistake which he hopes to reconcile or erase. As one progresses through the six worlds in Braid, storyline text at the beginning of each world provides further insight into Tim's quest for the princess, and alludes to the overarching gameplay mechanic of each level. The themes evoked include forgiveness, desire, and frustration. The final level, in which everything but Tim moves in reverse, depicts the princess escaping from a knight, and working together with Tim to surpass obstacles and meet at her home. Tim is suddenly locked out of the house, and, as time progresses forward, reversing Tim's actions, the events show the princess running from Tim, setting traps that he is able to evade, until she is rescued by the knight. Tim is revealed to be the "monster" from whom the princess is running. Following completion of the game, the player finds additional texts that expand the story.

Development

Jonathan Blow created Braid as a game that deconstructed current video games trends, "bringing together the abstract parts of a complex puzzle, revealing deep moral and philosophical questions". Blow came up with the concept of Braid in December 2004 while on a trip to Thailand, and started development work on it in April the following year. By December 2005, a version of the game was completed that had the same number of worlds and puzzles as the final version, but lacked the final artwork; this version won the Independent Games Festival game design award at the 2006 Game Developer's Conference. While working on the art direction, Blow tightened the presentation and mechanics of the puzzles to improve their playability. During the game's three years of development, Blow put about US$200,000 of his own money into its development, most going towards hiring David Hellman for artwork and for living expenses.

Originally, Blow had envisioned the game to be broken into several different worlds as in the final game, each exploring facets of space, time, and causality, but with each world having very different high-level mechanics. One mechanic that he could not develop further was a world with no "arrow of time" that would have required the player to traverse the level in a manner that could be repeated in reverse. For example, the player would have been forbidden to jump down from a tall height while moving in forward time, as they would not be able to jump that height in reverse time. While this idea was not used, Blow discovered the rewind feature could be developed further for other aspects. Another game mechanic that Blow considered was to show the player the expected result of an action they would take; while this concept was informative, he did not find it to be an entertaining game mechanic. Blow had previously explored this in a prototype game called "Oracle Billiards", the game predicting each billiards shot before it was made. He had found the billiards setting too chaotic for this idea and this led him to try out similar ideas in a simpler "Mario-style" setting. After selecting the game mechanics he wanted, he began adding puzzles that made philosophical points on his views on game design in general. After brainstorming more puzzles and concepts, Blow dropped the least interesting puzzles and worlds from the game. Blow wanted to include significant consequences of rewinding time, not found in games such as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Blinx: the Time Sweeper, and TimeShift in which rewinding time creates few or no changes to the game's world. While these games immerse the player with these time-shifting effects using a first- or third-person perspective, he decided to use a 2D presentation. Blow noted that some of the puzzles in Braid would have been more difficult or impossible to solve in any other perspective.

One of Blow's design goals was to achieve gameplay innovation naturally through the artistic expression of the game. He used Rod Humble's The Marriage as an example, in which Humble set out to make a game that related his feelings of being in a marriage, instead of developing game concepts first and adding the story later. As such, Blow noted that while there were no new gameplay mechanics, the gameplay felt different from any other game. Another concept that he used for Braids development related to the game's presentation to the player. Blow recognized that many games present a complex interface to the player that get in the way of understanding the game, but at times are needed to explain the game's rules to draw in players. Blow referenced Jeff Minter's Space Giraffe, pointing out that the game never communicated the purpose of playing the game upfront to the player, citing that as one of the reasons for the game's poor reception. Braid was developed to promote this non-verbal communication to the player, explaining the fundamental rule of each world at its start and allow the player to interact with that rule throughout the world. Commenting during the development of his following game, The Witness, Blow noted that he would run into difficulty in demonstrating Braid through video footage alone, as it would not show "what happens in the player's mind during the puzzle-solving process", a problem that he had also encountered with The Witness.

Blow recognized that the puzzles in Braid had a range of difficulties, with some puzzles being more difficult for certain players than others, and did not have any set difficulty curve. He designed most of the game's levels to let the player bypass the puzzles, allowing them to experience the rest of the game even if they could not solve a difficult puzzle. Only certain boss fights require the player to defeat the enemy character before continuing on, using a combination of the time mechanics. Blow hoped that players would be able to find solutions to puzzles they had skipped by completing puzzles later in the game. Blow felt that "unearned rewards are false and meaningless", and thus included collectibles earned only after solving a puzzle. He strongly discouraged players from using a walkthrough to work their way through Braid, instead encouraging players to solve them on their own so that they "will feel very good about" completing the puzzles without help; Blow created his own official "walkthrough" that initially appears to guide the player, but then instead restates his insistence that the player work through the puzzles on their own. Some puzzles pay homage to other video games; one level features a Donkey Kong-inspired puzzle, and the ending of most worlds tells the player that "the princess is in another castle", similar to the end of each world in Super Mario Bros.