Time travel in Braid

I bought Braid on the promise of lavish visuals and neat puzzles with temporal mechanics, and on this basis I was rewarded. I found some frustration with the controls, which I eventually traced to dodgy keyboard drivers - the game wouldn't register the up or down arrows while I was holding Shift, making it impossible to rewind at high speed. Since I wasn't even aware that you could rewind at high speed, this made one particular puzzle impossible until I eventually caved, broke a long-standing personal rule and looked the answer up online. The game itself, though, is joyous. It's old, I guess, which means either you've played it already or you haven't and never intend to. In the event that you've never played it and can be swayed, I suggest you check it out. Well-judged puzzle difficulty, extraordinary visuals, super desktop wallpaper material, cool new gameplay mechanics, and I discovered some good new music as well. Most of the music in this game is by Jami Sieber, check her out. I actually severely dislike Mario and Mario games, so this game has that going for it as well. I don't think I play enough games to be able to say with confidence whether Braid is/was a quantum leap forward for puzzle games or videogames in general. Other than being wonderfully well-executed, the main differentiator for this game is the story, and I really couldn't tell you anything about the story, except that I found each individual paragraph quite hard to swallow. As far as I can tell, Braid's story is deliberately constructed and presented to be super-ambiguous in a way which fosters energetic discussion of possible interpretations. This is a narrative practice which I'm instinctively dubious of. It strikes me as deliberate obfuscation, a way of avoiding stating anything clearly and directly, offloading the author's work to the reader. When I'm invited to lay my own interpretation of events on top of a thing, more often than not I feel an impulse to just step back and give no interpretation. What I'm saying is that I'm not writing this writeup to cover the text. From my perspective Braid is all about aesthetics, and superbly constructed puzzle scenarios, and mechanics. Braid introduces one new time manipulation mechanic in each of its six worlds. Some of these technically qualify as time travel, some of them don't; some of them have storytelling possibilities, some of them don't. (This is independent of the actual story of Braid, which as far as I can discern is not actually a time travel story at all, although I forgive it.) These possibilities are what I want to focus on here. Nevertheless: spoilers? * I've written numerous times about time, time travel and time travel in specific works of fiction. One thing I keep coming back around to is the fact that there are models for time travel; in fact, very broad classes of models, which individual time travel stories select among, and then refine for their own specific storytelling purposes. Another topic I've revisited several times, inescapable to any time travel nerd, is that many time travel stories have rough edges or deliberate errors in their models. There will be moments in the story where the strict rules, if there were any, are deliberately disobeyed because they are inconvenient, and because the story needs to go in a different direction from what was previously established to be possible. This happens because in fiction you can put together whatever sequence of words you like, and nothing can stop you. Your need for one word to follow the other is more important than the need of your universe to be internally consistent. In practical terms, there is nothing which can stop you from making a film whose main conflict is resolved when, say, objects suddenly start to fall up instead of down. Contrarily, inside a computer game, there are rules. A computer game, like any computer program, can only behave in the way in which it has been programmed to behave. (Give or take hardware faults and solar flares, obviously.) And if you have written your computer program to instantiate and execute a virtual environment, and to allow a player character to navigate that environment, then what you have built is a universe with a model; a model which is inviolate. This is a great way to immediately avert all possibility of inconsistency. (In The Matrix, while standing inside a virtual combat environment, Morpheus explains to Neo: "It has the same basic rules, rules like gravity. What you must understand is that these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken." This speech always rubbed me up the wrong way, and not just because it's "different from", not "different than". You can't bend a computer, unless you want to take some kind of science fictional electromagnetic effector to it. A more correct statement would be: "Some of the rules have faulty implementations, which may be exploited. Other rules are correctly implemented but poorly thought out, leaving loopholes." In any case, let's assume the opposite. Yes, Braid may have a rampant buffer overflow which, like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, lets you warp directly into the closing credits. But no one's found one yet, so let's assume it doesn't, and that the world the game presents is correctly implemented, not exploitable.) Braid is a conventional platformer plus a whole slew of time-related game mechanics. Some of these mechanics only dubiously qualify as "time travel". But I can say for sure that all of these mechanics are implemented consistently. To the extent that there is time travel in Braid, and to the extent that the game doesn't just crash when something weird happens, and to the extent that the game isn't loaded with hard-coded one-time special-case exceptions, time travel in Braid is consistent; contradiction-free. This is a good win for time travel fiction! * There's a slight down side to this approach. A game universe, no matter how advanced, is necessarily simpler than the real universe. Braid, like almost every game ever made, does not model air particles, or the real-time propagation of light and sound. The game's collision detection is (is able to be) pleasantly forgiving. Individual breaths of air and blades of grass are not modelled. So, just because a game presents a consistent model doesn't mean that this model can be transplanted back into "the real world" without contradictions arising. I don't even mean contradictions with the established laws of physics, because unless the world flips upside-down tomorrow and we discover exotic matter, modern physics pretty much conclusively rules out macroscopic time travel. I mean really glaring scientific objections, like, how does Tim's nervous system actually work? Tim is the name of the player character. Tim/time, get it? Get it? Of course, a game needn't feature time travel to have these problems. How many games have teleportation? Infinite ammo? Perpetual motion? 2. Time and Forgiveness The first world, numbered 2 for reasons which become clear later, introduces Braid's core mechanic. This persists through the whole game, and works like this: You can "rewind time". You can travel backwards along your personal lifeline, watching events play out in reverse. You can even rewind time at high speed, or wind forward again if you go too far back, or stall entirely. You continue to perceive normally through this. After rewinding as far as you like, you can let time flow normally again, fully cognisant of everything that happened in all previous timelines. You can use your foreknowledge to do something different from what you did before. Get-out clause: if you die, time stops, and you can/must rewind to save yourself. This has some interesting consequences. As the game designer, you don't need restart points, a save system, lives or health anymore. You can just rely on the player to rewind time any time they make a mistake, such as falling into flaming spikes. If a situation turns out to be thoroughly doomed and inescapable, they can simply rewind further, all the way to the beginning of the level if need be. If the player forgets something, they can wind back and get it. Say, if there's a gap which can only be crossed by bouncing on an enemy from high above, but they already killed that enemy, they can wind back and deliberately leave it alive when they pass it in the next timeline. There's a micro-puzzle, right there. And if a particular obstacle can only be overcome with precision jumping, and there's a near-bottomless pit below or a risk of instant death from a hundred fireballs, you-the-game-designer can make that task unusually difficult and unfair, because if the player screws it up it only takes a second to rewind the entire scene and try again with slightly different timing. So, these are puzzles and challenges. Fairly basic stuff, and this mechanic alone only sustains one brief world. Are there also stories that can be told with this mechanic? Of course. For a character to be apparently unkillable, supernaturally well-prepared, and a supernaturally lucky guesser, is a legitimate superpower. The scope of applications ranges from winning coin tosses, to always choosing the perfect words in every important conversation, to never missing a shot with any kind of firearm. As with many time travel models, this ability is so powerful it probably needs to be toned down before it becomes practical for a story. Some things to explore: the sheer boredom of constantly experiencing the same day or hour or minute over and over again until you get it right; the discontinuity when you "resume" after rewinding time a little; the agony of experiencing the same unpleasant fight over and over again until you win. There are also deep paradoxes which arise when one character with this power runs into another character with the same power. What does this person perceive when you rewind time, and vice versa? In a fight