Sometimes I feel I am spending my entire life mining for gold in a septic tank. It seems during the development process of most mainstream games, they make a specific point of extracting everything original about them and filling in the gaps with Havok physics. Oh, I’m sure many games start off with some bright-eyed, creative director foaming at the mouth with great ideas but before long the stuffed-shirts have fed his design to an angry dog and the sheer amount of time and manpower it takes to just make one character walk across a room in the top-tier graphics engines of this day whittles down all the great ideas in direct proportion to the creative directors will to live! Demanding quality from this process is like saving someone from starvation and then demanding they give you a piggy-back ride.

And do you know who I blame for all this? You! Yes, you: the public, especially you, Adrian! (That probably isn’t your name but it was worth it just to mess with the heads of all the Adrian’s in the world.) Ye unwashed masses who ensure massive profits for the same old cookie-cutter sequels because anything which isn’t ‘safe’ and ‘familiar’ makes you dive for your security blanket and since you spent all of daddy’s money on a current generation consol you wont give the time of day to something that doesn’t have resolutions above 720p and you're more interested in buying Master Chief novelty helmets than actual game play innovation. In fact I don’t even know why I’m talking to you- piss off! Close the browser and fuck off back to Gears of War! Has he gone? Good, I hate that guy!

Anyway, games are becoming more and more like the film industry in that, whilst you may occasionally find sultanas in rabbit droppings you would be better off going to a dried fruit shop… by which I mean the independent stuff.

Braid is an indie 2D-puzzle-platformer released for the X-box Live Arcade and is much better than most 3D titles despite or indeed because you can fit the whole development team into a phone booth. It does, however, undermine the whole indie aspect when you hear that the lead developer, Jonathan Blow, sank $180,000 into the project. I mean, how many bedroom programmers have that much scratch kicking around? That’s like $90,000 for each of his original game play ideas! I kid really…whilst time manipulation is not by any means an unexplored concept it’s never been this stylish or presented in new and interesting ways to still feel like something totally original.

Puzzles are extremely cleverly put together and almost seem to have deceptively simple solutions- the hard part is getting your head around the sneaky time mechanics available. When you do finally master your powers Hiro Nakamura style and find the solution, it’s a more satisfying feeling than killing hundreds of people in any online death match you care to name because it’s nice to know bits of your brain besides ‘run, shoot, kill’ have not turned black and dropped off yet.

But wait! I think I hear the nit-pick train coming into the station. After a top notch first half there is a sense that the game runs out of momentum. The later levels are just copy-paste versions of older ones only solved with a different time power, which feels a bit unimaginative. Oh yeah, here’s a re-occurring scenario: One key, two doors, key fits one door, the other door breaks key, no indication of which is the right door, broken key cannot be recovered, have to start level again. That, Jonathan, is what we call a Moronic Move; there is no need for it unless X-Box Live Arcade has some sort of bad game play quota you have to meet.

There is a story, but there might as well not be. I’ve always thought the best stories are the ones which combine game play and storytelling seamlessly but in Braid they’re kept in separate rooms, with you in the game play room looking into the story room through a tiny hole in the dividing wall. Most of it is told by a bunch of disjointed text walls explaining about some person looking for a princess or estranged wife or dead daughter or maybe even the atomic bomb, who knows? There’s a glimpse of absolute genius in a really well done ending sequence, but it still doesn’t explain much and then it’s back to obscurely written text for the epilogue which left me confused and unsatisfied and I refuse to accept it’s because I’m thick.

Of course, with its beautifully painted graphics and excellent soundtrack, Braid is proudly wearing the ‘Arty Game’ label but it may be taking refuge in that to avoid having to explain itself. ‘Oh’ people say, ‘it’s open to interpretation; you’re supposed to discuss it on forums and stuff’ but I don’t buy that. It’s like if you tell a joke but nobody laughs; you then explain the joke and people say ‘that’s pretty clever, I guess’ but they still wont laugh because you didn’t tell the joke properly in the first place!

I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who gets annoyed by this sort of thing though. Braid’s excellent game play makes up for its pretentiousness and the flaws are irrelevant because you have to play it for the utter uniqueness alone.

I’ve heard many people complain that it’s too expensive at 1200 Microsoft Points and all I can say to that is ‘welcome to my world, cheapskates!’ I live in London and have been conditioned to blindly accept ridiculously high mark-ups on games. There was a time when paying twice as much as the Americans do would have peeved me off, but now I think of it as ‘Having The Most Awesome Mayor in the World’ tax.