Palfrey's life

I've been playing the Braid demo this week. At first glance, people may get bored. In many ways, it feels like an old-school platformer, references to the Princess being in the next castle and all. Then we get into the time-manipulation abilities. Specifically, in this game you can rewind *everything*. Other games (various Prince of Persia games for example) have had this sort of thing before, but it was always a limited ability, something you could only do very rarely, and that always makes something much less of a game-changing core mechanic.

At a simple level, every time you die, your character does the whole 'fly-off-the-bottom-of-screen' death animation but then pauses at the bottom of the screen waiting for you to hold X and rewind to before you died. But when I said you can rewind *everything* I wasn't kidding - you can rewind all the way to the beginning of a level if you really want to, and you can do this as much as you like. Then we get into stuff like certain objects being unaffected by time manipulation - letting you do things like get into an impossible situation to retrieve a key, then rewinding *with* the key still in your mitt. Or levels like this one, which looks like a Donkey Kong clone, but then you realise you're in a level where time i.e. movement of the creatures down the slope moves backwards and forwards as you move backwards and forwards along the slope and suddenly the idea of twitch platforming is taken to a whole other level.

I haven't even mentioned the puzzles - the main aim of the game is not getting through the levels, but retrieving puzzle pieces to make jigsaws - and they will seriously twist your mind. There's a brilliant meta-level puzzle in the demo level set that I so don't want to spoil for you, but suffice it to say it's brilliant. Or you can not take my word for it, and read a few reviews.

Only downsides: it's not massively long (but given my current backlog, I could do with being able to complete something...) and apparently the current XBLA business deal is getting rewritten and that's persuading the author against making more games for XBLA which sucks lots. It's things like this and N+ that keep my faith in XBLA as a source of good games, and less indie developers would be bad.