Well, I resisted the urge to consult a guide. I'll always have that slight bit of honor. However, after eight hours, I think Braid has defeated me. The tricky thing about this game is that it's a both a difficult puzzle game and a difficult platformer, so when I reach what seems like a dead end, I'm faced with a dilemma - do I have the right solution, but I'm failing to execute it, or is the reason I'm failing to make progress because I don't have the right answer?
What's really frustrating is that I almost made it through the whole thing. Out of the sixty puzzle pieces you need to collect, I found 57. It's a good enough ratio that it almost seems worth it to tough it out and pick up the last three, but I am thoroughly stumped. Many times, over the course of playing Braid, I'd run into difficulty navigating a puzzle, but I'd fail in an effectual way. I'd see that something was happening, and how I could do thing differently so it would happen in a different way. Eventually, one of those different ways would lead me to the solution. You know, the basic way that stubborn idiots solve problems.
But with these three puzzles, I haven't even got that much. I've just been flailing away at nothing, unable to even fail interestingly. It's just the same missed jumps over and over again. And without that productive failure, I could not get a handle on the problems.
I thought, briefly, that I might have had one of them. In the first world, second stage, you have to jump from cloud to cloud to get through. One of the puzzle pieces is on a distant platform with no apparent way to reach it, but hovering above that platform was a cloud that appeared to be stationary. However, I noticed that it was actually moving very slowly, and that it was heading towards a platform I could reach. Thus a plan was formed. I'd simply wait for the cloud to get into range, and then use it as a stepping stone to the puzzle piece.
So I waited for about a half hour (it was moving excruciatingly slowly), until it got close to a tenable jumping point, and I made the leap - and it was too short, just like all the other ones. I tried it about a half dozen times just to be sure, but nothing at all came of it. And while there was another potential jump point, it would probably have taken another 20+ minutes for the cloud to reach it, and even if I could make it on top, it would, by that point, have been far too distant from the puzzle piece. Since, at that point in the game, I still had about a half dozen other puzzle pieces I could pursue, I decided to leave it be and hope that another idea occurred to me while I was doing something else.
It never did.
I'm now faced with a choice. Do I consult a guide and finish Braid - something I don't technically have to do, considering I bundled it with Never Alone and Brothers, or do I leave it as is, a monument to the limits of my problem solving abilities (despite the fact that I am so close to the end, I can practically taste it)?
It's a war between my pride (I've made it this far without a guide, it seems a damned shame to give in with only 5% of the game left to solve) and my curiosity (what basic thing have I overlooked that will make these jumps traversable). I think curiosity will wind up being the bigger draw, but I am going to be really mad at myself if it turns out to be something I could have figured out on my own.
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