The Xbox Live Arcade’s been going through a rather fruitful period of late, with last week’s most awesome Geometry Wars 2 proving to be one of the most addictive pieces of entertainment we’ve played all year. This week, Microsoft have gone and followed that up by offering us Braid – a game which dresses itself as a rather traditional 2D platformer but then slaps on the sparkly stuff and gives an experience unlike any other. It’s artsy, it’s clever, it kicks your brain’s arse and it’s one of the most unique things I have ever played.

Heck, even the way the game starts is unexpected. A silhouetted figure stands in front of a burning city, with his form gradually being illuminated as you guide him from left to right across a bridge and into a building. This little bod – drawn very much in the style of old-school 2D platformers but with a shirt and tie – is Tim, your lead character. Who is he? What’s he doing? Why is the city on fire? The game gives you very little clue as to any of the above, which heightens the slightly uneasy sense of mystery you feel twisting inside of you from the very first few steps downward into a building full of incomplete puzzles.

The general overarching theme of Braid is to visit the five worlds and collect the twelve puzzle pieces lodged within each to complete each world’s picture and open up a final level. To do this, though, you’re going to have to venture through a whole array of different puzzle elements all centring on the idea of being able to manipulate time to solve the various platform-hopping quandaries. Each of the worlds has its own particular quirk, however, so just as you feel that you’ve gotten used to the way that creator Jonathan Blow’s logic is working it wipes the rug from under your feet and asks you to think again. That it does this so enjoyably is startling.

Take, for example, the first world you set foot in. Starting things off relatively gently (although it doesn’t feel like it at that point), you are given a number of different platform layouts divided by doors through which you pass. Each layout contains a couple of puzzles – one, two or three usually – that you have to solve in order to get the puzzle pieces The key with these early levels is that by pressing X you can rewind time (a power that remains constant and key throughout the entire game), so if you find a key lodged at the bottom of a pit you can jump down, pick it up and then rewind so that Tim springs back up what would otherwise be an impossible leap still carrying the key. Clever, yes, but compared to latter proceedings relatively tame.

By the time you reach World 4 and discover that running right moves time forward and running left causes it to go backward your brain is really running on overtime. A piece of text from the Braid blog promises that ‘every puzzle is unique’ and that ‘there is no filler’, and you soon realise that isn’t a hollow promise. Each puzzle piece requires a different kind of manipulation of the rules of each world to obtain, and as a result there’s never a moment where you can kick back and flick the autopilot switch on as you would in other games. Each moment of Braid, from the first puzzle piece to the last, requires thought.

The other main positive that this has is that it makes the whole thing a great game to play through with a group of people, although obviously it should be people who won’t annoy you by yelling ‘get the key, idiot’ and ‘make time go backward again, it’s really pretty’ all the time. The old saying that two heads are better than one is perfectly proved by a sustained session on this game, with the fiendish workings of some of the puzzles leaving you stumped for hours on end but always with the knowledge that the solution is right in front of your face.

Hence, you end up digging your nails in and refusing to fall to the lazy tactic of checking up on Youtube or similar how to do a particular section. That so much effort has been put into Braid in making it a 2D platform puzzler that actually requires you to think to the limits of – and occasionally outside – the box makes you all the more determined that you’re going to beat the crew at their own game fair and square, and having done so the sense of achievement is hard to match. It’s like all the best light bulb moments of other games lumped into one 5-hour ‘Eureka!’ marathon, and despite the frustrations each and every puzzle is very much to do with thought and preparation, with a good dollop of timing lumped in to boot. There are so many fantastic little touches in there that I could pretty much make a list as long as your arm, but discovering their unique nature yourself is something that I couldn’t possibly wish to spoil.

The game’s brains are only half the story, though, for Braid is lovely to look at and listen to. Each of the game’s worlds feature beautiful watercolour-style backgrounds with vibrant, painted obstacles, platforms and enemies, with the gentle falling of background leaves and golden rays of sunshine in stark contrast to the often menacing nature of your surrounding items. It’s something that’ll appeal in different ways to different people, but it’s really quite unsettling to find yourself running and jumping around bright, colourful levels as a normal bloke in a suit and tie whilst bouncing on the heads of some really odd enemies. The audio side of things only adds to the disparity between the happy, colourful half of the game and the slightly depressing, downbeat part that bubbles underneath with some wonderfully atmospheric background music floating along as you dash about solving things.

At 1,200 Microsoft Points (a price point Mr Blow himself suggests was higher than he wanted) it’s more expensive than your usual XBLA title, but it justifies its price time and time again, whether it be the fascinatingly clever puzzles or the fetching and varied art style. Winding its way through this is a plot that doesn’t necessarily tell a story in the proper sense, but instead opens itself up to being somewhat of a fable from which you are supposed to learn that some pursuits are not necessarily worth chasing after. Once again it’s very much an abstract thing that’ll appeal to certain types of folks, but the beauty of Braid is that it appeals in different ways to pretty much anyone who plays it. Oh, and for what it’s worth, the last level is as clever a piece of design and plot twisting that I’ve seen, and well worth the effort of collecting all the various world’s puzzle pieces to reach. You know the twist in the middle of BioShock? Yeah – it’s one of ‘those’ kinds of gaming moments, and it really does completely change your perspective on what was taking place throughout.

Reviewing Braid is as tricky as playing it in a way; your first play through may take only a handful of hours (with speed runs to do after completion, which I am rubbish at), but into those few hours are packed so many great little moments, so many neat touches, that you could go on about the thing for hours and find yourself only scratching the surface. For all the head-scratching and four-letter word tirades it’ll provoke, the end sense of achievement once you gather every puzzle piece is the kind of feeling that turned us all into gamers all those years ago. If you are reading this, Mr Blow, thanks for reminding me what made me love this industry in the first place.