Braid: Anniversary Edition is finally coming in 2024 with 15 hours of developer commentary, and no I am not kidding
It's been more than three years since the announcement of Braid: Anniversary Edition, a «hand-painted» remake of the famed indie hit. At the time, it was supposed to arrive in 2021, and that was a pretty big miss—but now, two years later, we've got a new release date of April 30, 2024.
Three years is a heck of a delay for a do-over of a relatively small 15-year-old puzzle-platformer, but—and I'm just speculating here, but—the extra wait may have something to do with the addition of more than 15 hours of commentary from Braid creator Jonathan Blow and other developers. That's right, 15 hours of talking about a 15-year-old game—to put that in perspective, that means it'll take about three times as long to listen to the full commentary track as it will to finish the game.
«The goal is to make it the craziest, most-in-depth commentary ever put in a videogame,» Blow said. «You can follow particular threads of commentary spatially, through wormholes that go from level to level to see evolutions of particular concepts; the commentary has lots of markup so we can circle stuff on the screen, point arrows at whatever visual detail we are talking about, show diagrams, play back recordings of gameplay to show what happens if you try doing this or that in a particular level, and many other capabilities.»
I liked Braid a lot when it first came out, although I wasn't especially good at figuring out the later-game puzzles. But even so, 15 hours (holy cow) of commentary seems to me less like a feature and more like a threat. I'd be happy to listen to some anecdotes or interesting insights for, say, 15 minutes, but 15 hours? Maybe there are some diehard Braid fans out there who can't wait to dive that deep, but is there really still 15
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