I had to take a break between playing And Yet It Moves and writing this review. When I first started typing, immediately after completing this bizarre, puzzling platformer, I just couldn’t shake the fear that unless I pressed the up arrow immediately, all the words would fall catastrophically off the bottom of the screen. This is a game where submitting fully to its twisted rules is the only way to succeed, and removing yourself from its laws of motion is a decidedly tricky thing to do.

The premise is agreeably simple: it’s just gravity. Stuff falls down. But the levels sprawl out in all directions, and you have a powerful trick up your sleeve. Pressing the left arrow rotates the entire world by 90 degrees. Same for the right arrow, in the opposite direction. Pressing the up arrow inverts the whole image, so up becomes down and left becomes right. Whichever way the world is positioned, gravity remains consistent, your character remains upright, and falling too far means instant death.

It’s surprisingly difficult to get the hang of, but at some point towards the end of the first section, everything clicks. The rotation mechanics become second nature, and the focus becomes less about working out how to use these controls and more about how to utilise them to your advantage. Though cosmetically a side-scrolling platformer, it’s actually much closer to the puzzle delivery of Portal, where your velocity remains the same as you flip around the environment. You establish where you need to be, and the puzzle is in working out how to get there. If you fall too far, it’s instant death and back to the last checkpoint, so careful planning is essential to your success. Failing that, just jump in the air, button-mash the cursor keys, and hope for the best. The latter tactic worked at least twice for me.

And Yet It Moves is an incredibly frustrating game that manages to remain joyous and addictive, whether you’re bouncing your way to success or being sucked into the ether. While it’s immensely challenging, it’s almost always fair, and failure is usually your own fault rather than the game’s. There are a few segments that demand trial and error – not to mention a few traps that I’m sure are outright impossible to spot first time round – but thankfully these are few and far between. You learn the rules, and you play by them. It’s tightly designed stuff.

Puzzles develop into ingenious squabbles with wildlife, as you try to bounce a banana into the hands of an angry chimp, or coerce bats into flapping in the face of a prying iguana. They make for a welcome break from the chaotic platforming, though the real joy of And Yet It Moves is in just that: the terrifying, heart-in-mouth moment where, in a fit of exhaustion, you hit the left arrow instead of the right one, and watch everything fall into oblivion just inches away from the next checkpoint.

The real, crippling problem is a complete lack of context to anything. You traverse through a cave, a jungle, and a bizarre universe of colour. But you’re compelled by the desire to solve the next puzzle, rather than by any sort of narrative. It seems a shame, and a waste. The luscious, collaged art design and beautiful, swelling soundtrack are enough to melt the hearts of even the most macho of gamers, but they seem to lend themselves to a sequence of events with a little more narrative substance. It’s the missing link that would have propelled And Yet It Moves into the upper echelons of videogaming. With its release so close to Braid on the PC, it’s a stabbing disparity, an unwelcome exclusion that highlights the difference in class between these two comparable titles.

But, judged purely on the sheer exhilaration of flying around every which way, working out how to clear that next path or how to reach that next platform, And Yet It Moves can only be praised. The time trials in particular are heart-pounding experiences, where one wrong move means failing to improve on your elusive previous best. And, at just a couple of hours long, it never outstays its welcome – though the relatively high price for such a short game may be problematic for some. Though not at the head of its pack, there’s a lot to love about And Yet It Moves, and I defy anyone not to find themselves horrendously addicted within minutes.

5/10

We’re all familiar with the cult classics. Unusual, quirky little games, hidden away from the public eye but adored by the select few who stumble upon them; niche releases with a very specific appeal, shunned by those without the necessary mindset. We’re talking about the Pathologics, the Fahrenheits and The Paths. The art games that appeal to a select few, and divide opinion something rotten.

Braid is the art game that appeals to everyone. In a sense, it absolutely screams “cult classic”, but its gameplay is accessible and invigorating enough to transcend such status. The glowing reviews and stratospheric marks for the 360 version, released through Live Arcade last August, surely went some way to popularising this oddball indie adventure. But really, most credit has to go to developer Jonathan Blow, for his astounding aesthetic direction and tight, evolutionary game design.

Braid proves that games don’t have to be inaccessible to make an artistic statement. They don’t have to obstrue their mechanics or stray too far from the beaten path in order to speak to their audience. They can be pure and traditional – albeit with a clever spin – and use that to their advantage. There’s nothing at all abstract about these 2D, side-scrolling planes, or the enemies that plod around their platforms. There’s nothing immediately unfamiliar about the lost princess story that dominates the main bulk of the game. But in Braid’s conventionality lies a compelling subtext, a deeper layer of meaning, and a tragic and haunting story of obsession and regret. Braid is clever.

Certainly, this side of Braid will divide opinion, and has done extensively on the Xbox. The narrative is fragmented and ambiguous, and its refusal to stick to anything like a linear path will be offputting to some. It’s presented primarily via a series of memories between levels, snapshots of lead character Tim’s life prior to the events of the game. And it’s at least heavily implied that these in-game events aren’t real at all, but a fantasy-orientated representation of his blinkered fixation on achieving his goals, without considering the wider implications. It’s not until the closing moments that the story reaches coherency at all, and even then the conclusion is wide open to interpretation. It could be that the PC audience, more traditionally sympathetic to abstract expression in videogames, is more receptive of this than a large portion of its 360 players, but it’s still not for everyone. Which is in no way to say one opinion is more valid than the other. For me, the ethereal beauty of Braid’s story is what lifts it into the dizzy heights of wonderfulness, but do be wary of the mark at the bottom of the page. It’s a 90 for me. It won’t necessarily be for you.

Equally, though, it’s such a high score because there’s something here for even the most traditionalist gamer. Ignoring the plot strands completely still leaves a brilliantly stimulating puzzle-platform game, one that never outstays its welcome and rarely stagnates. Intrinsically linked with the game’s theme of hindsight, its primary mechanic is the manipulation of time, which allows the elaborate environmental puzzles to be solved.

Initially, the sole available ability is rewinding to correct mistakes. You might be forgiven for assuming it’s the same principle as a number of other releases, most notably Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but Braid sports a couple of keen differences. Firstly, the whole game completely revolves around time control, with the platforming being almost incongruous to anything else. Secondly, as Braid progresses through its five main stages, the laws dramatically change. In the second section, time appears to stand still, before you realise moving to the right causes time to move forward, and moving left erases everything you’ve done. In the third, rewinding causes a split in the continuum, releasing a ghostly representation of Tim into the world, resulting in a bizarre teamwork session between actions past and present.  Things get progressively stranger until the final level, unlockable by solving all previous puzzles, which completely defies expectation and sets up a remarkable twist in the tale.

This constant re-writing of the rulebook means regularly casting aside everything you’ve learnt so far. Complacency never hits, and the difficulty remains consistent throughout. There’s one section of really, moronically stupid design: a couple of levels involve races against the clock where certain items reject your time-manipulation and continue in motion regardless, and failing to achieve your goals in the meantime means starting the level from scratch. It means you’re often unsuccessful because of your lack of platforming prowess, not your ability to think logically around the problem, which is idiotic in what is essentially a puzzle game. (UPDATE: Since this review went live, I’ve been contacted by a few people – including the developer – who suggest I may not have quite understood this collection of puzzles.  While having the mindset explained to me does soften their blow (no pun intended) a little, I maintain that forcing the player to start the level again if he/she makes a mistake is a design choice that leads only to frustration.) But, fortunately, it’s all over quickly enough. The rest is delectably good. It’s always challenging, often completely bizarre, but when you work out what to do things slot beautifully into place.

The one overarching problem with Braid is one that’s only so apparent because the rest is so ferociously good. Though the time mechanics are clearly linked with the narrative statements, the rest of the gameplay is not. That it’s a platformer would be completely irrelevant, if it weren’t for the frequent references to Super Mario Bros. This wouldn’t be such an issue if the story were presented differently, but there’s a part of me that wishes it were all more closely tied in. There’s nothing that suggests Braid wouldn’t work just as well – if not better – poured into a different mould entirely: a mould in which the story could play out within the game, not during its intervals. As it is, it’s the only thing that threatens Braid’s status as a truly remarkable piece of work, a revelatory example of storytelling and design.

There’s something for everyone, and that’s important to remember. Whether you gel with the story or dismiss it as pretentious twaddle is immaterial when the game beneath it is so enjoyable. It’s also slightly cheaper than the price the 360 version emerged at, meaning the admittedly disappointing length doesn’t sting quite so much. At just a few hours, Braid certainly left me aching for more, but perhaps that’s testament to its quality more than anything else. It’s a triumphant achievement for its indie developer, and its PC release will hopefully pave the way for more to come. A shining example of how artistic expression and pure, unabridged entertainment don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

9/10