Heather Chaplin explains how Braid became this year‘s indie darling.

A little game called Braid caused nearly as much sensation in the gaming world this year as Rockstar‘s Grand Theft Auto IV and Will Wright‘s Spore — and this considering that Braid was made by one man on one man‘s savings with no original thought of mass distribution. People were so excited about Braid before the game even launched that one games journalist called the year before “the pre-Braid era.”

Braid is important to the world of indie games for so many reasons. First of all, it‘s great. The indie/experimental scene is small enough and new enough that for it to be a good game in itself is extraordinary. Braid is thought provoking, evocative, personal, emotional — not things usually found in the video game experience, indie or otherwise.

The game is a series of puzzles you have to solve as Tim, a tiny little blip of a character with floppy hair, scuttles across trellises, bounds across fields and catches rides on clouds all in search of “the princess.” As Braid goes on, however, you start to realize that the game is actually not so simple. Besides the fact that solving the puzzles forces you to manipulate the flow of time — which makes your brain feel like someone is inside it punching it out into shapes it‘s not accustomed to assuming — the story of the game is a mediation on, well, the meaning of life, one‘s place in the world and love. It‘s filled with feelings of remorse, longing and alienation. And at the end of the game, you discover that you weren‘t, after all, a gallant knight rescuing a princess in need, but rather you were running after a woman who was trying to escape you.

It‘s hard to even articulate how unusual such themes are to video games. Sam Roberts, the games director of the Slamdance Film Festival Guerrilla Gamemaking Competition and curator for indie showcase IndieCade, says Braid will go down in the history books for this very reason. Roberts calls Braid an “auteur” game because you can feel the voice of game creator Jonathan Blow in every frame, in every piece of music and in every dilemma little Tim gets into. (Voice is not common to videogames.)

But here‘s the other thing about Braid that‘s noteworthy and new. It‘s hard. Really, really, really hard. Like, if you hadn‘t played a lot of games before you would never be able to get through it. And this isn‘t because the controls are complex, as is the case with so many modern big-budget titles. No, Braid actually has very simple controls: You move forward, you jump, you reverse time with the push of a button. From a control perspective, it‘s as simple as Super Mario Brothers. Braid is difficult because if you have never played Mario Brothers, and lots of other games for that matter, you simply wouldn‘t know what to do. You wouldn‘t understand the paradigms being presented; you wouldn‘t get how to achieve the game‘s goals because the clues about how to play are all built on games and ideas that have come before. In other words, to play Braid successfully, you have to be game literate.

Doesn‘t it sound strange to have to be literate in video games? But at this point two generations have grown up playing video games as children. They‘re ready for experimental games to come along and challenge their gaming vocabulary and their preconceived notions and to delight them with homages to games gone by. Think about a film like Jean-Luc Godard‘s Histoire(s) du Cinema, a film that requires a basic understanding of film as a medium and even of the history of film to enjoy.

A lot of games coming out of the indie game scene are hard in this way. Last year‘s Everyday Shooter, a gorgeous riff on the games of the arcade era, was maddeningly difficult, requiring the skills and patience and knowledge of the arcade jockeys of another era.

Sam Roberts says Braid will go down in history for how personal it felt and for the fact it got mainstream distribution on the Xbox‘s downloadable system. I say it will also go down in history as the real opening salvo in an indie movement where the work makes you work in order to enjoy it — just like with difficult film or books or art.t