Me and puzzle games do not have the happiest relationship imaginable. Perhaps I'm not terribly good at lateral thinking, or perhaps I'm just stupid, but a lot of the time I just find the problems therein needlessly obtuse - not so much an attempt at creating challenging and thought-provoking gameplay as much as just a series of exercises in frustration - the equivalent sometimes feels like trying to play a video game with all the dialogue presented in Linear A and the controls mapped randomly to the buttons on a keyboard (the musical kind). So games like Antichamber and VVVVVV are not exactly my favourites (though the Portal games can be counted as honourable exceptions to that rule, as can Quantum Conundrum - even if I am currently stuck in the latter).

Nevertheless, even though the actual gameplay confuses and frustrates me, I can at least appreciate artistry when I see it, so having seen a playthrough of the game I can certainly applaud aspects of Braid. Lately, having bought it in one of Steam's Daily Deals (it was only £1.75), I've taken to actually playing the game a bit. For those of you who aren't familiar with the game, it's a puzzle-platformer with a gimmick of time manipulation: in each different world, protagonist Tim possesses a different way of affecting the flow of time - sometimes he moves through time as he moves through space, moving events forward and backward as he runs forward and backward, sometimes he can slow time to a crawl in a given area of the level, and at all times he can reverse time to correct any mistakes/deaths he may suffer. All this is set to beautifully lush and colourful art design, plentiful Mario references and a rather bewildering storyline that's incredibly fertile soil for theorising, speculation and wild mass guessing (for example, one theory holds that the whole thing is an allegory for the Manhattan Project).

As you can probably infer by the opening paragraph, I have a mixed response to this game. While I can definitely appreciate the artistry of the game and usefulness of the time-reversal mechanic (which is very useful for correcting jumps in mid-flight), a lot of the puzzles presented do wind me up considerably. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw famously and aptly referred to a lot of the puzzles as "dickmoves", and I agree entirely - I'd had to refer to a playthrough once thus far, and to be honest I'm not entirely sure I'm going to be motivated to actually finish the game.

Anyway, getting away from my inadvertant review of the game, I've developed my own little theory regarding the game. It doesn't try to explain the identity of the Princess, nor the particulars of Tim's quest for whatever - no, this particular WMG regards the creator of the game, Jonathan Blow. To me, this game seems less like an actual video game and more like an attempt to prove a point - the dickmoves aren't a result of overshooting the difficulty curve, they're all quite deliberate, for Jonathan Blow is none other than... Edward Nygma! Yes, this game was created by the Riddler, as another of his smug attempts to prove his intellectual superiority over Batman through the medium of devious puzzles!

Alright, so it's a bit out there, even for wild mass guessing, but it's a compelling theory, no?