It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll.

Jonathan Blow is something of a figurehead for indie development, speaking passionately about how games must speak to the human condition if they are to be considered a worthy artform. As the release of his time-bending puzzle-platformer Braid draws closer, we’re able to see if Blow’s hot air has condensed into something resembling the inspirational levels to which he believes games can climb.

Braid is certainly a work of considerable aesthetic success – the praise for which largely goes to artist David Hellman, whose visual endeavors subvert the stereotype of the lo-fi 2D platformer. Instead, layered brushwork forms a luscious, moving painting; a progression of Miyamoto’s intentions with the crayon rendering used in Yoshi’s Island. Indeed, Braid makes many (slightly wearing) references to that era of gaming, and that particular series – navigation in this world is very much like in a Mario game, and there are castles and toothsome plants as well as a missing princess.

What it manages to say is that even a game that is willfully circumscribed by the conventions of one of the oldest genres need not be simple. It’s a good reflection of Blow’s views on the habitual underestimation of the medium, and to some degree it carries over to the fundamentals of play, in as much as the platforming is complicated by a number of time-bending devices.

Braid allows you to reverse time but, unlike in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, this power is not limited. That you can rewind to the first step you make removes the tension from dying – and so Blow has rethought platformer conventions, shifting the challenge to another area and using your precognition of events to solve environmental puzzles.

Each zone presents a new trick in addition to the time reversal mechanic, many of which defy causality in brilliant and migraine-inducing ways. Getting from the beginning to the end of a level is usually of no great difficulty – but you must collect jigsaw pieces along the way, eventually piecing them together in a separate minigame in order to unlock the sixth and final zone.

The images that result from the jigsaws are graphic extensions of a somewhat overwrought story about love, longing and second chances – for which Braid’s time-reversal gameplay acts as a fanciful and tenuous metaphor. The impressionistic narrative is touching, but the sophomoric manner in which it is written makes you glad it’s relegated to a largely optional chin-stroking meta-text.

Even though Braid doesn’t communicate itself well verbally, it does a better job through pervading emotions, shaped by the yearning, beautiful score and the painting of each level. The game’s fundamental and delightfully taxing action is also strong enough to stand without these forced metaphors, even if it does not yet amount to the kind of transcendent artistic experience that Blow hopes to elicit from the act of interaction alone. That princess could well be in another castle.

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