I need a Braid hint. (Spoilers)

The Game Room
1

I’m stuck on the “Hunt” level in world four. (The one where everything moves forward in time when you move right, and backwards in time when you move left.)

Perhaps the best way to put the problem is by directing attention to the monster on the platform right under the door to the puzzle piece. When I move to that monster’s platform, the physics of the game have placed him in a position to the right of that door. But this means that after I kill that monster, once I move to the left in order to get over to the door, that monster has come back to life. (Because I had to move left so far time went back to a point before I had killed the monster.)

I need a hint. I can’t see any way past this problem. Edited to add: I just realized that the door is green, meaning once I kill all the monsters and it opens, it won’t close again when I move left, going back in time and resurrecting the monsters. So that problem is “solved” by not existing. There remains the second problem, described below:
There’s also the problem that, as far as I can tell, the only way to get up to that monster’s platform involves jumping on the monster on the platform below from above. But to get up to that platform above this “bridge jump” monster, I have to go all the way to the left of the screen to climb up a ladder–and that brings back to life every monster I’ve already killed.

So this is driving me crazy. I suspect the solution to the first problem I described might show me the way concerning the solution to the second problem–it appears to me that there must be a way, though I haven’t figured out how it could be possible, to change the monsters’ “choreography” with respect to each other. (I.e. there must be a way to change the relationships between their positions given Tim’s position on the screen.)

Don’t totally spoil it for me if you can avoid it, but please do try to find a way to hint me through this. :confused::frowning:

Edited further to add: I’m sure the general idea is to kill the leftmost monster first, proceeding in chronological/spatial order forwards/rightwards. Is that right? If so, the problem is specifically how to get to the rightmost monster without having to travel all the way to the left of the screen to climb up the ladder to the platform from which I must jump in order to use that second-to-last monster as a “bridge” to jump on.

2

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to use Tim’s standard rewind power to get myself back up on the platform I need to start from in order to use the monster as a “bridge” to jump across to the last monster. But ever way I try it ends up bringing some monster or other back to life. But am I on the right track? Do you have to use Tim’s rewind power to solve this level?

3

I have also been trying a 1…2…3 jump from the bottom level monster to the “bridge” monster to the final monster, but after countless tries it doesn’t look to me like this jump is possible. Is it?

4

YouTube is your friend. The walkthrough for “Hunt!” starts at 2:52.

But then, you said you don’t want a total spoiler, so how about this: start at the top, kill that beastie as far to the left as you possibly can, and then work your way down the left side, avoiding that far-left ladder. And to avoid that ladder and still use the “bridge monster”:

don’t forget that, thanks to the left-right rewind effect, you can get multiple bounces off one monster and thus bounce higher. So, you don’t need to jump from the third-level platform to use the bridge monster, start on his platform and bounce on him two or three times to get the height you need.

5

Exactly why I am not looking at such videos.

Yes, this much I had worked out, as I said.

I’m afraid to read this. Is it a complete spoiler, or just a hint of some kind?

6

Okay, I gave up and read the first sentence of your spoilered hint.

Gah! I don’t think that’s* something I would ever have noticed, so in the end, I’m glad I read it.

*the notion that bouncing more than once on a monster makes you bounce higher than when you bounce just one time. I didn’t even realize bouncing on more than one monster makes you bounce higher. I was trying the 1…2…3 thing I mentioned before because I thought maybe bouncing off the first monster would have the same effect as falling from altitude, which isn’t quite the same thing.

7

Okay, finished the game.

My. God.

That is a work of art.

Longish discussion of ending sequence to follow. Complete and total unfettered spoilers coming:

[spoiler]I have thought before about the way that if you looked at the way people interact, and reverse it in time, then the significance of the acts seems to reverse itself on the moral scale. Giving turns into stealing, killing turns into saving, and so on. So I kind of got the idea even before I reached the end of the final sequence that I was going to be shown the whole thing again in reverse and that it was going to turn out the way it did.

I’m going to describe the ending now so if you unspoiled this and are having second thoughts, respoil it!

As you play the game’s final sequence, it seems as though you are trying to save the princess from an evil knight, and she is running around pushing levers and things trying to help you overcome various obstacles. Then after its all over, you find yourself unable to reach the princess–then once you start running time backwards, you see things in a completely different light–she’s running towards the knight, he’s trying to save her (I guess from you) and when she pushes levers and things, its to put obstacles in your way, not to take them away.

And the whole experience is incredibly sad. Incredibly sad. Like as in, should I mention this? Yes I will. There were tears. Little bit. That’s how good this game is, and that’s part of why I feel justified in calling it art.

You, the player, just worked very, very hard to get to this point, and it makes the revelation about the game’s character feel very much like a revelation about yourself. It’s not really, but by making you inhabit the character so intimately, requiring you to suffer along with him in his struggles, it becomes very easy to identify with him, to the point of the kind of emotional reaction that I’ve only gotten in the past from really good books.

Before playing this game, I would have said “Sure, a game could do that to you I guess” but the facile futurist prediction is nothing compared the reality I just experienced.

Okay, with that said, now I’m going to complain about what happens after this.

Followingthe game’s final sequence there is this epilogue sequence which seems to take the whole game’s storyline up a level in the metaphor department, and I didn’t find this effective at all. Something about how what he’d been trying to do the whole time was build the atomic bomb or something? Way out of left field and completely out of the scope of the rest of the game. To be honest, I’m not completely sure I understood what was going on in the epilogue (and the author as much as says in that epilogue that this is his intention) but from what it seemed to me I did understand, this epilogue seemed tacked on and seemed to undercut the force of the rest of the work. Why couldn’t it simply have been about what it had seemed to be about all along? It had already done an excellent job of putting an eerie and emotionally effective spin on the classic “save the girl” trope in video games. Why the leap to all that other stuff? It doesn’t seem honest.

In my opinion, it may be best to ignore the epilogue sequence in kind of the same way that some people ignore certain completely imaginary episodes of the Star Wars series that occasionally are jokingly mentioned by people trying to start trouble.

However, I wonder if others who have finished the game might have something to say about all this that illuminates the epilogue, and makes it seem less out of place.[/spoiler]

8

I may be speaking on incomplete information here.

I just found out about the stars. I didn’t know about the stars. There are stars? Apparently there are stars. :smiley:

So now I think I typed the above without having read all the text in the game because

[spoiler]Having noodled around on the net a bit, I conjecture that maybe the text in some of the green books in the epilogue sequence are unlocked by the stars. Am I right about that? If so, then it turns out there’s a ton of text I hadn’t read yet when I wrote my previous post, and from what I gather from my noodling, that text makes the story of the epilogue seem more coherent.

Is that right? Did I just miss the green book text in the epilogue? I thought they were just empty for some reason![/spoiler]

9

I played the demo. It looks fun, but I’m not sure the game is long enough to spend 19 bucks on.

About the stars, I was searching for info about the game and read a post at a game site about the stars. To get to one of them will mean you waiting in one world, just standing in 1 spot for 2 hours.

10

It’s 15 on the PC. I’d say my total gameplay time was six to eight hours, but I am exceptionally stupid. :stuck_out_tongue:

Yep, I read that too. Sounds like more riffing on the game’s theme of obsession.

11

So far as I know, there is no text in the green books - except in the last screen. There is hidden text in the earlier screens though. You don’t need to get the stars to see that.

Getting all but one of the stars enables you to do the level with the princess chase differently, yielding a different result and the final star. I don’t want to hint more than that.

The epilogue I still find somewhat enigmatic, but I do like the bits about the atomic bomb. This plays well with the different ending to the princess chase.

I hope I haven’t said too much.

I wonder if there isn’t something more on the screen with the castle of books, possibly involving the cloud, but I haven’t been able to find anything yet. Anyone else?