Also, a new game from the creator (Jonathan Blow) is scheduled to release this year, The Witness [2].
The mechanic in Braid is clever in a bunch of ways. The key idea is that you can reverse time, so you never totally die. As the game advances things start being tied to the movement of time in strange ways. Sometimes not everything though - so you can (and need to) craft convergences of certain objects in order to solve various puzzles.
I'd highly recommend it.
The story was absolutely cheesy - I simply lost interest in it. Which is not really something unusual, because I am not a gamer at all.
But the story was truly remarkable - in my top five best game stories, easy. As others have mentioned, you must not have played for very long.
On a technical perspective...I'm sure he's written about this...but how does Braid manage to keep what I assume is a total record of gameplay? That is, theoretically, you could leave the game on for a very long time and rewind it...at some point, the console's memory runs out, right? I'm saying this as someone who really has no idea how little resources it takes to pop/push game events off a stack...I'm just assuming that if Photoshop has an undo-limit, Braid would have one too?
(Though Photoshop is different in that the program has to anticipate the user leaping back 5000 steps in a single go, where as with Braid, the player only has access to the top of the stack of events)
On further reflection, games that have "replay/ghost" modes, where a speed-record is overlaid atop the current game layer, invoke the same event-recording mechanic without trouble, so I guess I'm just overestimating how much space an abstracted game event/state would take to record.