Braid’s long-delayed anniversary edition finally has a release date

Remember Braid, Anniversary Edition — the updated version of the time-bending puzzle platformer that was first announced in 2020 with a 2021 release date? The game obviously missed that release window, but on Thursday, developer Thekla finally announced an exact release date: April 30th, 2024.

The anniversary edition will offer a bunch of updates that seem like they’ll improve the core essence of the game without changing too much. There are new “hand-repainted” graphics, according to a press release, and you can swap between the old graphics and the new ones at will. It has “improved sound” and “new mixes and variants of the soundtrack.”

It also has more than 15 hours of developer commentary featuring a lot of people, including designer Jonathan Blow and Frank Cifaldi from the Video Game History Foundation. But based on a statement from Blow, “developer commentary” feels like an understatement:

You can follow particular threads of commentary spatially, through wormholes that go from level to level to see evolutions of particular concepts; the commentary has lots of markup so we can circle stuff on the screen, point arrows at whatever visual detail we are talking about, show diagrams, play back recordings of gameplay to show what happens if you try doing this or that in a particular level, and many other capabilities.

To me, that all sounds like Braid, Anniversary Edition will be something akin to the interactive documentaries from Digital Eclipse.

Braid, Anniversary Edition will be released on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PC, and as part of Netflix’s mobile games subscription on April 30th. It will be released on Mac and Linux at “a later date.”