One of the single most frustrating parts of Braid's design is in its opening moments: teaching players the game controls. Tutorials are notoriously tough to do well in games, and designer Jonathan Blow had noble intentions of letting the player learn the controls on their own instead of flashing "PRESS 'A' TO JUMP" across the screen. Instead, he did this:
A box near a ledge with a picture of the Xbox 360's 'A' button on it. The player can't jump over this little ledge without pressing 'A', so it forces them to learn that 'A', in fact, makes the character jump.
But this helpful box is unnecessary. It's the 'A' button--the most cardinal of all video game controls. Even the original Nintendo Entertainment System featured the 'A' button to jump in most of its games. Braid itself is a satire of the most iconic "press 'A' to jump" platformer on the NES, Super Mario Bros.
Suffice to say, I doubt anyone savvy enough about video games to purchase Braid would need to be told to press 'A' to jump. This would be like a novel telling the reader "turn the page to read more." I could understand explaining more complex control schemes to players, but 2D platformers like Braid have the most basic and intuitive of all video game control schemes.
My second big issue is that the 'A' button onscreen is in a box. In most platformers (including Mario), boxes are something you destroy to reveal a power-up.
When I played Braid for the first time, the first thing I did upon seeing this 'A' box was jump on it and try to open it, to no avail. The three other people I've watched play Braid for the first time have done the exact same.
So not only is Blow's 'A' box redundant as a tutorial mechanism--it's outright unfaithful to the genre whose conventions it's attempting to emulate for dramatic effect.
