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Designed by Jonathan Blow with artwork by David Hellman, Braid took Xbox Live by storm in 2008, winning numerous awards from gaming magazines. It was later ported to Windows, and Hothead Games brought it to the Mac. The puzzles and story are the same, and the Macs keyboard controls couldnt be simpler: arrow keys to move, the space bar to jump, and the Shift key to rewind time.

That rewinding-time mechanism is the games foundation. Each world starts by introducing a time-manipulation ability that you use in the worlds levels to collect inconveniently located puzzle pieces. The puzzle pieces are hard to get to, and figuring out how to access them can keep you confused for hours. Luckily, you dont have to restart a level if you die or just screw it up somehow--thanks to the time-manipulation tricks, just rewind to a point before disaster and try again. The soothing music and the sense of satisfaction you get when a particularly tricky problem finally presents its solution kept our blood pressure low enough to keep playing--for the most part, anyway.

You can continue on to the next level without collecting every puzzle piece, and return later on to a level thats got you stuck. But you do have to find all 60 puzzle pieces in Worlds 2 through 6 to unlock the final level, World 1. Why are they out of order? That has to do with the games enigmatic story line, which deals with love and loss, forgiveness and redemption, and possibly the creation of the atom bomb (seriously)