izigame.me

Note: played most the of the game offline, hours played do not reflect actual hours.
You can't judge a game by it's creator, however it's safe to say that Jonathan Blow's turn towards Covid conspiracy theories and anti-lockdown stances during the pandemic,
as well as his subsequent embrace of the neoliberal takeover of twitter and US government, helped cement in many his reputation as a contrarian for-the-sake-of, whether rightly or wrongly.
This probably contributed to the poor game sales of this remastered version, though there are many other factors. Releasing it in the same year as Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer', which covered much the same moral dilemmas in more accurate and affective detail, probably also didn't help.
But most importantly, the 'indiepocalypse' as it's known, took off well after Braid was originally released. Before this point, Braid and a handful of other games helped pave the way for the ideology of 'small as big', breaking away from the previous perception of indie games as at-best, freeware vomit for niche crowds. The subsequent flood of attractive, well-considered and highly-produced titles from small independent game studios, which currently sit in the marketplace, represents competition which the original Braid never had - that situation of scarcity will likely never ever happen again.
So Braid, the anniversary edition, is competing with many newer, more contemporary titles - but also with itself. Because for the most part, it's not clear that the new additions to the game are strongly necessary. You need only briefly to sample the (unnecessarily long and articulate) commentary sections to hear just how much time and effort was put into the new edition. But was it work it? I can safely say I prefer most of the backgrounds from the original game over the new ones - particularly the clouds. The focus is softer, which suits the artistic style of the game more, to my taste. The music is in places an improvement, in others not so much as it adds high frequency noise (vs low frequency noise in the original) which is offputting.
The one clear area where the game has improved is the sprites. The originals are far too undetailed, fuzzy, and it's nice to have better iconography to work with also. However the unnecessary extra detail in the backgrounds and music often comes off as distracting, not actually supportive of the gameplay experience. Puzzle games in general are not something which benefit from a load of distraction. In places it's nice to see the details more clearly, but in many, there's both a sense of auditory and visual static being added to the overall game experience.
The commentary itself is detailed to a level that could only be called 'intricate', or for some, insipid. It's great that there's so much information there for those who're truly invested in spending 15 hours hearing about a 3-4 hour game, but navigating the in-game interface for listening to it is a little bit of a chore.
It's innovative for sure. But not all innovation is great. I'd rather have the whole length of a track laid out. A better mechanism would've been to simply have Tim onscreen, on a slow-moving series of clouds above the ground, and to be able to move him forward if one got bored of the current section, while having markers on the ground as to where certain sections started and ended, and basically just mimicking a video playback engine in-game. The better parts of the commentary are when 2 or more people are talking to each other - the dialog comes off as more natural, not so much phony.
Lastly, I felt the extra puzzle levels were good, though there weren't many. The statement of how many extra levels there are is a bit of an exaggeration, most of these are commentary levels, not game ones. There was one that, once I figured out the solution, I was like ugh no. Not enough time in the day. But because the levels have no intrinsic meaning in terms of the game as a whole, there's not a lot of incentive to complete them, and they sort of dilute the intentional quality of the original puzzles in a way. For me the commentary and commentary levels kind of do what movie commentary does, which is to take away the suspension of disbelief.
Do I recommend it? Yes, with the caveat that you might want to try playing with the original graphics/music, and/or skipping the commentary. Older computers in particular, or onboard graphics chipsets, will cope better with the original graphics.
But at least you have that option. The new graphics do look great on a larger monitor BTW.
The problem with remastering a game, particularly a game with as strong a feel as Braid, is the same as remastering music. For many, remastered tracks from albums released in the 1960s or 70's can often be a situation where you can 'hear everything, and yet feel nothing' - something is lost in the transition from more muted but historical takes, to more detailed tracks with more clarity. Perhaps what some might call the 'soul' of a song.
I wouldn't go so far as to say the same thing applies here to Braid as a whole, but it cuts close - and I wouldn't say the remastered music tracks - for all their technical clarity - are much of an improvement, though it is very nice to have an increased variety of music through the game - particularly in the ending, where the original had nothing playing, and it felt a little bit empty.
A cautionary tale, on more levels than one.