I = old. Old enough, anyway, to have fond remembrances of getting Nintendo thumb from over-playing Super Mario Bros. back in elementary school. It permeated the culture and defined game mechanics—and now indie designer Jonathan Blow has taken its formula and turned it into art.

In the rock-em, sock-em gaming world, art can be a dirty word. Though describing Okami as a “painting come to life,” producer Atsuhi Inaba still refused to accept the art-game tag.  “Maybe people are just throwing the word ‘art’ around too loosely,” he griped to me at the time. “It feels like a lot of games that simply break the mould of traditional gameplay are labeled as such, but we do not feel like it is appropriate.”

Blow has no such qualms. The infamous indie developer spends much of his time speaking at game conferences to promote art-games, slamming addictive money-printers like World of Warcraft while heaping praise on such personalized efforts as Jonathan Mak’s Everday Shooter or Jenova Chen’s flOw.

Now Blow can add his own game, Braid, to the list. Winner of the 2006 Independent Game Festival Design Innovation award and finally released on Xbox Live earlier this month, it’s already laid claim to being this year’s Portal, a small-scale game succeeding on innovation and imagination.

On the surface, Braid seems like neither. It is, in essence, a riff on Super Mario’s classic side-scroller, complete with piranha plants, a level ripped right out of Donkey Kong and a princess kidnapped by a “horrible and evil monster” who is ever in another castle.

Braid boasts the graphics of an impressionistic water colour painting (courtesy of webcomic auteur David Hellman) and a melancholy string soundtrack. But more importantly, it eliminates the twitch mechanics of a post-Mario platformer.

It’s really a puzzle game that uses time in different ways. In one area you can simply rewind, in another reversing causes a shadow you to retrace your steps. Sometimes the flying cannon balls and goombah-esque baddies move forward or back in the same direction that you do.

But it’s as much about memory as time. In giving you the ability to rewind, Blow allows you to “remove the damage but still be wiser for the experience,” as he writes in the hyper-literate text storyline that precedes each level.

Yes, Braid is a deep game, but rest assured it puts as much emphasis on fun as on philosophy.