I adore Braid. I had a particular interpretation of this game, considering the game mechanics on each world Tim ventured in: the princess is not a woman, and the castle is not a place.

The game mechanics always spin around the notion of regret. Tim must undo his actions in order to overcome his challenges. In every stage this deals with the irreversibility of actions, so instead of fixing things, Tim strives to undo them.

In a few puzzles the solution involves killing yourself before fiddling with time. Perhaps Tim, at some point, contemplated suicide as a solution to his problems. This is rather dark, but what was he chasing after all? What is this princess he is obsessed with?

The princess in my view was the personification of an ideal of perfection. Tim was chasing a situation where he would be free of shame and regret, unburdened by responsibility. He looked for it in a variety of places: in a girlfriend, in marriage, in work, in his own past. But the princess is nowhere to be found. Whenever he reaches a castle, the princess is elsewhere.

The more he pursues this ideal, the more it eludes him. Like the girlfriend he wanted to protect, but she took his actions as suffocating - "you're going the wrong way and you're pulling me with you". Like the engineers who worked in the first atomic bomb, brilliant men that did their best, but in the end, they were all sons of bitches.

What Tim was chasing doesn't exist, like princesses in fairy tales. In his view, there's a knight in shiny armor that gets the princess, but never himself.

In that sense, the ending of the game is positive. He realizes that each step of his journey is a building block in his castle, and finally admits that while he needs many more blocks what he has is a good start.

His goal was always there. The perfection of life is the journey, not the destination.