Game Helpin' Squad took the piss out of Jonathan Blow's tedious, sanctimonious approach to game design with this parody of Braid called "Time Travel Understander":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI

The fictional creator, "Jimothy Lasic", has supposedly "said repeatedly that if you can't figure out what you're doing in the game you're just not thinking in the right way."

The joke skewers the same self-important sermonizing running from Braid to Order of the Sinking Star: endure my tedium, absorb my philosophy, and if you aren't enlightened, you're thinking wrong.

It's everything the MAGA/Gamergate crowd screams about when a game acknowledges women or LGBTQ+ people exist: preachy, ideological, more interested in lecturing its audience than entertaining it. Apparently "keep politics out of games" makes an exception for a foaming-at-the-mouth Trump supporter assigning hundreds of hours of philosophical homework.

That's what makes the review's discussion of Blow's Trump support relevant: once you present your games as lessons in how to think, your own judgment becomes fair game. You're asking players to trust that adopting your way of thinking will reward their patience. The Game Helpin' Squad parody punches back up at a designer who punches down at his own players' intelligence by assuming that any failure in that relationship must be theirs.

This review follows that question of trust into the contradiction between the new game's celebration of collaboration across differences and the developers whose work it draws on distancing themselves from the project over Blow's pro-MAGA politics. If we're supposed to take the philosophy seriously, we get to question its contradictions too. "You're just not thinking in the right way" cuts both ways.

Unfortunately, Braid's rewind mechanic can't undo January 6, Trump's historical revisionism, or Blow's infamous track record of sycophantic praise for Trump, crackpot COVID-19 conspiracism, and bigoted attacks on inclusive hiring as well as his own colleagues and players. Rewriting history requires a different kind of time travel understander. Meanwhile, understanding why his own star is sinking shouldn't take 500 hours.