This looks to be the first of Jon Blows games to put writing front and center, so I wonder if the clunkiness goes beyond the trailer. That's not really his forte.
It's been about 15 years since I played it, but I recall the writing in Braid being memorably shallow, clumsy, and pretentious (with the grand twist at the end being that they guy who spent the whole game acting like a clingy stalker was actually a clingy stalker this whole time).
The actual story wasn’t anything special, but I thought how it told the story through mechanics was really well done. It wasn’t the first to do that but did it a larger scope than anything else at the time.
I very deliberately did not say anything about my opinion about the quality of writing in Braid (and I think replaying it again wouldn’t do it any favors) ;)
But I do think that the writing was fairly central to the intended experience and design of the game.
Not really, the writing is sectioned away from the gameplay and easy to skip over unread without missing anything relevant to the main event, the puzzles. It's not good but its unobtrusiveness made it easy to forgive. Judging from this trailer the characters will be yapping to themselves and each other during gameplay though, so it had better be well executed, especially if they end up talking a lot.
This looks to be the first of Jon Blows games to put writing front and center, so I wonder if the clunkiness goes beyond the trailer. That's not really his forte.