Supergiant Games
Lovely. Touching. And the best combat this side of God of War.
Bastion has its flaws, but few games put it all together the way this one does. The base of the game is something that at first reminds you of Diablo with its isometric view and experience points, then makes you feel like you're playing Gauntlet in the Wild West, and finally circles back to Diablo when the full range of weapons and upgrades - that is, spells and abilities - become available. Everything feels solid. The joy you got from calling down a Meteor comes back in the form of a Galleon Mortar. The fully upgraded Flame Bellows puts an inferno at your fingertips. The Carbine may be my single favorite weapon/ability of all time in an action-RPG: a powerful single-shot item whose focusing mechanic give your patience a viscerally satisfying payoff. The game simply feels the way it should.
I bring up the gameplay first because I'd otherwise be tempted to focus on nothing but Bastion's art and music. The graphics are lush, hand-drawn, and anime-inspired in the best way possible, part Studio Ghibli and part Rayman Origins. No point in blathering on when you can see for yourself:
But the music. Oh lord, the music. Darren Korb's self-styled "acoustic frontier trip-hop" is now my favorite soundtrack in gaming. Here's Bastion tricking us into thinking Firefly's still on the air:
The overall sound design is just as strong as the music, the most obvious part of this being the character of the narrator. Somehow, some way, the folks at Supergiant created a nonstop dynamic dramatization of your actions that you never get tired of hearing, and that even gains new significance when you play through the game again. But there are other touches that shouldn't be missed. Realizing from the sound of her voice that you're circling a singing woman in one level drives the allure of finding out who she is. The sound effects of your weapons reloading and the monsters' tip-offs build some of the tightest timing-based combat you've seen outside a Nintendo title. A hallucinogenic sequence gives us the narrator humming a half-remembered melody from a previous level. It all works.
And then there's the story. This is both Bastion's strongest and weakest point, I think. Others have written some great, spoiler-filled pieces on the themes in the plot, so I'll mostly skip that except to say it's one of the few game stories worth experiencing. In fact, Bastion has perhaps the single most moving scene I've ever experienced in a game. What's unfortunate is that this scene is hidden behind an essentially meaningless player-made decision. Neither choice modifies the game's outcome, and one offers a narrative far superior to the other. Perhaps the designers felt that players would only care if they had chosen the action themselves, and there's some merit to that. But I wish that, having done so, they would have given the opposite choice an equally significant alternative scene. As it is, some percentage of people playing the game surely missed out on what is essentially the climax of the plot without getting anything in return. A second plot choice at the very end of the game is well-executed, with both paths hitting the right notes in response to the player's decision, which makes the lazy treatment of the earlier dilemma all the more confounding.
This problem goes to the heart of what sets video games apart. Choice allows us to become more invested in the narrative than any other medium; choice allows us to break that narrative and undermine our own experience. That seven people working from a house are pushing this medium forward is both a testament to their shared devotion and an indictment of the wasted potential at so many studios with far greater resources. Certainly, nothing is perfect, even a game that expands our horizons like this one. But speaking solely as someone who, like most of us, delights in new experiences and well-told stories, I'll leave it at this: I can't wait to see what these creative giants come up with next.
Played on PC (Steam, Xbox 360 controller, headphones)
Completed the game twice, 16 hours /played
Current price: $15
