Bastion review

Bastion.  It’s an indie game, the first by Supergiant Studios.  I haven’t played this game beyond a demo of the first level available on Steam, but it is currently on sale and I have plans to buy it.  The basic premise is this: The world has been destroyed.  Remnants still linger, floating in a void.  You wake up and have to cope.  It has dynamic narration, which is great.  I just sort of swung my weapon for a few minutes after I got it, and cracked up when I heard a smooth voice tell me, “The kid just rages for a while.”  I’ve heard very good things about this game.  It’s garnered good scores from critics, getting a 9.25 from GameInformer.  The final decision of the game is said to have paralyzed players for upwards of twenty minutes.  The gameplay from what I’ve seen is solid, allowing you to switch from melee to ranged combat with nary a hitch.  The art style is that of a painting, giving the game a feeling of a story just being told for the first time, which is reinforced by the narration and the way platforms just appear as you walk in the direction you need to go.  So I’m really looking forward to playing this.  I’ll probably detail it more after I’ve beaten it.

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I finished Bastion already.  Finishing games quickly, or even at all, is a fairly rare occurrence for me, because I have so many games that I want to play.  The last time I finished a game within a week of getting it was The World Ends With You, which I still love, having beaten it four more times after that.  Admittedly, I did sell it after that, but only because I had practically memorized the story, and I had played it for something like a hundred hours by then.

Bastion, first of all, has hand-painted visuals.  This may not sound like it’s all that important, but it’s what allowed me to play it in the first place, thanks to the bad graphics chip in my computer.  Not to mention that it’s the reason why it looks amazing even on the lowest resolution.  It does look a bit cartoony, but then again, given the subject matter, I’m glad for it.  There have been too many postapocalyptic games that were all doomy and gloomy in both story and visuals, with death and brown rough textures running rampant.  The world of Bastion, ruined though it may be, is beautiful and diverse.  You go from the brightly-tiled top of the Rippling Walls, the starting area, to the grassy Roathus Lagoon, populated by various hostile creatures, to the icy Tazal Terminals, home of the Ura.  Never will you confuse the three.  The most interesting part, however, is the way the path you must take rises up from the void as you walk.  You never really know exactly what you will see next.

I mentioned the dynamic narration, and the way it felt like it was a story being told for the first time.  Well, the story is absolutely captivating.  The narration keeps information at something of a premium, allowing you to fill in the blanks yourself.  You can find mementoes to get glimpses of the world before the Calamity.  To get backstory on each of the characters, you can go into a dream world called Who Knows Where and fight off waves of enemies.  Each wave gets you a bit more of the story.  There are more little things that provide backstory as well, but I don’t want to explain them all.  The point is, if you want more of the story, you need to put more into the game.  And it’s a great story, about how people cope with life after their world is blown to bits, and what they do about it.  I said that the final decision was tough for many players.  For me, it was the decision just before that.  The guy that’s set up in opposition to you (he’s not really much of an antagonist) is grievously wounded, but you are carrying a weapon that lets you blaze through enemies like they aren’t even there.  Your choice is to leave him and forge on, or to abandon your weapon and help him.  The music stops when it gives you the choice, forcing you to sit there in silence while you struggle with your course of action.  I personally took five minutes, but I eventually chose to help him.  Once I did, a haunting song began, and an army attacked little, defenseless me.

I’m not going to lie, I love the progression system.  Unlike in most RPGs, leveling up doesn’t give you a significant stat boost.  While it does give you a small amount of health, its main benefit is opening up another slot in the distillery, where you equip spirits to gain passive buffs.  In addition, as you go on, you get more weapons, and you can upgrade them in a way of your choosing.  Want to throw your War Machete a lot?  Lower the recharge time, add another blade, and give it extra damage.  Want to spray projectiles everywhere?  Give your Fang Repeater a giant clip size and rate of fire.  How you play is up to you.  Within reason, of course.

There were a few things I think could have been done better.  Sometimes, it’s not obvious where you need to go, and it doesn’t tell you.  However, when it does tell you, it doesn’t wait long to flash an arrow and say ‘GO HERE’.  Maybe I just want to smash the stuff to get money, did you ever think of that?  As much as I liked the story, it really could have been fleshed out a bit more.  It seemed bare-bones.  And finally, the shrine.  Oh man, the shrine.  You can invoke the gods to give yourself an extra challenge in exchange for a small boost in XP and money.  Unfortunately, it’s not worth it.  Even just invoking Jevel, giving enemies damage resistance, ups the difficulty more than you’d think for a measly five percent increase.  It’s a great system as-is, but I found myself never using it.  I’ll try it out on the new game plus and see what it’s like there, but I’m not optimistic about it.
In case you can’t tell, I did love this game.  Its faults were mostly small in the face of the wonderfully crafted whole.  It’s not often you see such a seamless integration of gameplay and story.  I’m really looking forward to what Supergiant Games does next.

Score: 9.5/10