K-SCORE: 90
Developer: Supergiant Games
Creators: Amir Rao, Gavin Simon, Andrew Wang, Jen Zee, Greg Kasavin, Darren Korb
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“the world rises up to meet your character’s feet”
A kid wakes up after “the calamity” destroys the known world of Caelandia. Guided by narrator Rusk, he sets to rebuilding The Bastion, a homestead that holds the secret to undoing the calamity and fixing the torn apart land.
Bastion is a short experience, a quick story with simple gameplay, yet it’s rewarding the whole way through. Each element of the game’s design is born of tremendous love and attention from the small team and they coalesce perfectly into a beautiful final product.
The gameplay is fairly classic real-time RPG combat reminiscent of Secret of Mana. The kid carries two weapons and slowly advances along maps that are created around him as he moves, destroying the enemies infesting the world, while simultaneously giving the feeling that everything is being rebuilt. I never got bored fighting the enemies, but it’s far from the game’s strongest attribute. All of the weapons are too balanced. They provide different options for dealing with the swarms of baddies, but they often feel equally useful, equally weak. Yes, there are some enemies that are more easily dispatched with certain weapons, but because of the limited number you can carry, you often end up using a subpar tool for the job, and it goes alright anyway. I really wish the game incentivized weapon variety somehow, since it probably would have been a better strategy for me to just become an expert in something - dual pistols and spear for example. It would have been smarter to leave the fire bellows, the giant hammer, and the machete at home, which is disappointing, since the game took the time to design those tools. The upgrades work well though.
Thus concludes my complaints with Bastion. Seriously, it’s that good. If you need complex, fast-paced combat, photorealistic graphics, or gameplay that demands twitch reflexes to keep you entertained, there’s no way this RPG is for you, but that doesn’t stop it from being great. The art is spectacular. The way the world rises up to meet your character’s feet makes you feel like you’re watching Jen Zee paint the setting as you’re playing, a unique video game experience as far as I know. Every level could have been a mural you’d want to hang on the walls of your house. This isn’t Indi garbage graphics masquerading as retro. They created a distinct style that looks wonderful and fits the word, and makes everything pleasant to explore.
The narration and the story are equally fantastic. Rusk never gives the sense that there are big reveals coming, but rather over time shapes the background of the few characters and the world over the course of the game. Details about who the kid is, who Zia is, Rusk himself, Zulf, and of course Caelandia come as you journey, so the pacing is great. No need for big set-ups or periods of time where there’s nothing really going on story-wise like many RPGs. By the end, you’re invested, and you’re never really sure when it happened. At the conclusion, Bastion provides the player with a final choice so meaningful it made me pause to consider it for longer: leave the world broken or reset the calamity, but lose your memories, experiences, and potentially doom it all to repeat. Caelandia is lovely, and you journey the whole way seeing its lands torn asunder and its people turned to ash so that you can fix it, but for me, the cost of losing the memory of that journey was too high. Because Zia says that the memories she cherishes happened after the calamity, not before, I chose the former option, let the land stay broken, and sailed onward into the unknown. It’s a cool thing to consider. The latter option, the reset, also provides a Bioshock: Infinite-esque explanation for multiple play-throughs. Always more satisfying than game over screens.
“it’s the music that’ll stick with me the longest”
I smiled as I hit the abort switch on everything I’d worked up to, watched the credits roll in about ten seconds, and listened to yet another amazing song play through my PC’s speakers. Oddly, it’s the music that’ll stick with me the longest. If there’s one champion of Bastion, it’s composer Darren Korb. His soundtrack will keep me coming back long after everything about the story and the gameplay has dried up. Bravo.
I’m not a gamer who will throw myself into the camp of Indie games, claiming they’re always made with core audiences in mind, and nor am I the kind of gamer that will rally behind exclusively AAA titles for their big production budgets, better graphics, and wider assortment of features; they can coexist peacefully. But I did think that about this little game a lot, for it’s definitely the realized vision of a few dedicated people, so fun and so rewarding, and it makes games like Assassin’s Creed III or Dragon Age: Inquisition look pathetic. They should be ashamed that their teams of hundreds of devs and multi-million dollar budgets can’t produce anything close to as good a product as this group. It also speaks to the healthy place video games are in right now, where with enough vision and skill and a few believers, the little guys can thrive.