Since my previous post about Bastion was completely inadequate, I’m going to give it another try. I still maintain my stance that it’s much, much better when you play it without any preconceptions - which, perhaps, I didn’t get across so well in that post - but I do want to discuss the game a bit. I’ll try to write less spoilers at the beginning; this post is pretty much spoiler free. If you’ve already played it through, great - take a gander at the discussion and let me know if you agree with it or not.
Now, you might ask - what the hell prompted this? The game came out two years ago, for crissakes - it’s too late for a review! You settle down, angry voice in my head. For your information, I was discussing Bastion on a message board for one of my college classes - game design, in fact - and I realized I’d never really formalized my thoughts. Yeah, I thought it was great, it’s my #1 favorite game, but why?
Like my discussion of Metro: Last Light, this discussion of Bastion is going to span several posts. If you’re not a fan of long-form review, you should probably head out now.
If you’re still around, first up are surface details; gameplay & presentation. Going to try to cover these in one post because I want a lot of time to cover the story & characters.
Bastion’s gameplay is solid. To be honest, it’s nothing to get too excited about, but it is definitely well done and polished. You start off with three weapons, a hammer, a bone machine gun, and a bow. These two weapons can last you the entire game, but you also find additional weapons as you go, creating a formidable arsenal. You can only carry two weapons into any given level, limiting your playstyle some, but also forcing you to make interesting choices about what combination of weapons you want to use. You will always have one melee and one ranged weapon, because it turns out the hammer is the only melee weapon that doesn’t double as a ranged weapon.
Just this small fact - that you always have a ranged weapon - shows at least some of the polish that went into making the game. In one of the making-of videos, they show off a whip that, of course, only had a melee mode - what kind of ranged attack can you pull off with a whip? Magically extend it? Either way, the idea must have gotten dumped in the playtest process; it’s not only essential to have a melee weapon, it’s preferable from the player’s point of view. Often, there are enemies that will be just out of reach, and you won’t feel like chasing them around the level.
Using the weapons is a very tactile and rewarding experience. The control scheme (I played on PC) was laid out reasonably, with movement on WASD and aim & use weapon on the mouse. Using melee weapons is as simple as moving the cursor and clicking; your character will smash, slice, or stab in that direction. These normal abilities are augmented by the fact that you have a roll and a shield. The roll will quickly get you out of harm’s way; the shield will allow you to block blows coming from one direction only, but if you pull it up just before an enemy or projectile hits you, you’ll reflect the damage back to them.
Ranged weapons are the same, except you hold down and release the mouse button; for most of the ranged weapons, if you release the mouse at just the right time, you can pull off a “power shot,” dealing additional damage. Now, this might not seem like a huge deal, but it is. When you manage a power shot, you feel skillful; if you can hit them continuously, you feel absolutely masterful. This adds a simple minigame into the formula of “hold down mouse until the string is all the way back, then release, then repeat”, making an otherwise bland system into one you must master.
There are also some special skills you can equip. You can only have one equipped at a time, and some of them are weapon-specific. These abilities range from firing huge barrages of arrows, to calling friendly monsters, to throwing hand grenades. To be honest, I never really found much of a use for them.
To switch between these weapons and skills, you head to the Arsenal. This is a building you can choose to build at your home base; completion of certain levels gives you the ability to choose a building to place down. Originally, this was going to be a huge part of the game, but now it’s a fairly marginal one; not to say it isn’t a cool feature, it just feels like it’s a hangover from an old version. There are six buildings in total you can build and upgrade, and each one serves a different purpose.
One of the biggest features, in my mind, is how they implemented the difficulty system. There’s no slider of “Easy, Medium, Hard” here; difficulty is determined by how many gods’ idols you activate in the Shrine, another building. The gods in this universe are not so forgiving; each one you activate has a different effect on the enemies you fight. Some are as simple as “enemies take less damage”; others take a lot of time to get used to, such as “enemies will drop explosives on death”. It’s great for two reasons; first off, whichever ones you find annoying, you can simply disable. If you can deal with enemies having more health, but can’t deal with them dealing more damage, you can just turn it off! Secondly, the shrine system supports the story. It’s not just an option in a menu somewhere; they took a system that’s usually not part of the story at all and made the story stronger for it. That’s impressive. I’ll talk more about that in the next post, though.
The leveling system is implemented in a similar fashion. Every time you level up, you get some base stats, but you also can drink more alcohol. The “Distillery” is used for this purpose. A variety of drinks is available; they can give you more base life, more retries when you die, lifesteal, reflection, and more.
Then, there’s the “Memorial”, a building which serves as the repository for achievements, such as killing 5 enemies with one blow. Each achievement you pull off gives you “money”, which can be used for different things. It isn’t really money, as such; it’s “fragments of the old world”, that is, pieces of the world before the calamity. You can use these fragments to craft things you passed by while exploring. Whether it’s a weapon or an compass you can discuss with Rucks, it can be built at the “Lost-and-Found” building in the Bastion. This reduces the punishment for impatient players.
The building is the “Forge”. This houses all the weapon upgrades. To upgrade a weapon, you must collect weapon pieces. They are different for each weapon, and fairly rare, so it’s a treat when you pick up upgrades for a weapon you know you will use. The upgrades themselves are each unique. You’ll find some that are simply “do more damage!” but there are others that conform to or alter your playstyle significantly. There are two paths for each weapon. I chose the path for the bow that allowed me to draw the string back faster, instead of the one that allowed me to pierce through many enemies; the result was that each fight was frantic, with me rolling and running and kiting the enemies until they were all dead. I’ve no doubt that if I’d chosen the piercing upgrades, I’d have been more strategic about it.
The levels in which this is all taking place are usually quite linear, with the odd offshoot here and there containing rewards; a traditional action-adventure formula. There are optional levels you can attempt, called “Proving Grounds.” Each of them corresponds to one weapon; you’ll have one for the bow, one for the hammer, one for the repeater, etc. Each one gives you a reward for completion, usually some weapon upgrade materials or a skill. Now, you might be a fan of open-world adventure, but I believe that the linearity of the levels serves the game’s purpose marvelously.
The presentation of these levels can be summed up in one word: gorgeous. There’s really no other word for it. Apparently, each individual tile was hand-painted by their artist, Jen Zee, and it gives the universe a unique look. There’s no samey brown corridors or grey brick dungeons to be found here; instead, you’ll find vibrant green flora, mines infused with glowing crystal, drinking holes with chess-piece robotic guards. The actors inhabiting these areas (i’ll use this term to refer to any NPC) are all done in a faux-3D style, but they completely match the environment. Apparently, to create the actors, they modeled them in 3D and then exported them, facing in different angles, to a spritesheet. Bastion is not the first game to do this, but it’s really impressive how well they match up with the backdrop. With models, I’d imagine it was extremely hard to get the same hand-painted, vibrant look, but they look great.
So, I’m not sure if Bastion can actually be called an indie game, as they were funded by Warner Bros. In any case, production values are really ridiculously high in general for a game put together by a dedicated team of four. I’ve already mentioned the graphics and the SFX; what I haven’t mentioned yet is the music.
Good god, the music. I doubt I can do it justice, but I’ll try. Back when the game was released, I actually remember “stumbling upon” the soundtrack on Bandcamp, and thinking “the first song’s some guy talking, lame.” I look on that moment, and shake my head how foolish I was back then. Now, I don’t really know what makes the music so compelling. I’m no music theorist. Just go listen to it; the fusion of folk-like tunes and rock rhythms that Darren Korb managed to harmonize creates something absolutely unique. Not only that, each and every song supports the story. For the Ura, there are folksy tunes that sound like they were made by stretching strings across pots and banging spoons together; for the Caelondians, there are electric tunes that somehow also include a hint of bluegrass.
I seem to have spilled over into discussing the story a little bit; we’ll save the rest of it for the next post, which will be on story & characters.