Super Nerd Sundays Presents: To the Bastion!

There are relatively few games I would unequivocally recommend to nearly everyone I know. Recommending a game is a risky thing, after all. Unless you know someone’s tastes very, very well you risk offending their sensibility or worse, exposing the manner in which you see a person. That Civ 5 recommendation could be interpreted as thinking that person is boring. That Baldur’s Gate recommendation could be mistaken for a statement about their level of excitement regarding spreadsheets. And the majority of AAA first person shooter releases could be mistaken for a statement on the recommendee’s attention span and intellect.

In order to be recommended to nearly anyone, a game must have a certain level of perfection underlying it. It must be one of the few, elite games that accomplishes all of its goals while never really revealing them, one of the few games that draws players in before reinventing itself, growing and changing what it means to be a game all the while. It has to be something that is both fun to play, but can hold up to a closer examination. Bastion is one of the few games in recent memory I’d recommend to nearly anyone without any caveats whatsoever.

Even defining what Bastion is is kind of risky, because it doesn’t really fall within the boundaries of traditional genres. It has prominent elements of brawlers and RPGs in it, but it also carries elements of platformers and adventure games as well. There’s even a little light tactical work at play in it. It’s such a singular collection of elements that it feels wrong to try and define it within a genre. It’s something that simply warrants being experienced.

Its art style walks the line between high brow and low brow perfectly. The inhabitants of Bastion are all more or less adorable, but they’re adorably cast against a stark and lifeless world hostile in every conceivable way. You can play through the entire game marveling at how cute the not-quite-sprites are, or you can traverse the world of Bastion marveling at the harsh beauty Supergiant Games crammed into every inch of its world, reveling in the subtext present in all of their art. It has something for the casual gamer and the most pretentious indie acolyte.

And its writing and voice acting is so pitch perfect, trying to put it into words is a disservice to the game. This is how you do games writing. There is nothing else to say about the subject. You accomplish your goals as a writer, you find the right voice for your words (not a stock actor like the very talented but very overused Stephen Jay Blume or a celebrity the like of John Goodman) and you just let it speak for itself. You accommodate things that players could do in the game and acknowledge them, providing constant feedback for both small and big choices. You make a word for players to enjoy, not just a set of rules for them to engage.

Bastion builds its world better than most titles with ten or a hundred times its budget. I never felt that anything was out of place, nor did I feel that anything needed more explanation. Unlike Starcraft 2’s ham-handed portrayal of the Koprulu Sector, Bastion’s ravaged, lifeless world seemed to have an involved, storied history without any of it ever being told.

And the music. It’s the rare game that experiences a simultaneous soundtrack release, and Bastion is certainly that game. And what a delicious soundtrack it is. From the haunting to the bracing, Bastion’s music perfectly suits its world. To say anything more about it is to risk spoiling one of the most incredible games I’ve played in recent memory (so much of Bastion is how it unfolds in the telling, so my persistent attempt to avoid spoilers will be a constant black mark in this review, one I hope you’ll forgive after you play Bastion).

But all I’ve talked about so far is Bastion’s world. What of the gameplay, the glue that holds this world together, that immerses you within it?

As I mentioned above, it’s difficult to define Bastion’s gameplay. Each person seems to do so a little differently, and it illustrates as much about the speaker as it does about the game. Bastion is rife with different ways to play, using a simple and straightforward set of tools. And while mastering the game and these tools usually involves zeroing in on a particular style the developers wanted you to use there’s never any pressure to find or use a specific set of tools to defeat your many, many foes.

The crux of Bastion is that you’ll use an assortment of weapons and special abilities to defeat hordes of enemies. As you do so you’ll acquire money and special items that allow you to upgrade weapons and purchase new abilities. You’ll also acquire experience, which makes you marginally tougher and gives you access to a wider array of special abilities. It sounds blasé there, because I wanted it to, but the finished product is elemental in its execution. There is something terribly fun about whittling away at your big, bad foes and ripping through your little, pathetic foes, and the degree to which you choose how to do so is something unrivaled in most other games, from RPGs to FPSes. I believe the Deus Ex prequel may have been outdone in terms of the importance and scale of choice by Bastion, a fifteen dollar game I didn’t know about a month ago.

The point of this review isn’t to give you a clear idea of what Bastion is. To give that to you is to ruin Bastion, a game which is as much about the way game play evolves and changes within it as it is about the story which that game play serves as a mechanism to advance. The point is to get you playing Bastion, thinking about Bastion and discussing Bastion. It’s a marvelous creation, original, intelligent and fun. It’s just as long as it needs to be. And every element of it was crafted with such care and dedication that it’s hard not to look at the sum of all its parts and feel a swell of love for the effort of Supergiant Games. Play Bastion. Play it today. I don’t care who you are, just play it. You won’t regret it.