Review – Bastion

Remember my Outland review? Of course you don’t. But everything I say there goes triple for Bastion. In a year of pretty incredible independent games, Bastion is the best of the year so far. It is a legitimately great game and you have to play it.

That’s the hook. Now back to the beginning.

“Proper story’s supposed to start at the beginning. Ain’t so simple with this one.”

We know about Bastion for one reason: its overwhelming sense of style. Usually, though, style in a video game is like a guy wearing a suit covered in shiny, reflective panels: eye catching but ultimately hollow. Even Outland, a game I will compare to Bastion relentlessly, had a hollow style, a beautiful face that would have grown tiresome if not for quality gameplay. Bastion, on the other hand, comes at you like an immaculated groomed man wearing a smoking jacket, puffing on a cigarillo, reading Tolstoy and asking to put classical music on the record player that’s materialized next to you. It is style personified. Bastion‘s style punches you in the face and asserts itself from the get go.

A lot of this comes from the narrator. He’s as good as advertised. If you try really hard you could get him to repeat things, but the man never repeated a single line of dialog while I was playing, which I consider a huge feat. He’s fantastically realized. His comments aren’t so much description of what you’re doing but rather a second voice that serves to create the world around you. The narrator uses the most pleasing baritone since Ron Perlman to provide back story, interesting tidbits, and help inform you of how to defeat the toughest enemies.

And enemies there are. The game itself plays like an action/RPG, reminiscent of Diablo but truly specialized to work on consoles. It’s not a click-a-thon, but rather a smart game where you have to focus on balancing dodging and countering to keep the enemies off balance. In general you will end up attacking and rolling out of the way a lot, which is very satisfying. Furthermore, it’s chock full of RPG elements. Before each level you can pick two of the games ten or so weapons, all of which are pretty viable until the end. They’re viable because each weapon features a fairly meaty upgrade path, and each upgrade has two different ways it can go, allowing you to specialize each weapon pretty dramatically. You can also drink spirits before you go into a level, which makes the Kid even stronger and more durable.

The Kid, by the way, isn’t really a kid. The Kid is plastered with all sorts of plot elements that serve to make him a memorable badass protagonist.

This is where Bastion shines the brightest. The humble action/RPG has never been a place for story. Diablo 2, patron saint of the genre, had a yarn best described as throwaway. In a genre with dozens of games, there has never been one with a story worth hearing. And yet here comes Bastion, proving all the naysayers wrong with an utterly compelling yarn with well-rounded characters comparable to a tripe A experience.

Admittedly, the title gets a lot of its narrative from atmosphere. The world Bastion places you in is immediately compelling, and it follows up on that by offering up the best writing in a video game.

Here’s a moment that sums Bastion‘s writing up. This paragraph will have spoilers, so if you don’t like having the first ten minutes of a game spoiled, look away. One of the strongest moments Bastion has is this one. In the beginning of the game, after running through a destroyed, fragmented world, you end up in a saloon, a place where The Kid had frequented. The narrator tells you about the bartender, his name, his interests, the Kid’s experiences with him. You fight off some enemies (actually, his security system). Then you look up, towards a balcony above the fray, and you see him. You see him, except his body has been reduced to ash. He’s looking at you. You can see his face. You can see his eyes. And, in good action/rpg, fashion, you smash him to bits with your hammer. The narrator says, roughly, Barkeep always wanted to have his ashes scattered here. The Kid did him the honor.

That’s the kind of moment Bastion thrives off of. It’s a game about human moments. It’s a game about relating to the characters you meet, about relating to the world. It’s not so much a game about plot as it is a game about story. One could describe it as a game about rebuilding a world, but it would be more accurate to say it is about reliving, about imagining a world that is now gone, a world you are trying to restore, but one that you cannot restore. It’s not about what is happening, but about what has happened.

Fundamentally, it is a game about loss. It’s a game about might have beens as much as it is about plot. It sets things up, and it lets your imagination take hold to fill out different elements of the narrative which you could care about. And then, eventually, it comes to a very deliberate conclusion. It’s a complete, deliberate game.

And it plays that way in the trenches. It is not a gleeful whack-a-thon, but rather a terse, deliberate game of combat in close, confined quarters. You have to think about your dodges, your counters, your recoils. Your actions must be deliberate and careful. You have to think about the choices you make, both in combat and in preparation. It is a thoughtful and deliberate game whose pace matches the story, and the combination produces an intoxicating effect. It’s thoughtful and demanding, punctuated with bursts of violence.

Bastion‘s most important element, however, is this one: the ending. In a world where every video game ends poorly, Bastion caps things off with a spectacular, fitting conclusion for the ages. I’ve been reading a number of comparisons to Braid on the internet in the past couple of days, and they feel particularly apt: Braid was, metaphorically, a film by a famous director, Frederico Fellini or the like, that awed and wowed us with its technical achievement. Bastion, on the other hand, plays like a modern classic, a piece you don’t have to be an intellectual to understand. Its crowning achievement is taking the sense of marvel that Braid created and putting it into the body of work that can touch everyone. There’s no extended metaphor in the game itself, just a solid story beautifully told.

Put simply, Bastion is a game that makes me love playing games. It is tense, weighty, and tells the kind of story that video games should tell. It both reminds me of playing classics like Okami while remaining its own incredible thing. This is all we can ask of our games, and Bastion delivers unquestionably.