Review | Bastion

Elegant craftsmanship. If I were forced, on the precipice of one of Bastion’s grass choked tiles suspended in a dyed starry void, to pick two words to describe the game those would certainly be the pair. It’s evident during every moment of Bastion just how well thought out this game is. It might, on some level, be a simple hack n’ slash action RPG. But Bastion shows how much can be done within the boundaries of such a simple, formulaic concept.

The elegant, economical and creative way in which the story plays out is a remarkably clever solution to the problems inherent in an independently developed game. Bastion forsakes the gaudy and expensive cutscenes that might be expected, and even shuns all but a single (fantastic) voice actor. And it ends up all the more compelling for it. The game is narrated throughout, telling the tale of your character (Known only as “The Kid”) in third person while you live the story. It’s incredibly cool, done in a way that reminds me most of the prose in Steven King’s “The Gunslinger”. Narration plays out moment to moment quite beautifully, the gravelly voice might relay how, “The Kid cut down the weeds” as you cut down some of the cartoony bright vegetation in the world. But, of course, he would speak a much better written line.

I hate to call the art style “cartoony” actually. It kind of is, but it feels more like a natural progression of 16 bit sprites in games like Chrono Trigger. The point is that it’s highly stylised, and will look as great as it does now forever. Screenshots don’t do it justice. Paradoxically Bastion is a game that benefits from zooming all the way in, looking slightly blurry, because the art takes on this incredible water-colour painting feel and treads away avoids looking like an animated cartoon. (Not that the art isn’t spectacular, varied and compelling anyway. Enemies are unique, and each environment looks drastically different.) Bastion is at its most visually exciting when The Kid is making his way through a level, and you get to watch a series of floating titles lift into place before you.

The story told in Bastion feels like a fairytale, and not in the modern watered down sense but in the original Grimm’s style – where a sinister background is felt on the edges of your consciousness all the way through. Often you will come across large grey statues, instinctively you will hit them with your weapon and they will burst in a cloud of ash. The narrator will relay, in one laconic sentence, the story of the old citizen of Caeldonia who’s ashes you just scattered. You never quite get filled in on the back story of the world, and reading your own ideas into the story makes it feel vast.

I said elegant. Then I said craftsmanship. But I never said earthshakingly original, and that is the issue some might find with Bastion.

Because if you really want to deconstruct all the way down, in the end it turns out to just be top-down action RPG. But, again, it’s a well crafted, thought out, elegantly simple one. “The Kid” can hold two weapons at once, usually it is sensible to go for a ranged one and a melee one, as well as one equip-able power that may or may not be tied to a specific implement. You can dodge in all directions, and use a shield which can bounce back enemy projectiles. That’s it. But in the end that’s all you need thanks to the variety and distinctiveness of Bastion’s armory.

It might be easy to take for granted just how remarkably different each tool of destruction feels and plays. The perfect remedy to this is to recall how similar RPG weapons so often are, even in critically acclaimed blockbusters like Mass Effect and nouveau Fallout. Usually, you’ve got to make do with what amounts to maybe two weapons types: Perhaps a shotgun (short-ranged) and a rifle (long-ranged). Of course there are loads of different shotguns and loads of different rifles but they all play in exactly the same way. Not so in Bastion. You pick up a new tool in almost every level, and each one feels totally unique and discrete.

The enemy variety is a more legitimate concern, if a small one. There are still quite a few, and they all feel far more specific than your average AAA RPG enemy (Which are usually divided into the far-away-shooty ones and the run-and-hit-you ones). That said, they are not introduced with anything like the same frequency as the weapons, and bosses are, all too often, basically just a big version of a minion type enemy. Even so, the combat gets quite stressful and strategic when you are swarmed by gasbags and squirts.

You could argue that, at its core, Bastion is derivative and you would justified in doing so. It’d be a shame though, because the game has been executed with such finesse. The style is quite enchanting (I won’t spoil anything more), and the simple combat works really well. I enjoy hacking you will enjoy Bastion. If you also enjoy slashing? Well. Go for it.  [8]