Bastion and Big Companies
I was gonna play From Dust this week but sadly my router screwed me and I was left almost gameless for a good two hours. So instead I called up my bro from last week and asked if he'd gotten anything new. Bastion lept forth from his mouth and I was in my car and over in minutes. My mate was busy with a coding assignment and I was reserved to being quiet and to only have the sound of the music up a little bit. As a writer, the conditions were not uncommon, but still I decided to write something good this week...well, objectively good.
The game starts off and the loading screen looks like someone trying to uncover elvish ruins and then the narrator speaks and it is glorious. I want to fall asleep to this man's voice cradling me and telling me every story known to man and I want to serve under his every golden voiced whim...but I keep playing the game and it is incredible in every way imaginable, without him holding me.
I start off with a gigantic hammer, which in the book of gaming, almost all great characters have gigantic hammers. Super Mario, Ramona Flowers, Tomba and now Bastion, and you can destroy everything in your path. Blocks just crumple under the weight of mighty hammer. You are Thor's tiny narrated brother and your whim is the world's way. So yeah, the game is a highly stylised, beautifully narrated and cleverly designed hack and slash.
The narration is not only soothing but it's helpful. In a comparative note, you would have Portal's GlaDOS, a mean-spirited but contextually justified character voice, whilst Bastion's narrator is calming but casually reassuring as the game's linear world forms around you, so does his words, creating an audible scenery to match the colourful block-filled world.
The collectables in the game, other than your weaponry, are tiny little crystals, which at first seem fairly arbitrary, but become incredibly useful regarding the RPG elements later on and even finding them is half the fun. The landscape forms beneath your feet and as such, secret areas will pop up by just wondering around and leading you in a path of danger or delight. Also destroying blocks around you, free-form GTA style will find a few more bits of fun and a lovely bit of narration, such as "The Kids just rages for a while...", I smile with delight and continue to punch the B button.
The difficulty curve of the game is interesting to say the least, but using the right weapons, skills and heals you can get yourself through any battle with the salty voice of the narrator peppering you through the worlds.
The RPG elements of the game really help with adding a bit of flavour to the game. The elements range from little things such as levelling up to building brand new places on the Bastion such as a forgery and distillery. The distillery promotes some minor underage drinking musings but nothing harmful...as long as a kid doesn't know what a distillery is. The forgery brings you new weapons so you can kick more arse and before you know it, you're hacking and slashing like never before unless you fall off the edge of the floating world...which happens a lot.
When you die, you fall into the Bastion. It's a beautifully green landscape. The call of a crow, the hum of the cicadas i nwhat looks like the freshest brightest spring day you've ever seen and somewhere standing on a golden and freshly cut pasture...is someone simply called Stranger...the narrator calls, he finds "another...he finds me", you can actually talk to the narrator and a beautiful guitar melody begins to play. Something akin to Neil Young or early Willie Nelson and I just want to sit here and turn up the soundtrack. It's monumental and oddly moving, but I must continue my quest. But actually it's here where the greatest plot element is revealed. It's a bit of a spoiler so if you want you can just play the first 30 minutes of the game or the demo and just wait for the words "subtlety is key".
Upon plot-assisted-death or what anyone who played the first Silent Hill and understood the opening without going, "Dude, wtf do I have to die, srsly, lame?!" the Bastion is essentially an overworld that actually helps you to different parts of the game world. The world itself acts as a land slowly growing and renewing, much like the game's landscapes during the gameplay. It's a beautiful landscape in a beautifully constructed game.
Subtlety is key here...with people who are made of ash, who when you smash to pieces the narrator gives a minor backstory to them and you either go "Sorry, my fault", or you chuckle unevenly. The game's key is playing with established video game and narration tropes and playing them with and against the player. Whilst some bits of narration and gameplay are expected, they're played into the story and atmospheric strengths, except for a few minor naming issues...such as "Something Heavy" and "Something Stringy", which I find lacking in creativity rather than subtley humourous, but I'll get to my gripes later.
Healing in the game is represented by fountains and tonics and the first time you hear the narrator talk about it, it seems real and almost like an advertisement for a fictional drink with the tagline "Sometimes you need a drink"...take all my money, now, magical narrator man.
"And then he falls to his death...I'm just foolin'" had me laughing so hard I annoyed my friend anough to throw a wireless mouse at me. I returned it sullenly and was told to keep writing or otherwise he'd not take my job as seriously. My friend is a coder and his work is serious business, whilst I takka takka away.
Some of the story elements, whilst almost non-sequitor like adds to the feel of the world. I'd use the word atmosphere a lot, but I did last week so I'm just gonna write the words Shabadoo instead. The Shabadoo works so well in this game that the little embers that burn in the opening world and the creatures you encounter seem to just add so much more to the game than just the narrator's voice. The crafting of the character and the narrative elements and how they seem to drip slowly and poignantly like water from a tap into a long deep echoing well makes for one hell of a Shabadoo-ic experience.
Weaponry such as The Fang Repeater, a shark-looking weapon - that's right SHARK-LOOKING - and the Breaker Bow - which the narrator tells you after you fall on it - "it breaks his fall, but it ain't broken - is given to you and the narrator professes delicately how they should be used. Not mockingly, not annoyingly, just subtlely with a bit of an onscreen flash of a button tutorial. This is barely half an hour in to the game and you're just riding the wave and the Shabadoo of the experience - that'll become clearer later on . You're just into the narrator's voice and the mood of the game; you just feel like it's right, that the gun or the voice will never steer you wrong...and this is where my first problem comes into the game. Nothing to with the gameplay or the game itself, this is where I'll become mildly analytical and you can tune out till I write the words, 'so the game'.
The tone of the game is strictly, speaking all over the place. Whilst thematically, there is little to draw on from the get-go, the game's style and over-arching story-based narrator-heavy theme leaves me high and dry sometimes, but the gameplay and humour just slides me back into a forgiving mode. I'm not sure what Bastion wants to say about games or narrative or characters or if they creators wanna say anything at all...all I want to say is that the game is amazing looking, great to play and also structurally beautiful...literally.
So the game does a lot of things amazingly and I've found the testament of a true game is that it keeps me wanting more of it. Resident Evil 4, LA Noire, Plants vs. Zombies and Half Life 2 all have kept me - and a million other gamers like me - wanting more and more like a battered lover. The look of the game just is amazing from the character design, overworld and parchment style menu design, the game has a very distinct style like a mix between nature-based artwork and naturalistic writing.
Like last week's Audio Team for Dead Island, this week's Handshake Award goes to the Design team for Bastion as they have created stunning architecture which is both eye-catching and never boring, some points in the game I feel bad for a micro-second for destroying things with a gigantic hammer.
A repetitious soundtrack - which isn't annoying - pumps in a lovely low bass as I pause the game, continue to type and it doesn't annoy my mate. The game has heaps of tracks and they all do follow a fairly similar progression but it never gets on your nerves. My mate was trying to code quietly and calmly, but when I pause so he can focus, he just grooves and hums along with it. We smile and clink our drinks together and go back to our prospective mediums, his "real work", my....uh...this. The slow strings of a guitar whine in as I enter a saloon, the narration is slow, perfect and much like this sentence ends on a sarcastic but humourous note, damn.
Falling off is an inconvenience, but is even greater so when dodging an enemies attack. The game treats death like "it ain't no thang", but really that "thang" does become quite annoying after a while when you wish you hadn't destroyed the barrier around the land looking for more crystals to level up your stuff. Aiming can also be a serious pain in the arse. You may be a fraction of a degree off and end up wasting a Fang shot or two or just simply miss a crucial shot instead of healing and it's Game Minor Inconvenience for you, buddy.
Whilst the enemies are fairly varied, they all have two or three attacks and one of them is a strictly "Come at me bro" strategy, to just run directly at you, you can usually expect it, but it does become mildly annoying.
The voice for The Kid is mildly unfitting, I imagine more of a young Link voice, but he sounds like a whiny 20 year old who just found out he's got a term paper due in a fortnight. There are more unexplained things such as where do my weapons go when I obtain new ones and why couldn't I switch them out with the D-Pad and when I defeat the big Gas guy in the second area how all those guy love me and then disappear...I want them to be my slaves and to build a posse rather than turning up randomly...well I did free them...maybe I shouldn't have slaves...slaves are bad.
Picture of THE MORE YOU KNOW (with Kirby)
The life point system for enemies is a intriguingly redesigned circle beneath the NPC and disappears with every swift ring of the hammer towards it. Bastion is not a perfect game and whilst the experience is enjoyable some minor things like the AI being too easy, a lack of co-op, a slightly meh RPG, XP system and a leaderboard system (something I've personally never cared for) do not keep this game from being perfect, but just feeling a bit undercooked. I wish the game was a bit more creative or exciting in those elements.
I know I spent a good 90% of this article praising the heavenly voiced angel which descends into our mortal audio realm, but maybe having a secondary voice or another voice to play off would have been interesting. A finely-tuned weapons upgrade system, rather than just pictures and purchasing. Buying stuff in-game almost always makes me feel cheap. Oh and according to the game, you fly to each of the Skyway levels...I would have loved to have seen a bit of that, even in an opening cut scene.
Actually that being said I'm glad there are no cut-scenes in this game, it would have ruined the flow and fun...but flying would have been nice and interesting, but maybe a bit too much. To be honest, when I find flaws in a game I know it's just apart of me, not as a reviewer, but just knowing my tastes vs. knowing my standards as a gamer. I feel at a loss when I see potential and finances wasted on mediocrity.
And Bastion is not mediocre, it could be better, everything could be better, I could be a hell of a lot better...what I'm saying is...I just want a Bastion 2, I want to meet the developers and thank them and I wanna work on anything they make in the future, if they'll have me...and I know that's asking a lot. It's like asking for a shark to borrow it's gills and to be bros or for a volcano to not erupt and to be quiet, but I do love this game and I expect more amazing things from these guys.
Games like Bastion rarely get everything right and I do have to commend Warner Brothers for publishing a title, letting it be made and it being amazing in almost every domain. It's rare that a game will inspire me or at least enlighten me, entertain me and brighten up my day like Bastion does, the only other games I can think of similarly is the visual poetry of Flower or the blocky-creativity of Minecraft. The narrative, gameplay and music fit so perfectly together, you'd think three pieces had been scattered across the globe and the developers had put them together perfectly. So I do implore you, nay, beg of you to get this game on XBLA or Steam, it's worth every single dollar as I want these guys to make another game or for the narrator to come to my house and give me a lecture about quantum mechanics and their relation to the Futurama Universe.
Why you should play Bastion and why Warner Bros. publishing may be the next big thing.
