![]() ![]() This got really, really overbearing when I was trying to talk to the other characters who weren’t the narrator, since he did all the talking for them and – again – prevented me from building up a connection with any character that wasn’t him. ![]() ![]() The problem with it isn’t the fact that there’s narration per se, it’s that every interaction I made with the game was funnelled through this single character. The narrator’s voice acting is great and the dynamic nature of the narration is totally fine, since it really builds on the storybook feeling imparted by the visuals. ![]() Before the angry mob starts gathering outside my castle with flaming torches and pitchforks I should stress that I’m talking about the narrat or here, not the existence of the narration itself. Yes, I’m actually going to chalk up Bastion’s narrator as one of the things about the game that didn’t really work out. Considering the way things end this hurts the game a fair bit, and I think it’s at least partially down to the method the game uses to tell the story. There’s no attachment to the world that came before, no sense of loss for a civilisation that has been reduced to dust and echoes, and the game doesn’t even try to build up a connection with the few characters that did survive the apocalypse. This lets the player’s imagination fill in the blank spaces between the broad strokes of past the game does paint, but this comes at the cost of the story having little in the way of emotional resonance. Because Bastion is pure fantasy the game very wisely holds back on the fine detail, with almost no in-depth descriptions of what life was like before the cataclysm that destroyed the world. That leaves the Ugly and the Exceptional to talk about. These two aspects of Bastion ensured I forgave it the odd niggle – like the poorly-camouflaged linear nature of the game, or the fact that the X button triggered both my main attack and activated items in the game world often leading to my guy standing there flicking a switch back and forth while hordes of hungry blobs converged on his location – because the general ambience of the game was more than enough reason to keep on playing. The soundtrack too is an outstanding mixture of Middle Eastern styles with twangy, strummy guitar that evokes the Wild West, in keeping with the game’s pseudo-steampunk theme. It’s a testament to how intelligent art design can work together with gameplay to produce something magical, something that the ridiculous quest for photorealism in AAA titles cannot ever hope to match. Visually the game is a treat, with painterly landscapes that form themselves under the protagonist’s feet as he moves through a level. Where it does excel is pretty much everywhere else that matters. No, Bastion does not particularly excel in terms of innovative gameplay. This enemy can only be hurt if you hit it from behind! This enemy can only be hurt if you shoot it when its guard is down! These baddie tropes are as old as time itself, and so when it comes to its stock gameplay I’m not going to accuse Bastion of anything approaching imagination, because even though Bastion does what it does particularly well I’ve seen it all several dozen times before. There’s only a few enemy types in the game (that’s if you treat “plants” as a single enemy type, which I do) and while they’re all reasonably distinct in their behaviour and the tactics needed to defeat them they nearly all rely on hoary old gimmicks. Ranged attacks, melee attacks, the block button, the evade button – they’re all here and they all do pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Bastion is a charming little game with some hefty flaws but also some great ideas, and it’s one that’s put me in a very good mood for the rest of 2012.Īt its core Bastion is a fairly simple action RPG. I’m doubly glad that I went into it relatively ignorant of what it was actually about, because I suspect that if I’d actually listened to half of the gushing word-of-mouth opinions about it I wouldn’t have liked it half as much as I did. I’m glad Bastion was the first new game I played this year. ![]()
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