Bastion: He Steals the City’s heart. Might as Well.
Bastion is a textbook example of a game — like Braid or Cave Story — that encourages critical analysis off the bat. The story happening as you play the game, as well as the choices you make throughout it, truly makes the player feel at home within the story. You form an emotional bond with the characters and places. The final choice is truly difficult, as it has a genuine impact on these people you’ve formed bonds with by playing through the game. There’s some deeper artistic or philosophical statement.
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Bastion, a lesson in interactive storytelling. Instead of presenting the player with a wall of text or a beginning cut scene with expository dialogue, Bastion presents its narrative during the course of gameplay. As you progress through the game, the narrator unravels the story, telling pieces only as they become relevant to your adventure. This keeps the story engaging and memorable as you truly feel that you’re living it out. The game features three optional arena-style side games where you fight waves of enemies and learn about one of the few characters in the game through the narrator. This makes learning about the character’s motives a reward in itself due solely to the fact that the story telling is so engaging.
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The compelling story, and absolutely outstanding soundtrack should make this game an instant purchase for everybody. The Calamity is where the artistry of the game comes in. Your character — the Cormac McCarthian “Kid” — wanders through an already destroyed world, not entirely sure where to go except forward. As you walk forward, pieces of stone, grass, earth, etc. fill in before you, creating paths through the levels and onward through the narrative as well. He has the most counters out of all heroes in the game, including quite a bit of hard counters. He’s big and immobile, and has no defensive or escape abilities, and requires the team to babysit him all the time.
The Kid’s ability to recreate the destroyed land around him is coupled with The Stranger’s or Rucks’ narration, which overlays the entirety of the game, often in past tense. As the authors, Dušan Stamenković and Milan Jaćević, explore the link between the game’s narrative and its gameplay mechanics based on the TIME IS SPACE/MOTION metaphor, Bastion game, despite being played in real-time, takes on the appearance of a painting being constructed bit by bit. The Kid has already done everything you’re doing, and Rucks is retelling it as you perform the recursive actions of his story.
