BASTION
Platform: Xbox Live Arcade
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Bastion is an isometric action RPG for the Xbox Live Arcade, the first of this year’s “Summer of Arcade” promotion package. As such, it’s short and inexpensive—1200 Microsoft Points, or about $20. It’s also very well done, up until the very end.

First, the graphics. I don’t usually discuss graphics because I’ve been bored of the topic since I was reading game magazines in my teens, and because most games have well-executed graphics at this point, but Bastion‘s graphics aren’t just well-executed; they’re well-conceived. The game’s conceit is it’s set in the broken remains of a floating continent-spanning city, destroyed in “the Calamity,” and the protagonist (the Kid) has a McGuffin that holds some of the power the city used to keep itself together, so the levels build themselves as the Kid goes through them, passages and stairways assembling in front of him. I especially want to congratulate the designers on putting the levels together so they self-assemble but you can still tell where you’re supposed to go.

The whole thing is made to look a bit like watercolors, or at least the digital painting style so popular on the Internet these days. It’s something to see.

Gameplay is well-done. The Kid has access to two weapon slots and a total of eleven weapons over the course of the game—each weapon he equips is mapped to X or B. Weapons are usually melee or ranged, although a few of the melee weapons, like the spear and the machete, can be thrown. All the weapons behave differently and each can be upgraded five times, and every upgrade for every weapon unlocks a slot for one of two mutually-exclusive options, which you can switch between for free at your home base. By the end of the game there’s a lot of tactical depth—lots of different ways to outfit your character to face different situations, and enemy behavior is sufficiently complex and synergistic that different levels benefit from completely different loadouts. Unfortunately, the very last part of the last level gives you a new weapon you’ve never used before, which replaces both the weapons you brought with you, and that bit does not play very well. However, up until the very last sequence it plays very well.

There’s also a New Game Plus mode that lets you play through the whole game again using whatever upgrades with which you ended your first playthrough. This is handy because there are two endings.

And that brings us to the story. Bastion is one of the few games that I actually cared about the story as I was playing through it. Long ago, I cared about story in video games, but years of games with stories that are absolutely crap by any metric external to the medium have left me burned out on the topic—though I’ll still gladly wax eloquent on atmosphere and ambience, which games can do better than any other medium I can think of. But Bastion not only has great ambiance, it’s also small and short enough that the creators were able to put together the story they seemed to want to tell, without whole acts and plot twists getting cut because the money ran out for the art assets for the levels those things were going to take place on. The whole thing is presented by an unreliable narrator who varies his narration based on your in-game actions. I don’t want to say much more about it than I have already, because it’s good enough on the whole that it deserves not to be spoiled. But, I will say that, like the gameplay, it sort of falls apart at the end, with some unfortunate subtext I’ll leave you to discover for yourselves.

My concerns about the last twenty minutes aside, Bastion is a great game and worthy of your attention.

Previously – Alice: Madness Returns

STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD