Bastion (video game)

The Kid fights in a floating, grassy ruin, aiming a bow at a monster. The interface shows the player's health, experience, collected fragments, selected weapons and special skill, and number of health and black tonics.

Bastion is an action role-playing game with a level structure. The player character, "the Kid", moves through floating, fantasy-themed environments that form paths as the player approaches the edge. Levels consist of a single plane, and are viewed isometrically. They are filled with enemies of various types, which attempt to harm the Kid.[1] The Kid carries two weapons, which may be selected from the choices available to the player at specific locations called arsenals.[2] The Kid also has the ability to perform a special attack. Weapons and special attacks must be acquired before they can be used.[1] There are a limited number of special attacks that the player can perform at any time, represented by "black tonics" that can be found in the levels or dropped from enemies. Special attacks may be used a total of three times. This maximum number of uses can be increased in the Distillery. The Kid's health is represented by a health bar, which can be replenished with "health tonics". Like black tonics, the Kid can only carry a certain number of health tonics at a time, and can replenish them by finding more in the levels.[3]

Levels contain many different environment types, including cities, forests, and bogs.[4] At the end of most levels, the player collects an item called a core or a shard;[1] occasionally, the level begins to disintegrate once the Kid takes the item, forcing him to hastily retreat. As the player progresses through the levels, a voice narrates their actions. This narration gives scripted plot information as well as dynamic comments, such as on the player's skill with a weapon or performance while fighting enemies.[4]

Between levels, the Kid visits the Bastion, where the player can use fragments—the game's form of currency—that they have accrued to buy materials and upgrade weapons. With each core the player collects, they can add one of six structures to the Bastion, such as a shrine, an armory, or a distillery, and each shard allows the player to expand a structure. Each structure serves a different purpose; for example, the distillery lets the player select upgrades, and the shrine allows the player to choose idols of the gods to invoke, causing the enemies to become stronger and giving the player increased experience points and currency.[5] Experience points are used to determine the Kid's ability level; higher values give the player more health and increase the number of upgrades they can select.[4]

Whenever the player leaves the Bastion, they can choose between one or two regular levels to play. In addition to these levels, however, the Kid can engage in challenge courses designed to test the player's skills with the weapons the player has found.[4] They are called Proving Grounds. The challenges differ depending on the weapon, such as destroying a certain number of objects within a given time or breaking targets in the fewest shots possible. According to the player's score, different tiers of prizes are awarded. Additionally, the Kid can fight waves of enemies while the narrator tells a character's backstory by journeying to "Who Knows Where" from the Bastion. The back story battles occur during 'Memories.' The player earns fragments and experience for each completed wave.[6] After the game is completed, the player can choose to begin a "new game+" mode, where the player replays through the game while keeping the experience points, fragments, and weapons that they have gained. This mode also offers more options in the buildings, as well as two more journeys to "Who Knows Where".[7]

The game takes place in the aftermath of the Calamity, a catastrophic event that suddenly fractured the city of Caelondia (/seɪˈlɒndiə/) as well as the surrounding areas of the game's world into many floating pieces, disrupting its ecology and reducing most of its people to ash. Players take control of the Kid, a silent protagonist who awakens on one of the few remaining pieces of the old world and sets off for the eponymous Bastion, where everyone was supposed to go in troubled times.[8] The only survivor he meets there is an elderly man named Rucks, the game's narrator, who instructs him to collect the Cores that once powered Caelondia. A device in the Bastion can use the power of the crystalline Cores to create landmasses and structures, as well as enable the Kid to travel farther afield via "skyways" that propel him through the air.[9]

During his quest, the Kid meets two more survivors: Zulf, an ambassador from the Ura, underground-dwelling people with whom Caelondia was once at war; and Zia, an Ura girl who was raised in Caelondia. Both of them return to the Bastion, but upon reading a journal that the Kid discovers, Zulf intentionally damages parts of the Bastion's central device (the monument) and returns to Ura territory.[10] The Kid learns that the journal belonged to Zia's father, Venn, who had worked for the Caelondians. He had helped Caelondian scientists ("Mancers") build a weapon intended to destroy the Ura completely to prevent another war. Venn rigged the weapon to backfire, so that when he was finally forced to trigger it, the resulting Calamity destroyed most of Caelondia as well.[11][12]

To repair Zulf's damage to the Bastion, the Kid starts collecting Shards, a lesser form of Cores. As he obtains the penultimate shard needed, the Ura attack the Bastion, damaging it and abducting Zia.[13] In the next seven days, The Kid engages in sporadic skirmishes in Ura territory. When he finally blasts through an Ura outpost and meets Zia, she tells him that she had left with the Ura voluntarily to find out their intentions;[14] Rucks had previously told Zia that the Bastion had the ability to somehow fix the Calamity.[15] The Kid travels to the once-underground Ura homeland to retrieve the last shard.[16] There, he discovers Zulf being attacked by his own people: the battle with the Kid has devastated the Ura forces, and they blame Zulf for bringing the Kid to their home.[17] The Kid can choose to drop his weapon to help Zulf or leave him.[18] If he leaves Zulf behind, the Kid destroys the remnants of the Ura and escapes through a skyway. If he chooses to carry Zulf, Ura archers initially open fire on them but ultimately cease fire and watch silently as the Kid and Zulf take the skyway back to the Bastion.

After the Kid returns and recovers, Rucks gives him another choice: He can have the Bastion rewind time to before the Calamity in the hopes of preventing it, or use it to evacuate the survivors and move on to somewhere safe.[19] Rucks is unsure if there is any way to prevent the Calamity from reoccurring if the time is rewound, as there was no way to test the process.[20] The game ends either way, showing images of the characters (with the inclusion of Zulf if the player chose to rescue him) flying away or of their lives before the Calamity along with the credits.[21] In the New Game+ mode, which is unlocked after beating the game once, it is hinted that restoring the world didn't prevent the Calamity.[22][23]

Director Amir Rao at the March 2012 Game Developers Conference

Bastion was created by a team of seven people, who composed the studio Supergiant Games. It was the company's first game. The game was directed by Amir Rao and Greg Kasavin wrote the game's narration, which was spoken by Logan Cunningham. Jen Zee was the artist, Gavin Simon developed the gameplay, Andrew Wang helped develop the game, and Darren Korb handled the sound effects and music. The co-founders of Supergiant Games, Rao and Simon, previously worked for Electronic Arts, where they helped develop Command & Conquer 3 and Red Alert 3.[24] They left to form the studio because they wanted the development speed and the ability to try new ideas that would be possible with a smaller team. Development began on the game in September 2009.[25] The team created the game over almost two years, and funded the development themselves.[24] Most of the team built the game in a house in San Jose, though the music and voice acting were recorded in New York City.[25] Some of the San Jose designers—including the writer—did not meet Rucks' voice actor in person until near the release of the game.[26] The team spent the first nine months of development prototyping various ideas, before settling on the game's design.[25]

Composer Darren Korb at the March 2012 Game Developers Conference

The original idea was based around the premise of creating a town like those found in a role-playing game.[25] The team chose the design elements of a fractured, floating world due to their wish to portray a sky in the game, which is usually not possible with an isometric camera, as it always points down. They also wanted to forgo a map system, and felt that having the ground come up to the Kid allowed the player to easily see without a map where they had already been in a level. The story of the Calamity was created as a way to explain this game mechanic.[26] Jen Zee developed the art style of the game to express beauty in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The hand-painted style was intended to soften the sharpness she saw as typical in isometric games and the colorless, harsh depictions of most devastated landscapes. Zee was inspired by the pixel art landscapes of earlier Japanese isometric games.[25]

The narrator was added early in the game's development as a way to provide background details and depth to the world without requiring the player to read long strings of text or wait through cutscenes. To avoid slowing the pace of the action-oriented gameplay, the team had the narrator mainly speak in short, evocative phrases, with long pauses between speaking parts.[26] The narrator is intended to feel like an "old acquaintance" to the player, a connection built by his commentary on the player's actions as they happen, both major and minor. Kasavin sought to make the game feel as if it were the player's story, rather than just a story being watched.[25] The development of Bastion was chronicled in the monthly Building the Bastion video series from October 2010 to May 2011 in which Supergiant Games collaborated with Kasavin's former GameSpot co-workers at Giant Bomb. The videos showed early game concepts in addition to the process of building the final game, as well as interviews with the team.[27]

Supergiant Games showed an early, unplayable version of the game at the March 2010 Game Developers Conference, to little acclaim. They debuted a playable version of the game at the September 2010 Penny Arcade Expo, where it was well received. After a strong showing at the March 2011 Game Developers Conference, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment signed on to publish and distribute the game.[28] This publishing agreement lasted until September 2019, when Supergiant Games took over as publisher on all platforms.[29] The team decided to partner with a publisher in order to get through the process of Xbox Live certification.[30] Bastion was released on July 20, 2011 for Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA), and on August 16, 2011 for digital distribution on Windows through Steam.[31][32] It was released as a browser game for Google Chrome on December 9, 2011.[33] A version for Mac OS X was made available via the Mac App Store on April 26, 2012 along with a SteamPlay update for Mac OS X and Windows.[34] Ports followed for PlayStation 4 on April 7, 2015, PlayStation Vita on December 5, 2015, Xbox One on December 12, 2016, and Nintendo Switch on September 13, 2018.

Bastion was released to strong sales and critical acclaim. The game sold more than 500,000 copies during 2011, 200,000 of which were for the Xbox Live Arcade.[49][50] In March 2013 at the PAX East gaming convention, Bastion's creative director Greg Kasavin stated that the game had sold more than 1.7 million copies combined across all platforms.[51] By May 2014, the game had sold over 2 million copies,[52] and by January 2015, it had sold over 3 million.[53] Bob Mackey of 1UP.com called it "the perfect mesh of game and story", and McKinley Noble of GamePro said that it "raises the visual and narrative bar for downloadable titles".[45][47] Maxwell McGee of GameSpot called it "wonderfully crafted" and "an amazingly good time", and Greg Miller of IGN concluded that Bastion "is amazing and you owe it to yourself to download it".[5][7]

The presentation of the game was widely praised, especially the narration. Mackey said that the game "could be sold on its presentation alone", focusing on the graphics, music, and story.[45] Edge said that the narration added "emotional resonance" to the game, and Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer praised the "dazzling visuals" and "artful commentary".[1][46] Game Informer's Matt Miller highlighted "the well-written narration, excellent music, and bright visuals" as factors that made the game feel "like a storybook in which you control the outcome."[4] Of the presentation elements, the story was the least praised, though several reviewers such as Noble enjoyed it, saying that it "just gets better the further you delve into it."[47] Ryan Scott of GameSpy, however, termed it a "just-sorta-there plot", and Greg Miller said that it "could have been better" and never "hooked" him.[2][7]

Reviewers had a more mixed opinion of the gameplay. Mackey praised the variety of gameplay elements and said that combat has "a deceptive amount of depth", but Bramwell felt that the combat did not "invite experimentation" and was somewhat disappointing.[1][45] Edge said that the gameplay was "more interested in variety than challenge", for which he praised it, and Matt Miller said that combat was "a lot of fun", though he felt it lacked "the depth, speed, or complexity of a true action game".[4][46] Greg Miller highlighted the variety of the gameplay as the best part of the game, and Scott called it "enjoyable", though not "challenging".[2][7]

• Official website