So the player has to go in and take it from the animals, which really just means committing mass murder against them so you can steal an artifact that is, by all rights, totally theirs. They need objects of power in the same way that The Kid does. When searching for a Shard, which is a powerful artifact thing, it is explained by the Narrator that the animals of the wilderness have decided to make their own Bastion. That said, there is some fucked-up logic going on in one stage of the game. The inability to acknowledge that those stones might not want to live the life they have been sold into is interesting (and probably something for an object-oriented ethicist who cares about video games to cite as an example).ģ. It is revealed in quarry level that the Cores and Shards are rocks with memories, and while it isn’t stated explicitly, I took that to mean that the power source of the Cores comes from the vitality of the stones. It is pretty special.Īdditionally, there was also a moment of sadness about the nonhuman here. We talk about video games as being ways of telling new stories or at least allowing people to branch out into new narrative spaces–here is a game where nonhuman objects are given agency and action, in a universe where the physical laws allow that to happen. Similarly, a rail line in a later level is described in the same way. Nellie is a character as much as anything else. She takes off and moves on her own, and when she dies in flames, the music gets sad. For example, Nellie is a skybarge who is very much treated like she is alive. Nonhuman objects have agency and presence attached to both their physical, material being and their “spirit” or something like it. The Kid, so enveloped by his mission, will do anything to get to the Core and make sure it reaches The Bastion.Ģ. Rather, this is a brilliant moment in the game’s design. I’m not invoking player action versus diegetic action to talk about why story is bad in games (there is too much of that shit already). Smashing through these people would be difficult for The Kid, since he knew them, but for me it was merely another click in a series of clicks. Before this moment, the ever-present Narrator told you the names of numerous victims of The Calamity that The Kid had come upon. It didn’t, of course, and in order to get to the Core the player has to smash through these ashes. What sets me off about this is that the people, in their dying moments, thought that the Core might save them. The Bastion is a giant machine-space that serves as the central hub for all the game’s missions. The protagonist, known as The Kid, is searching for things called Cores in order to render The Bastion powerful. The Calamity, a disaster that destroyed an entire civilization, did so by fracturing the ground and reducing the citizens to ashes. It is fairly early in the game, maybe a quarter through. Īs always, there are SPOILERS for the game here.ġ. If all you want from this is my stamp of approval, text adventure style, then. I can say here, right at the top, that I liked the game. I don’t have anything particularly amazing to say, but I do have some thoughts that I will enumerate below. In any case, something clicked with me this time, and I just spent four hours of my life playing through Bastion. Maybe I like the PC controls more than I like the Xbox controller. So I paid my $10 and went indie, getting Bastion as part of the sweet deal. I will normally wait for some kind of sale to buy most titles, be they AAA or indie or whatever. Of the new Humble Bundle games, the only one I owned was Amnesia, which I played about ten minutes of and turned off in a joint boredom and complete terror. It is super-rare for me to buy a game on launch day–I can think of three in the past year that I have purchased on launch ( MF 3, ME 3, and Dear Esther). Last week, Humble Indie Bundle V came out, and all my dreams came true. That isn’t the end of my Bastion story, though. I dismissed it and went back to playing whatever the hell I was playing at the time. I wasn’t good at blocking (this is a common thing for me across all games). I didn’t like that I fell off the bloody map trying to dodge cheap enemies over and over. I downloaded the demo, played the thirty minutes or so that was included, and then deleted the demo. I read all of the push about the game, about how it was beautiful, about loss and gain, and that the Narrator was adaptive to what the player did. It was last summer, I think, when the demo showed up on Live. So I didn’t like Bastion the first time that I tried it.
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