It’s been a while since I finished Bastion. With mixed feelings, and only after some retrospective contemplation can I attempt to get some thoughts down on paper, namely that I’m giving it too much thought.
Bastion is a deceitfully un-complex game. The colors saturate the details of each brushstrokes, which are serenaded by a nostalgic narrator who hums a seemingly familiar story that is heard rather than listened. The entire journey feels like an ethereal dream where the ending is as gently faded out to mute as the beginning was in its crescendo, and what happened curtains into emptiness.
At its heart, Bastion is a dungeon exploration game infused with a Zelda-like responsiveness to its action: machetes are madly swung as it should and mortar cannons cranks, aims, and impacts all within the tight control of the player. The immediacy and the familiarity of the mechanics give an intuitive natural symbiotic relationship so that buttons are no longer mapped on a controller to control the animation of some pixels on the screen, but rather the moves have evolved right under the player’s fingertips. You are the puppeteer pulling the strings of the bow, and the impact is more directly innervated than any full motion controller can ever imitate.
Its immediacy can be misconstrued as simplicity. The simplicity comes as a result of the mechanics being so naturally familiar, but the complexity and depth is regrettably absent. Instead of organically enabling the mechanics and the designs to evolve the simple idea of a sword strike into something with complexity, the system adds layers of artificiality through achievement points and purchased abilities. The player doesn’t become better along with The Kid. The Kid becomes better because he was able to buy some points to apply to some statistics. And the game has unfortunately trapped its achievements with an achievement system.
But Bastion is not meant to be taken so seriously. The one-liner story evokes an entertaining response rather than actually involves the player in a thought-provoking and thrilling narrative that’s actually supposed to make sense in some existential level. The story is a hum underneath the experience: you hear it, you enjoy it, but you don’t actually process the words.
Ultimately, Bastion is thoroughly enjoyable in every sense of the word. It’s a throwback to a time when games are not so obsessed with its theatrics and its resemblance to a movie. You play this game to enter the rabbit hole of a world that pops into place while an elderly man recounts your every move, and nothing else really matters. It’s a fantastic journey where, for a few hours, the player turns off his or her brain, relax, and watch a painting move.
Recommend: Yes