Bastion
By Supergiant Games, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Genre: Action RPG
Caelondia. Once a country by degrees gritty and industrious, but also beautiful and idyllic. That all changed when the Calamity struck. Something caused the world to simply shatter, its people turned to statues of ash, with no hope of repair, and so the ending to this tale comes before the beginning…
That is, until the Kid comes along. Waking up in the Wharfs district on the edge of Caelondia, he finds the world around him disheveled, incomplete; he finds the walls and floors flying to meet his feet as he walks. Somehow he alone has been saved from this Calamity; with the aid of the ever-present Rucks, also serving as faithful narrator, the Kid must journey to the Bastion and recreate it with the cores, or load-bearing trinkets, belonging to the areas which he finds.
The road won’t be easy. Battling vicious ghosts, slimes and other RPG standbys and collecting fragments of the old world (which serve as your currency!), you upgrade weapons that you find in your journeys, but they seem to keep coming, and the treacherous landscape means you can fall off the world with the slightest misstep. Follow Rucks’ narrative and advice, and you should be able to get out of this mess alive, and you may discover other survivors of the Calamity…
Again the oldschool aesthetic rings true for this game. The graphics are very polished, but nothing an early PlayStation 2 game couldn’t do. The action is pure old-school RPG, reminiscent of the World of Mana series for the consoles. You level up, increasing your maximum HP, strength and defense; you find items (the aforementioned Cores), such as in Legend of Mana, that expand the functionality of your home base, the Bastion; and you can visit proving grounds every so often that train and challenge your use of the weapons you find.
The narrative is unlike any we’ve experienced in gaming before, being consistently delivered to us by the grizzled, rusty old Rucks, who seems to think this is a Western-themed adventure. You may come to think he’s annoying, but he adds a fresh tone that makes you think about the proceedings more than most games.
So, if you’re interested in guiding the Kid through the shattered lands of his home, trying to salvage it and taking in a grand adventure along the way, try this game! Five out of five!