Cruise Elroy

If Bastion falters anywhere — and I’m not sure it does — it’s at the beginning.

The hyper-streamlined action RPG mechanics are slick and well-crafted, but retread familiar ground. The early plot development is vague to the point of meaninglessness. The much-hyped dynamic narration feels gimmicky, making snide comments when you wander off the edge of a cliff or overuse the dodge button and occasionally reaching for pathos that the story doesn’t yet support. Ambivalent, I stopped playing after about two hours.

Then I began to notice that literally every other person I know who has played Bastion can’t stop talking about it. I went back to it, and in another hour everything had clicked. Not only that, but I somehow found myself retroactively pleased with the beginning of the game and couldn’t imagine wanting to change anything.

My delay in appreciating Bastion is wholly attributable to its deliberate pacing. The gameplay feels shallow because it is — until the weapons and enemies and spirits and idols start rolling in. Similarly, the plot is delivered via a gradual accumulation of detail; it takes a bit before there’s a large enough corpus to start connecting the dots. The narrator’s blend of world-weary crypticness and casual familiarity slowly coalesces into the game’s soul; by the end, even the loading screen factoids seem incongruously matter-of-fact.

My ex post facto enjoyment of the opening mirrors Bastion’s great narrative trick: recontextualizing your past actions in light of a major plot decision. Nathan Grayson, for Maximum PC:

For many reasons (narration, innovative usage of music, etc), Bastion is the type of story only a videogame can tell. However, the biggest of them – in my eyes – is that it can so effectively put me in two entirely different, largely opposite states of mind. Bastion can shift the ideals and motivations behind every action I perform, and – more importantly – it can make me believe in them.

Bastion accomplishes this, Grayson argues, through consistency and restraint, which seem like as good an explanation as any. It’s the narrative equivalent of the ground flying up to meet your step; any direction you choose feels like the right one.

(This site being what it is, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the music. It is, in a word, fantastic, and is unlike any game soundtrack I’ve heard. Composer Darren Korb calls the genre “acoustic frontier trip-hop,” but even that seems too narrow for the variety of styles he’s appropriated. I don’t have an angle for any deep-dive analysis — not yet, anyway — so for now I’ll just recommend that you listen to it. It’s my favorite game soundtrack of the year, and very listenable as a standalone work. More on it later, perhaps.)