Quick Critique: Bastion (Patreon)

If you approach it as a game, Bastion is pretty disappointing. It's just not that fun and it's mostly combat that isn't interesting. If you approach it as just an interactive story, you'll probably have a good time. The problems stem from the feeling that you're just there to be the catalyst to move the main character through the story rather than actually being a part of it or enjoying the gameplay. The most frustrating part of the game is that it's inconsistent. The enemies' areas of attack aren't clear so you take damage from attacks that demonstrably did not touch you. Sometimes your ranged weapon auto-aims really well and you can roll around dodging and avoiding attacks, other times round after round after round will miss a slow enemy moving in a constant direction. The game automatically swaps your special move as you find new ones and you can't change it back unless you have a specific building in your town, which you won't have at the beginning of the game. The melee attack defaults to Circle, but if you're a decent human being, you''ll change that to Square; only one of the later levels automatically swaps a new weapon on Square, which left me with two bad ranged weapons instead of my melee attack. The game takes place on floating islands in the sky and the ground only appears when you get close to it. This leaves to a lot of situations where you don't know where the path will appear until you're close to falling off the edge. It doesn't really do much damage so it's just an annoyance rather than a real threat.

The ending is super disappointing. The final few levels are almost endless combat against some really tedious enemies, you're saddled with things that reduce your walking speed, and the story doesn't really go anywhere. The game seems to think the final moments have far more emotional impact than they actually do. I didn't know enough about the world to really care about it or the characters outside of what you play, and the "moral choice" moment at the end of the game is just silly because it presents you with two choices, but one of them is pointless. Slight spoilers, but you're given the choice to go back in time before the world destroying event, but your character wasn't involved with that event and had no relation to the people that caused it and as far as you know, was nowhere near where the event happened, so going back in time would do or solve nothing. If the main character was even remotely involved in the pre-game events, it could have been an interesting choice because then you'd have the choice of saving a racist hateful world but one filled with innocent people or trying to build a new world that's gotten over its problems at the cost of probably millions of dead people and society is left with some morally gray people to rebuild it. THAT is a choice. Go back in time so this will all happen again in an endless cycle versus moving ahead is not a choice.

Without not-Ron Perlman as the Narrator, there really isn't much to Bastion. On the one hand, that goes to show just how well they handled using the Narrator to tell the story. On the other hand, the gameplay is pretty shallow so it drags on anytime you're not getting new information out of it. I picked Bastion up for less than five bucks during one of Sony's flash sales, and that's probably the way to go. Pay full price and it's a pretty meh video game, but get it on the cheap and it's a fun comic book.