Bastion Editorials

Supergiant Games’ Bastion seems to have generated a rare interest in the press, as the action-RPG, besides receiving a fair bit of critical acclaim, has also been the subject of a slew of editorials, two of which we’re now reporting on.

First, Rock, Paper, Shotgun‘s Alec Meer explains why he felt sad that the game ended and didn’t want to replay it (be warned, it contains spoilers for the game narrative):

There are three Bastions. There’s the game on my screen, the game in my ears and the game in my head. The second of these is, I think, the most powerful. I don’t know whether the Stranger’s narration was always in the design brief, or added later when other expository techniques were deemed to have failed. Either way, it transforms the game. It’s the Portal effect, to some extent a potentially untrustworthy narrator talking to you at all times, and your only guide to what’s going on whether or not you put your faith in him. Kid’s got no place else to go.

Even having finished the game, I don’t know whether I trust The Stranger/Ruck. He has noble intentions, but at some point before that he had dark intentions; he claims to be trying to fix the damage he helped wreak, the accidental genocide of his own people as a result of deliberate attempted genocide of another, but he takes his damn time sharing any of this. He takes even longer to reveal that even if he can fix it, the cost will be terrible and the original tragedy might just happen all over again. On his orders, I kill so many of the creatures I’m working to save. It’s for the greater good, he says. I listen. He has a warm, knowing voice. He sounds exactly like a frontier hero should sound. He knows more me about me than I do, whether from straight-up wisdom or a strange, secret link he’s not sharing. I have my theories. We all have our theories. I listen. He talks all the time, but he never says too much each phrase is a blessing of brevity, loaded with subtext and ambiguity. Kid could listen to him all day.

But I don’t trust him, not for one second. I’ll do what he says, of course. I have no choice. There’s nothing else to do. His voice in my ear spurs me on. The soundtrack, an immediately memorably, immediately affecting hybrid of old West, old East and something new, something electronic, something dark, something adventurous, spurs me on too. I have listened to it many times since. Parts of it echo around my skull all day. Kid can’t hardly sleep for the music he hears all the time. Kid knows it’s time to move on now.

Then 1UP details their thought on Bastion’s storytelling and how it keeps the player always at the center of the narrative:

Most games modern games though, especially those that emphasize story and player choice, don’t manage to capture meaningful feelings of comfort and interest. Text adventures are the last home for games told in the second person, whereas many early graphical adventure games that used a text interface like Sierra’s Leisure Suit Larry and Quest for Glory put heavy emphasis on calling the player “you” rather than a character’s name. (For example, the command “buy whisky” activates a text box that reads, “‘I’ll have a glass of your fine, well whisky!’ you tell Lefty.” reinforcing that you are Larry.)

Over the past thirty years of design, games invested in telling a story have drifted away from making the player that fulcrum for narrative, and relied instead on building character in other ways. Games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mass Effect give the player sway over Adam Jensen and Commander Shepherd’s moral compasses, but little role (beyond opening branching story paths) in how the story ultimately unfolds. On the other hand are games like Bethesda’s Oblivion, where you make a highly detailed character from the ground up and then send him out into the kingdom to either mess about and enjoy the scenery or engage in a sweeping tale, but even then you control a reactive protagonist, someone who merely reacts to what is happening and triggers potential new streams of events. Neither mold, however, effectively makes the player the core of the story, leaving them to either be a semi-passive participant in larger events or a puppet master for a rigidly defined character.

Bastion melds these approaches though, and through the reactive narration, comes away with a solution for putting the player back at the center of the game. “I wanted our protagonist character to be empathetic,” explains Kasavin. “If he was a blank slate, then the narrator could never have anything interesting to say about him. I took a balanced approach toward this in Bastion. Starting off, we never give you his name, to help you imagine him however you want. You learn his back-story only during optional content. His background and his personality are never inflicted on the player, but they’re there to be discovered, hopefully at a time when the player is interested to learn more about the character and how he fits into the world.”

It’s significant that Kasavin refers to the kid as “him” in his description. Bastion isn’t truly a second-person narrative in the way that those early Sierra games were; the player is never referred to as “you,” just “the kid.” Thanks to the player’s actions being consistently reflected in real time by Rucks, they are put right at the heart of the story’s flow. That correlation makes the action about them as much as the kid and, when coupled with that careful character development described by Kasavin, creates a story that manages to be more affecting than what’s found in those other modern examples.