![]() There are quite a few to collect, but the game is appropriately lengthy without overstaying its welcome. Gemlike cores and shards, remnants of the old world, power the Bastion and players are tasked with finding them all. ![]() The Kid soon finds the narrator at the Bastion - a sort of last hope for rebuilding society and the hub from which players venture out. ![]() As players explore, the world literally and figuratively pieces itself together at their feet, giving both a nice visual effect and a mournful sense of how the world used to be. The narrator soon reveals that the world has been broken by the Calamity, a catastrophe that may have been natural, man-made, or the will of forgotten Gods. Players begin Bastion as The Kid, a hammer wielding young man who finds himself marooned on a floating island where his house, and the ground it stood on, used to be. And the Narrator is so well voiced that you won’t miss having a larger cast. Though there is only the narrator’s voice guiding the entire narrative-and at times you will question that rough, old man’s motivations-Bastion doesn’t feel barren, but rather heartfelt and personal. The independent studio’s final product is intimate in scale and draws from a pool of familiar tropes found in everything from Metal Gear Solid to Out of This World, putting hallucinatory and non-verbal cues together in semi-dynamic world that feels like it has existed for many years. Instead, there is much more focus on character actions, fears, and native history: in short, things that matter. Thankfully, SuperGiant Game’s Creative Director Greg Kasavin has written a script that gives that narrator enough talk without getting too minute about every move players make. You'll get to know this small band of survivors well Having to decide how much dialogue the narrator will have based on player control isn’t something many studios dare try to tackle. Throw a narrator into the mix, like Portal, The Bard’s Tale, and now SuperGiant Game’s Bastion, and making a well-written story is that much more difficult. Most video games struggle to create a consistent sense of pacing, the medium isn’t really known for having amazing stories across the board, and adding player agency creates big challenges.
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