(Seen the credits roll 5 times. This review is based on a Switch playthrough.)
In Supergiant Games’ Greek myth themed Hades, myth making is done through gods bullshitting their peers. It’s hard not to see it as the studio doing some self-reflection. The small studio can be seen as one of few success stories among game developers who used to work for EA, but the selling points of their games were contributed by their friends who never worked for EA. Always has been since their humble beginning titled Bastion.
It's not to say that former EA employees like Amir Rao and Greg Kasavin did not have some tricks up their sleeves. They started the company and its project small way back when it was still viable to start small. And under all that sugar coating their friends brought to table, the Bastion game underneath still creates varied enough interactions with its limited scope and mechanics.
End of the world? No, madam, just this neck of the woods.
Capital C Calamity happened! A young frontier soldier known only as the Kid was one among the few who survived. He found a shelter called Bastion soon enough. From there, a smooth-voiced man named Rusk tasked the Kid to rebuild this shelter, find other survivors and blaze a path out of this whole mess.
Bastion was sold on its athletics, water color art by Jen Zee, music mixed high fantasy with Western by Darren Korb and voice-over mostly by Logan Cunnigham. Even as someone who liked Kasavin’s writing since his reviewing-games-for-Gamespot days, I can see the script falling flat without Cunnigham doing his A-voice with it.
The story is more tell than show. The player will be told by Cunnigham as Rusk about who the deceased were and how those places appeared by the Calamity. Even the player’s interaction with friendly NPCs are told through this sole voice-over narrator. This is the con of it. The pro is how reactive such narration is to player action, even though it’s usually a binary between fight or flight.
Typical of a game made first for Xbox 360 and its console generation, Bastion gives players 2 choices near its endgame. Of course, the voice narrator would make cases for those options up to the point where player has to choose. I got to say without directly hearing from those who affected by player choices did reduce the impact but kudos to Supergiant not spent their precious little resource back then on something as pointless as surface level production value and so-called epic scale.
Tempest in a tea cup
Mechanically speaking, Bastion is an isometric action role-playing game. The “role-playing” bit come to twofold. On the one hand, killing enough enemies leads to leveling up. On the other, the game’s its handful of weapons that player can only take 2 at one time do create the feeling of “builds”. Well, usually long range or close quarter and then fast or slow but powerful.
The game let player assign two weapons to two face buttons and one resource consuming special attack to right trigger. The down face button is for commando roll that does some damage. As someone who came here from Hades 2 and Pyre, Bastion does make me long for a sprint even though the arenas in this game are relative small. Well, there are long corridors between arenas after all, I would prefer to move faster there. Or maybe taking damage from falling off the edges is more of a concern to the developers.
The game’s limited er, presentation can be felt through gameplay. As some late-game enemies’ lack of animation does make them harder to read. Though the animated ones are not easy to read when the screen is jampacked with them.
Fighting is one aspect of this game, the other would be building the titular Bastion. It’s about the only hub area of this game with 6 buildings to build during the first half of the game and to improve in the second half. There are the Arenal to adjust the player build, the Forge to upgrade weapons, the Distillery to add player’s edge, a temple to add challenge, the Memorial to list to-do for currency and a Lost-and-found to buy upgrade material or story item.
Supergiant Games usually ships its game with New Game Plus. It started with Bastion and its aptly named “New Game +”. Most weapons acquired as story progresses is available from the go-on, though the buildings at Bastion can only be built one by one after each level and acquired core.
…See you in the next one
It would be impossible for me to tell anyone how would Bastion fare for people play it for the first time in the year 2025. My basis favored it still had not faded as I revisited it. I just like what they did within the limits they had. I like how the game allows fight or flight for the most part. I like they give the game a victory lap rather than boss by the end. I like how relative short it is. Overall, if you want warning about this game’s shortcoming, you are in the wrong place.