(The Deck run this review is based on took me 3.3 hours to see credits roll according to Steam Clock.)
For San Fransico based developer Supergiant Games, one should not say “And the rest is history” Bastion. Instead, the release of Transistor is more fitting for the expression. While Bastion had a process of ex-EA employees came up with the concept then their friends polished it up, Transistor was an idea cooked up by those 2 groups more collectively. I liked the game when it first came out, and that has not changed more than a decade later.
Second game, second draft
Red was once a humble singer in the city of Cloudbank, until she was targeted by the power behind her city. After losing her voice and the love of her life, she gained the power to wield a sword like device known as Transistor. Even with the whole city falling apart around her, Red’s quest for truth and vengeance will only end on her own term.
In many ways, Transistor can be seen as the second draft of Bastion. Both are solution-turned-into-problem narrative. For better and worse, Transistor is more focused. Logan Cunnigham returned not to play another voice-over narrator but a companion to player character, as a man without name trapped in the titular Transistor. With a silent player character, this is the closet thing to the commenter on events starting with the Xbox 360/PS3 generation. No elusion of branching paths here, Transistor tells it tale in a straight line.
Other similarities contain the jump cuts loaded endgame. While Bastion jumps in both space and time, Transistor’s home stretch jumps only in space. The focus does demolish something, while all 4 other Supergiant joints have different er, biomes, Transistor only has different looking city streets.
With Mr. Cunnigham’s role in this game having a more focused and narrow perspective, the big reveals here are delivered by other voices. This certainly boarders the scope and makes the presentation of game more convincing.
Time out on Parasite Eve
While both can be called real-time Battle Arena games, Transistor handles its explosion very differently from Bastion. While the Calamity Canon will blow back at the player firing point blank at enemies in the latter, the former’s Spark function allows players to blow enemies up without worrying about blowing them up.
The four buttons of a controller are up for players to assign in Transistor. Which is a good thing since the dodge movement called Jaunt mapped to up face button by default feels less natural compared to the down face button for dodge in Hades games. Of all functions for active uses, passive uses and enhancing active uses, Transistor offers many a build.
Transistor offer 2 unique features among Supergiant joints. For one thing, the game does not have a main menu, you boot up the game and it’s directly to the last save. For another, this is the only Supergiant with turn-based element: pull the right trigger in the heat of battle and the game let you lay out an attack plan. After the plan is executed, the player will be put on a cooldown during which only Jaunt function. It’s all about legging it during cooldown. If player got Jaunt equipped they can leg it faster and farther before they can attack again.
Enemies known as the Process can be seen as Bastion’s Windbags having 3 forms extended and kept adapting as player leveling up with more functions. The game is very much an indie and voiced version of Square Soft’s Parasite Eve, one plays as ladies in both and the combat is about waiting for your turn to attack while moving.
Transistor does not throw out the New Game Plus of Bastion. Its iteration is called Recursion and it can be seen as a precursor to Hades games’ rouge-lite structure. Player kept everything they got from playthroughs before, their level, functions they unlocked and Limits for some additional challenge. While the arena lay-out and the story do not change, enemy encounters are random to a certain point. Player might face the hard-to-kill late-game Process known as Man in the very first battle of Recursion. The tutorial certainly makes a joke in Recursion, as the go-here-do-this arrows cover the whole arena in saying “You had gone through this before. It’s your oyster now.”
A big difference between me playing Hades and me playing Transistor would be how frequent the player characters die in those games. Hades is a rogue-lite and its narrative says even if you complete a full run, the player character dies and goes back to the underworld. When Red’s life bar is reduced to zero in Transistor, she simply lost a Function. Only after all 4 active Functions shut down would lead to a Game Over. It only happened to me once and it was during an optional challenge fighting against a Transistor wielding mirror image. So, I would admit that never Game Over ain’t too hard, some cannot stand Soul-borne coward like yours truly can do it.
Fresh start
While my run on the Deck was fine, the game is not as Verified on the Deck as the platform claims. The save file in which I saw credits roll 3 times crapped out so I had to start a fresh file. Strangely it works fine. The audio issue people post on the Steam forum is still present but it can be fixed with the wired ear phone plugged out and plugged in. Overall, this is an early PS4 game and has a solid Switch port, so a fully charged Deck is the way to go if you want a quick playthrough without charging the device you play the game on.
When everything changes, nothing changes…
Yours truly’s outlooks on the video game industry are very different between May, 2014 and February, 2025. Whether or not there is a blind optimization is the key. Yet, affection for some same games remains, I am just glad that I do still like Transistor.