When the first hints of Bastion made their way to the collective hive-mind that is The Internet I became immediately enthralled; I was obsessed with finding out any and every detail about this masterpiece-in-waiting. Even when next to nothing was known about it I was already talking about what an amazing experience we were all in store for when it would finally came out… and nobody else seemed to have any idea what I was talking about.
As a coworker of mine headed off to GDC just prior to the release of Bastion, I demanded that he take the time to do an interview with Supergiant Games, just so I could absorb that much more information while I transcribed the audio of his interview. It was a touch of synchronicity that almost all of the information I had came from a plethora of audio sources and the final product itself utilized audio in a way never before seen in a modern game.
Playing as The Kid is almost an incidental part of Bastion. It’s expertly crafted, of course, but it’s the constant companion of the narration that really made the game something special. There is clever dialogue for possibly everything you could hope to do, from exploring the levels to mixing and matching weapons. As if that one facet wasn’t enough there is also the world itself to consider, a world so shattered that it has to rebuild itself in front of you as you move forward. It’s just an incredible thing.
The fact that Bastion placed as highly as it did on a list put together by a collection of writers with vastly, often diametrically opposed tastes in games is a testament to how amazing of an experience it actually is.
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