I'd
like to say I'll never forget him, or what he's doin'. What he's
done. I surely would.
Can I talk about
Bastion for
a bit? It's been on my mind lately. Partly because
Transistor
is coming out in the near future, partly because it's got one of
those
soundtracks
that's stayed on my iPod long after I've uninstalled the game, and
partly because of a thing somebody said, but I'll get to that at the
end.
A lot of people
have talked about the things that make Bastion a beautiful and
polished game with a strong cult following – the hand-painted
art style, the narration, the music. (The beat-em-up gameplay is
absent from that list – Bastion is admittedly much more about
the window dressing.) What I want to talk about is the favorite
moment I had personally while playing it, which was toward the end of
the game and was something that caught me completely off guard. This
means SPOILERS AHOY;
if you haven't played Bastion, I'm going to be spoiling my favorite
part of the game for you, so if you'd prefer to perhaps have this
fantastic experience someday instead of just reading about it, you
should stop reading now.
So me and the Kid
land in the Tazal Terminals. Just when we thought we were done
making the Bastion whole, our old friend Zulf decided his true
loyalties were with his people, the Ura. He sold us out to them,
helped them wreck the Bastion, and fled here, the Ura homeland, and
he's got the shard that we need to fix everything. I'm getting a
little tired of the repetitive gameplay. The Kid is getting a little
tired of killing everything that moves. But here we are, pressing
on, doing this one last thing, because the guy we pulled out of the
ruins of the Calamity decided he wanted to undo everything we've been
working for. Gods dammit, Zulf. You better hope we don't catch up
with you.
The Ura put up a
good fight. They hit hard and move fast. And the whole Ura nation
put together is no match for us. We've been through too much at this
point to be stopped by anything as small as an army making its last
stand. Block, strike, shoot, it's just reflex, and all the enemies
blur together like so many blades of grass beneath the blades of a
riding mower. The death cries are a little disconcerting, though;
nothing else we've been killing screams in terror like that when it
takes the long fall down. The Tazal Terminals seem to stretch on
forever, and we just want to grab that shard and get back to the
Bastion, the only little piece of home we have left in this shattered
world.
There was never
any doubt that when we found Zulf there wouldn't be much of a fight.
But when we find him, his own people have already done the job for
us. Seems they blame him for leading the Kid to their doorstep and
slaughtering them wholesale; they turned on him and left him for
dead. Zulf, you poor dumb bastard. Now, we've been inside Zulf's
dreams, and we have some inkling of what he's been through in his
life. It's been nothing but one long struggle to find someplace he
fits, and every time he thinks he's found it, it all goes to shit.
When he made the decision to ditch us for the Ura, he'd just found
out that our people were the ones who caused all this mess and ruined
his life; reckon he was feeling pretty betrayed himself, did
something rash, and it's not like I've never done anything in such a
situation that I've come to regret. So when the game gives me the
option to have the Kid try to rescue Zulf or leave him be, I don't
even see it as a choice. C'mon, you idiot, I'm done here, we're
going home, and you don't get a vote. Try not to bleed out on the
way.
Picking Zulf up
causes the Kid to set down his weapon. And as the Kid trudges toward
the exit, the Ura show up and start shooting at him. Okay, I think,
no problem. Plenty of healing potions in reserve, and there's some
cover, so the name of the game here is going to be keeping that cover
between us and them as much as possible, and if we do that right
we'll get to the exit before we run out of potions. For a while
that's how it goes. I'm optimizing the Kid's path to minimize
exposure to enemy fire, conserving the healing potions by using them
at the last possible moment, this should be cake. But now there's
less cover, we're running low on potions, and the exit is noplace in
sight. Doesn't seem right.
The soundtrack has
changed from fast-paced synth music to a
somber
acoustic song. I've never heard Zulf's voice before, but I
recognize it instantly. “Lie on my back / Clouds are making
way for me / I'm coming home, sweet home,” he sings, voice
tinged with something between wistfulness and bitter irony. I don't
know if he means coming here to rejoin his people before they turned
on him, or going back to the Bastion with us, or if this is him dying
and heading into the bright light. Shit, that was the last potion,
and there's nothing left to hide behind now.
At this point, the
part of my brain that's playing the game is pissed off at whoever
designed this part of the level, because this seems like bullshit.
How am I supposed to get through here with no cover? Was picking
Zulf up somehow the “wrong” choice? At the same time,
the part of my brain that's in the game, the part that's the Kid, is
pissed off at the Ura. I could kill every one of you, and you know
it, but you can see damn well I'm not trying to. I never wanted to
come here, I never wanted to hurt any of you, I just want to take
Zulf and leave, because even though he betrayed me, he's one of the
only people alive I can count as a friend, and I ain't leaving him
for dead. The whole situation is so frustrating that I almost reload
a save, but I keep the Kid stoically marching on even as his health
drops, and I think, well, I'm going to push it as far as I can, just
to see exactly how bullshit it is, and the Kid is thinking just STOP
already, you assholes, I'm done fighting, and right then is when the
bullets stop and everything gets quiet.
It takes my brain
a second to process. All of the Ura just watching their most
terrible foe walk past them. Letting us go to salvage what we can.
Guess they've had enough of this bullshit too. One of them didn't
get the memo and he takes a potshot at us, and his countrymen smack
him down. And we make our way back to the Bastion in peace.
Leigh Alexander
said recently that
games
are about feeling powerful and about you getting your own way,
and that's what Bastion set me up to expect. Through the course of
the game you get more and more weapons and upgrades that make you a
more efficient killing machine, so naturally you progress through
harder and harder fights that make you feel powerful when you
overcome them. After it was all done, though, the single thing that
makes Bastion stick out in my mind most was that unexpected moment of
ludonarrative consonance when I put myself in a position of feeling
completely powerless and frustrated, and it worked absolutely
perfectly for the story that the game wanted to tell.
It's not uncommon
for a game developer to catch lightning in a bottle early on, only to
spend years trying to do it again, so I'm managing my expectations
for Transistor. I don't really expect there'll be a moment in that
game that I'll still be thinking back on years later as if it was a
thing that actually happened to me. Supergiant has built up enough
goodwill from me with their first game that it's going to be a day
one purchase regardless.
.JPG)
