Sometimes the song and dance actually is enough

It's kinda strange going into games you know are overrated. You can tell enough from a trailer to tell, well, that one isn't quite the stellar knockout your peers are wailing about it being.

Bastion, well, yeah you can tell from the trailer instantly that's it something all right.

First things first, the narrator, nope nope not gonna talk about that. Gonna talk about art. What's the word mean? Not quite sure. I've been told that engineering is all boxes and aesthetics is all curves, and art is where you blend the two to makes something functionally aesthetic. The meaning of that one might not be immediate, but truth be told Bastion is gorgeous. It looks somewhere between the charming SNES era pixel delights of the bygone age before 3D crapped everything up and a watercolour painting. Maybe it's a pixel portrait rendered perfectly through a watercolour filter, I don't know. By the way sometimes you blend in bullshit and hype into art, and you get pop culture, but Bastion has no truck with that and the game's art does right by me.

The game is real pretty, right down to its bones. Even beyond the visuals the sound meshing together nicely really ratchets things up a step. The game is dreamlike and blissful, which is at times almost off putting given what the game appears to be about. I think the game implies its a nuclear apocalypse, but maybe it's just some other form of apocalypse.

It's also offputting because it's a failure as a game.

Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, well the game, as a game, sucks. Hard. I found myself bored and listless more times than I could count, with the "level falling into place" gimmick overstaying its welcome about 30 mintues into the game. Don't care guys, just put the level in front of me. Oh cool I fell off because I was bored and just rolling forward while your art drops into place. Sweet game design. You run everywhere, slowly, unless you're fighting and then that feels slow too. Combat is course and unintuitive, boring and unrewarding. The enemies have a measure of personality, but fights are mostly dull button mashings that there's probably a better way to do...

Except I don't care, and the game doesn't seem to either. There's likely a well spring of better means to an end, but maybe there isn't and the game didn't push me to try to discover it. Maybe the 'training arena' thing is supposed to teach me that but by the third one I was terribly bored of them on a conceptual level. I'm not saying the game is hard, I'm saying it sucks. The counter system sucks, the block system sucks, the ranged system sucks, the aim system sucks (like really sucks), the weapons all suck and so on so forth. All sucks. It's a perfect suck. For most of the game I found myself wishing I could just do something else, then past the first half you actually get a gun worth using and then things are ... Better, though still not great.

This is where we talk about gunplay, right, ok cool. One of the things FPS games have so rightly to themselves is when you push THAT BUTTON bullets come out and they're innately satisfying. Maybe decades of movie culture being driven into our brains, but you hit that and you feel good for unloading a clip into a splicer, demon, mutant or other player. Bastion has nothing like that in the first two hours, the weapons feel clunky and above all else shitty. You'd think a hammer would do it, it doesn't. It has the satisfying feel of a limp noodle striking the pasta bowl. Shit still hits you most of the time anyway. You'd think the grenades would, except in a tense situation they seem to stop working and just cartwheel off the fucking planet. You eventually get the carbine, which feels pretty decent. The mortar is great, and should have been in the game earlier.

One of the turrets has slow moving homing bullets, which you can dance around if you're carrying the repeater. Fine! So I need this one gun! Cool. Thanks. Oh if you're not, you try to shoot them and then maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but I'm bored.

So I think to myself, am I supposed to block? Maybe. Sometimes that doesn't work. Maybe not. Sometimes you counter block, which takes timing, then the homing shot loops back around and kills you.

Are you fucking kidding me? You actually have the dull ache in your groin necessary to pop up COUNTER! when I just tripped up and killed myself off using the shield? Man this game, thiiiis game.



Yeah great. The game just forced a weapon on me and then that weapon is terrible in the following fight. This has happened a couple times and it's incredibly unwelcome as game design goes. I actually died here, which happened not especially often, then just stopped playing for a bit because it was so unfun. If you can't make out the screen shot here for the fucking bloom effect (note: this shit sucks too) I'm trapped in a plant cage and the weapon I'm using either doesn't work on it, or does but I can't tell for all the shit smudged on the screen. Why would you ever do this? Look at this screenshot, does this work for you?

Anyway so it's a righteous romp through a beautiful drawn and gorgeously rendered daydream with sweet as fuck sound engineering, with some sort of good weapon system and sweet village building minigame. There's so many things right with this game, so much correct and awesome, that the fact THE GAME itself is THE SUCK is just so much more jarring. If it was just a stewed pile of shit through and through, you wouldn't even blink at the woeful flaws. In fact you probably wouldn't reach those flaws because you'd put it down. It's a game that draws you in and keeps you going, but for every delicious spoonful of great story telling, beautiful art and gorgeous audio work you get a couple flakes of broken glass. Om nom nom nom ow fuck my mouf.

I'd probably buy it again, and if they made another game I'd probably buy that too, because it's actually sort of satisfying to play a game that truly is pretty enough and artistic enough to just keep you going. The gameplay really isn't that far off being decent and if I was asked to tell the developers how to improve it - I'd say ratchet down the tedium, give the weapons more oomph and remove any/all shit like this

Where's the fucking pig? Seriously, this section lasts about 5 minutes but it's intolerable. There's a bunch of shit like this, where visibility is poor, you can't tell what's going on, enemies off the screen are shooting at you, so on and so forth. I can sort of understand if it's supposed to add to the drama, but it's just miserable. It doesn't really add to the challenge anyway, so it's just miserable for the sake of being miserable. The latter half of the game mostly does away with it and the latter half of the game is mostly really good, so maybe they should have just focused on making the latter half more of the game.

Next up - Get your wands ready, it's time to talk about a game I actually didn't like (really)