Bastion review and contest winner!

Bastion is an isometric style action role-playing video game produced by independent developer Super Giant Games and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

Bastion takes place in the wake of the apocalyptic “Calamity”, a catastrophic event that has fractured the game’s world into many floating pieces, disrupting its ecology and reducing its people to ash. The player controls “the Kid”, a silent protagonist who awakens unharmed the morning after the Calamity and sets out to find the Bastion, a sanctuary where citizens of Caelondia are supposed to meet in case of trouble. The only survivor he meets there is an elderly man named Rucks, who also happens to be the game's narrator. Rucks instructs the Kid to collect the crystalline Cores that had powered Caelondia. Once collected, a device in the Bastion can use the power of the cores to create landmasses and structures, as well as enable the Kid to travel farther via "skyways" that propel him through the air. Once the Bastion is restored, the player can choose to reset the world to a time before the Calamity or leave Caelondia as it is and start anew.

The cores are spread throughout different fragmented levels. The levels contain many different environment types, including cities, forests, and bogs. They are filled with enemies of various types, which attempt to harm the Kid. Occasionally, the level begins to disintegrate once the Kid takes the core, forcing him to hastily retreat.


As the player progresses through the levels, Rucks narrates their actions. This narration gives scripted plot information as well as dynamic comments, such as on the player's skill with a weapon or performance while fighting enemies. The narrator was added early in the game's development as a way to provide background details and depth to the world without requiring the player to read long strings of text or wait through cutscenes. To avoid slowing the pace of the action-oriented gameplay, the team had the narrator mainly speak in short, expressive phrases, with long pauses between speaking parts.

Between levels, the Kid visits the Bastion, where the player can use fragments (the game's form of currency) that they have accrued on their journey to buy materials and upgrade weapons. With each core the player collects, they can add one of six structures to the Bastion: a lost and found, a shrine, an armory, a forge, a distillery, and memorial. Each structure serves a different purpose; for example, the distillery lets the player select upgrades, and the shrine allows the player to choose idols of the gods to invoke, causing the enemies to become stronger and giving the player increased experience points and currency. Experience points are used to determine the Kid's ability level; higher values give the player more health and increase the number of upgrades they can select.

The Kid carries two weapons, a ranged and a melee, which may be selected from the choices available to the player at specific locations called arsenals. My favorite weapon to use is the classic bow. The Kid also has the ability to perform a special attack. Weapons and special attacks must be acquired before they can be used. There are a limited number of special attacks that the player can perform at any time, represented by "black tonics" that can be found in the levels or dropped from enemies. The Kid's health is represented by a health bar, which can be replenished with "health tonics". Like black tonics, the Kid can only carry a certain number of health potions at a time, and can replenish them by finding more in the levels.

During his quest, the Kid meets two more survivors: Zulf, an ambassador from the Ura people, a group with whom Caelondia was once at war, and Zia, an Ura girl who was raised in Caelondia. Both of them return to the Bastion. Additionally, the Kid can fight waves of enemies while the narrator tells Zulf or Zia’s backstory by using different items within the Bastion and journeying to “Who Knows Where".


Whenever the player leaves the Bastion, they can choose between one or two regular levels to play. In addition to these levels, however, the Kid can engage in challenge courses designed to test the player's skills with the weapons the player has found. The challenges differ depending on the weapon, such as destroying a certain number of objects within a given time or breaking targets in the fewest shots possible. The player earns fragments and experience for each completed wave. After the game is completed, the player can choose to begin a "new game+" mode, where the player replays through the game while keeping the experience points, fragments, and weapons that they have gained. This mode also offers more options in the buildings, as well as two more journeys to "Who Knows Where".

Another great element of Bastion is it’s stellar soundtrack produced and composed by Darren Korb, a songwriter and composer. Bastion was the first video game that Korb had scored. He was brought onto the team in the beginning stages of the project, and several of the pieces he developed were created prior to the final design of the levels with which they were associated. The musical style of the soundtrack has been described by Korb as "acoustic frontier trip hop". It was intended to evoke both the American frontier and an exotic fantasy world. The songs combine "heavily sampled beats in layers, along with acoustic elements", and he determined that he wanted to create the soundtrack in that style as it was different than video game soundtracks that he had heard before.

Bastion is definitely one of the best independent games I have had the pleasure of playing. The beautiful handpainted isometric style and unique game map mechanics drew me in and the music completely immersed me in the beautiful world Super Giant Games created. I look forward to future works released by this team. I highly recommend this to anyone who is looking for a great unique game.

Check out "The First 60 Minutes of Bastion"



And now the moment you've all been waiting for!

The winner of my Bastion giveaway is escribner86 from YouTube!

Please message me with your Steam name so I may gift you your prize! Congratulations!

For those who entered and didn't win a prize, stay tuned! I will be doing another giveaway at the end of December!