Bastion

I mentioned last time that I got the latest Humble Indie Bundle and Psychonauts certainly wasn't the only game in the bundle.  Another one of the many games that I got is Bastion, the first game from developer Supergiant Games.

Bastion is an action role-playing game in which your character, known only as "The Kid", awakens after "The Calamity", an event which has destroyed the world, Caelondia.  He makes his way to the Bastion, the place where people were supposed to gather if there was trouble.  As the Kid wanders around, the ground forms paths to follow and a voice narrates all of his actions.  Eventually he makes it to the Bastion, which is also in ruins, and meets another survivor, Rucks, who also happens to be the narrator.  Rucks tell the Kid that he needs to travel to different parts of Caelondia and collect the cores that power it to repair the Bastion which can somehow repair what the Calamity has done to Caelondia.  During his journey, the Kid finds two more survivors and learns about how the Calamity came to have happened.

Taking on some Squirts

Bastion is a pretty neat game and a lot of fun to play.  The story is engaging and the way it unfolds, mostly via the narration that goes on during the regular gameplay, keeps the action moving forward.  The gameplay is pretty simple and linear, but you've got enough options with weapons and buffs to keep things interesting.  Bastion is also fairly short, which keeps the story from getting bogged down and boring, though there are enough optional things to explore as well as a new game+ mode to make playing through more than once appealing.  The two things that really make this game standout, though, are its music and its narration.  The soundtrack was composed by Darren Korb and fits the game absolutely perfectly (you can check it out here; and really you should since it's pretty great) and Logan Cunningham does a phenomenal job with the over three thousand lines of narration, not all of which you'd even hear on your first play-through.  You can check that out in Bastion's game trailers, which you can find here.

So, if this sounds like something you'd like to play, you can purchase Bastion for the PC (Steam has it for $14.99 regularly though at the moment I'm writing this it's on sale for $3.74), Mac for $18.99, or Xbox 360 for 1,200 Microsoft points.  I definitely recommend it and I look forward to seeing what Supergiant comes up with next.