Ten years ago, I installed Bastion on my Xbox 360. I was 15 years old and a complete moron – only one of those things has changed, and if you’re aware of the inevitable passing of time, you’ll probably be able to guess which.
For a few hours, though, as I vicariously trundled along the decadent and desolate paths of the Calamity-ravaged Caelondia as The Kid, I wasn’t quite as moronic as I was during the few hours either side of that time. Bastion is one of the most sincerely affecting games I’ve ever played – ten years on from launch, it feels like more of a masterpiece than ever.
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Bastion was one of my first indie games. I played and loved Braid before it, and I was fascinated by brutally hard platformers like Super Meat Boy and bogglingly innovative puzzlers like Fez. Yes, I watched Indie Game: The Movie and felt inspired to play something other than Call of Duty, Halo, or Fifa – I don’t know many people who naturally came into contact with indies in their mid teens. Bastion was the first game of its kind that I chose for myself – it was never recommended to me, I never read about it, and the names attached to it were alien to 15-year-old idiot Cian. I think it was the name – ‘Bastion’ – that piqued my interest most. ‘What the shit is this?’ I asked myself. ‘Sure look, it’s raining outside and football’s cancelled – I’ll give it a whack.’
I’ve replayed Bastion several times since. I think my last experience with it was during a trip to Tokyo with a close friend of mine back in 2019. I’d told my younger brother I’d pick him up a Nintendo Switch Lite on account of them being considerably cheaper in Japan, but there were about three weeks between my Akihabaran adventure and catching a flight back to Dublin. I thought it would be sound to install a couple of games for him so they were ready to go as soon as I handed it to him – genuinely, at the time, I had no intention of playing anything. I was too busy wandering the streets of Golden Gai, listening to System of a Down in cramped bars with cold Asahi. But then I saw it – Bastion for two quid. ‘It’s been years,’ I said to myself. ‘What’s the harm in having a little looksy, eh?’
About five hours later my friend was like, here, Cian, what are you actually at? We’re halfway across the world and you’re huddled up in a cheap hostel bunk bed pure button-mashing. He was right. I could play Bastion any time I wanted – we were getting a flight to Osaka like two days later, at which point a short, compact, brilliant little odyssey like this would be perfect. But again, Bastion is a masterpiece. It’s not something you can really look away from. You can’t ignore Logan Cunningham’s post-apocalyptic Tom Waits narration, every word sounding like the grizzled grunt of a sentient cigar drenched in whiskey. You can’t mess about with a new weapon, a new means of traversing this world while stamping your own distinct mark on it, and then say, ‘Okay, time for bed.’
The reason Bastion is so enduring is because it, like every Supergiant game, is as close to perfect as a video game can get. It is tonally coherent, logically sound, and atmospherically cohesive to an astonishing degree. I’m of the belief that criticism is immeasurably important – it’s my job, hey – but critiquing this game in a way that is honest to how I feel about it is no easy feat. I don’t really consider the traditional mode of reviewing games – or any other art for that matter – as particularly effective, slowly trudging down a list of arbitrary, checklisted metrics. I’m more intrigued by how a game makes me, or other people, feel – how we respond to it, what we take from it, what the most prominent lasting impressions are at the end. With Bastion I was just blown away, both as a teenage moron and as a mid-20s moron. In ten years’ time, when Bastion turns 20, I’ll play it as a mid-30s moron and my brain will once again do backflips until it spontaneously explodes.
I could talk about art. I could talk about music – The Pantheon still slaps, and when Zulf’s and Zia’s themes combine for Setting Sail, Coming Home you’re hit with what is probably the single best use of music in a game to date. I could talk about combat, characters, and the Calamitous world. Ultimately, though, the people reading this are either aware of all of those elements from having played Bastion already or should experience them for themselves without any sort of premonition or predilection.
Bastion is ten years old today. Supergiant has launched hit after hit ever since, with Transistor, Pyre, and Hades all having established themselves as indie darlings beloved to critics and fans alike. But all of the DNA that makes a Supergiant game emphatically that – a Supergiant game – is traceable back to Bastion, a wonderful little text that played a huge role in shaping the games industry as we know it. If you’ve never given it a whirl, I’d urge you to change that immediately. If you have – well, you already know how good it is, right? Reinstall it and have another crack this evening – Rucks is waiting for you.
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