Most video games have you trying to forestall disaster. Even the ones set in a post-apocalyptic milieus–like Crysis 2 or Fallout: New Vegas, for example–have you trying to prevent an even more awful end-of-days scenario.
Supergiant Games’ Bastion–the first title in Microsoft’s annual Summer of Arcade promotion–puts players in a slightly different position, where you’re mostly concerned with picking up the pieces of a shattered landscape. In fact, the whole affair’s shot through with bereavement, loss and regret.
Published by Warner Brothers Games, the downloadable game tells the story of a hero who’s trying to restore the realm of Caelondia after an incident called the Calamity explodes it into a series of floating archipelagos. Everything in the game gets pulpy narration by a mysterious, gravel-voiced Stranger and his tale-telling is dynamic, meaning that it responds to what you’re doing in the game. Everything from changing a weapon to getting pounded by a level boss gets commented on, creating the effect that someone’s paying attention.
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You play as a silent character called The Kid. But he’s not naïve: He’s got the white hair of a sage, if not the memory or wisdom, and he knows how to fight. The Kid wakes up to find the rest of the world and makes his way along the narrow strips of earth left standing. Eventually he finds his way to the Bastion, the fail-safe last redoubt that holds the power to rebuild the world. For the Bastion to fulfill that promise, the Kid journeys to the remains of its districts to find the rare energy resource required to power it.
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There’s a big heart beating underneath the gorgeous artwork and finely tuned play mechanics of Bastion. You’ll wield handheld and long-ranged weapons along with special skills that cause big damage over bigger areas. The usual acquire-and-upgrade mechanics that started in the role-playing genre—and have since spread to every type of game imaginable—get implemented in Bastion. Get a gun, upgrade it with various parts and tweaks, paid for with discovery and experience points (XP). But Bastion puts them across with far more charm and humor.
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You learn a little bit of history with every weapon you find and the spirits that passively upgrade your stats get described in terms usually reserved for fine wines and liqueurs. “Spicy with a smokey aftertaste,” indeed. In the Bastion, you build things that you need to survive disasters: forges for arms and improvements, distilleries for potions that help you get through the brawling, a lost-and-found where artifacts and forgotten talents can be had once again. It’s a common trope in RPGs to spend experience points. Bastion‘s sure-footed tone provides a nice twist to the mechanic, as it drives home the idea that what you’re spending are the things that experience is made from: namely risk, effort and memory.
What’s left of Caelondia is made out to be a rough science-fantasy milieu with a steampunk manga tinge to it. The action unfolds in an old-school isometric camera view that gives players a 2.5-D feeling, meant to invoke games made during the late ’80s heyday of the Super Nintendo home console. The gameworld design is broken up into tiny hubs where the landscape itself seems to improvise itself into existence around you, like floating jigsaw puzzle pieces. Errant steps will send you tumbling into the abyss–only to slam harshly back onto solid ground–having to take a hit on health and humility before figuring out where to go next.
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That last bit’s important. Bastion leans on the idea of the crossroads as an existential signifier. As they’re used in the blues idiom, crossroads represent where we come from, the choices and people that got us here and how we move forward. All those considerations come out in Bastion. The game itself is both a work of nostalgia and a commentary on wistfulness. As you play, the shades of the deceased linger in the world and all you can really do is destroy them and move on. Just as in life. The central mystery of the game is what exactly you’re moving on to.
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The narration’s the centerpiece of the Bastion experience. With it, you get the Stranger’s constant commentary as companionship, so you never feel as alone as you really are during your adventure. The oral history he provides grounds your fights in a deeper history and the narration also works as a vector for character development. But all his talking never gets in the way. It actually generates a soulfulness that pays off hugely in the end. The game does the players the favor of giving the Stranger narrator a name as things proceed. Later, you come across the presence of a survivor from a rival culture that hints at the tensions of the old world. Will that pre-apocalyptic drama survive into the new world? It’s one of the questions you play to see answered.
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But Bastion actually asks a lot of questions. You’re tasked with rebuilding the world, but in whose image? How do you leave the old hates–ones borne in the fires of manifest destiny–behind in the wake of disaster? Can you? What would you do if you could avert tragedy? Or is it better to just move on? Some of what you do in the game provides some of those answers, culminating in a surprisingly emotional ending.
Assured in tone, beautiful to look at, challenging to play. And more still: wonderful to listen to, in its voice, sounds and design. Its disparate parts combine to make Bastion feel like a game that was made in memoriam, as a way to recall someone. Somewhere in all the hacking, slashing and shooting, Supergiant’s captivating downloadable adventure becomes a meditation on loss, grieving and moving on.
Bastion builds a powerful internal mythology, which isn’t that unique. What is singular is that the game reveals something meaningful with it. You find out that you’re either the kind of person that lingers over loss and steeps himself in what-could’ve-beens or one that cuts off tragedy like a tumor and gets on with life. Either way, Bastion creates a new understanding of what a game can show a player and that’s something that you can take with you to your own safe haven.
You’re getting a lot of game for $15 (or in Redmond-speak, 1200 Microsoft points). The story mode clocks in at about 20 hours, with plenty of arena missions on the side for replayability. After you finish Story Mode, you can go at it again in New Game+, which lets you bring all your beefed-up stats and weapons along.
Techland Score: 9.2 out of 10
Evan Narcisse is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @EvNarc or on Facebook at Facebook/Evan.Narcisse. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.