Bastion: Part 1

Hello. Today I'm writing about a very good game called Bastion. There will be only a couple spoilers in this blog, only about the basic premise of the game.

Bastion is available on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, but I played it on iOS. Bastion is an absolutely amazing video game, and has become my current favorite. The game is isometric, which means you look at the character top-down as if you're in the sky. Bastion is excellent in every category, but what ties it all together is its narrative. Bastion begins with a child sleeping on a cot, on a floating ruin in the sky. Below is a broken, burning landscape. The narrator is excellent and sounds like an old man. Bastion begins like this: "Proper story's supposed to start at the beginning. Ain't so simple with this one. Now here's a kid who's whole world got all twisted, leaving him stranded on a rock in the sky. He gets up."

That's how your journey begins. As The Kid gets up (The Kid is the name of the main character) he starts running along what's left of The Rippling Walls. Ruins of the walls soar into the sky into place under his feet. The Rippling Walls were the walls that protected Caelondia. The Kid lived on the walls, working to protect the city-state. When you begin the game, you have no idea what has caused The Calamity. You only know that is was some massive event that has tore up the world and left a sole few survivors. Imagine putting an orange in a blender and pausing time halfway through. That's what his world is now: lava and water careen over a broken and jagged landscape on the surface, and what was left of Caelondia float in the ruined skies like spiderwebs. The Kid makes his way to The Bastion, a place that Caelondians built as a safe haven in case of something like this. There, he meets the only other Caelondian survivor that made it to the Bastion: Rucks, the narrator.

The game is based around finding large stones called Cores. Cores are huge sources of energy that can restore the bastion to its former glory and eventually, maybe they can use The Bastion to do something about The Calamity. Maybe they can rebuild this world. Bastion is an excellent game and is probably the best game available for iOS I've ever played. The artwork is incredible and bright, it's the only post-apocalyptic game I've played that wasn't all brown and gray. The gameplay is incredible and the combat style is very fluid, you're always dodging or pulling up your shield; timing the perfect hits on your enemies. In the end, all aspects of it are simply incredible. It even has it's own soundtrack which is very good and available on iTunes. I loved this game so much, I plan on doing at least one more blog on it examining the story and moral dilemmas in the Bastion universe.

I highly recommend purchasing Bastion for any platform. I've played through it almost 3 times and I find new things that surprise and amaze me every time. Bye.


- By Ashton