Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Steam Backlog: Bastion

Narrator Narrates

bastion
 I played Bastion for six hours when it came out and I loved every minute of it.  It is not a game I chose to revisit and play as part of my Steam backlog journey but it brought back lots of fond memories (see all posts tagged Bastion).

 The most memorable aspect of Bastion was the narrator.  It narrates every action the player takes and makes it feel like it was designed commentary when it is actually dynamic; ever-changing based on what the player is doing.

 "The boy moves forward to smash the thing."

 "The boy smashes the thing."

 I didn't have to smash it.  Did it know I was going to smash it?  Was it leading me along?  The narration is phenomenal in that regard and I can still hear the voice in my head.  The game world, story, and combat itself was a ton of fun, but the narrator put it over the top.

 At one point the game had me thinking hard about MMOs as well.  Narration was a big idea; Bastion showed me that dynamic narration can work and that is exactly the type of narration an MMO would need.  Then more aspects of the game spilled out of my brain into that blog post and if you told me tomorrow that a Bastion MMORPG was being developed I would be the first person in line.  So much of Bastion make sense for an MMORPG.

 Now that I've written this post I think I may have to revisit this gem!

 This post is part of my running series: My Steam Backlog (see all MySteamBacklog tagged posts).

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