Bastion opens on a boy waking up in a broken world, and the first thing he hears is a voice telling him what he is doing. That voice belongs to Rucks, an elderly survivor waiting at the Bastion, and it never stops. He narrates the Kid’s steps, his kills, his falls. It is the single best idea in a game full of good ideas, and it is why Bastion still holds up as one of the finest action role-playing games of its era.
Trailer, via Supergiant Games.
The Kid Wakes Up in Caelondia
The story starts after the Calamity, a catastrophic event that fractured the city of Caelondia and the land around it into floating pieces. The blast reduced most of the world’s people to ash. The Kid, a silent protagonist, wakes on one of the few remaining fragments and heads for the Bastion, the place everyone was supposed to gather when trouble came.
The only survivor he finds there is Rucks, who tells him to collect the Cores that once powered Caelondia. A device in the Bastion uses the crystalline Cores to build landmasses and structures, and to open “skyways” that propel the Kid through the air to reach farther ground. The setup is simple, and the game never buries it under exposition. You walk, you fight, you listen.
Zulf, Zia, and the Journal
Two more survivors turn up. Zulf is an ambassador from the Ura, the underground people Caelondia once fought in a war. Zia is an Ura girl who was raised in Caelondia. Both come back to the Bastion.
Then the Kid finds a journal, and Zulf reads it. The journal belonged to Zia’s father, Venn, who worked for the Caelondians. He helped the scientists called Mancers build a weapon meant to destroy the Ura completely and prevent another war. Venn rigged it to backfire. When he was finally forced to trigger it, the Calamity destroyed most of Caelondia instead.
Zulf damages the Bastion’s central device, the monument, and returns to Ura territory.
That turn is where Bastion stops being a game about rebuilding and becomes a game about blame. The weapon that ended the world was built by the people the Kid is trying to save. The game does not lecture about it. It lets Rucks keep talking in his calm, plain way while the ground under the story shifts.
Shards, Skyways, and the Distillery
To repair what Zulf broke, the Kid collects Shards, a lesser form of Cores. Each level is a single plane viewed isometrically, a path that forms as the player approaches its edge. The Kid carries two weapons, chosen at arsenals, plus a special attack. Special attacks run on “black tonics,” which can be found in levels or dropped by enemies, and the Kid can use them three times before running out. The Distillery raises that cap.
Health works the same way. A bar drains, and “health tonics” refill it. The Kid can only carry so many at once, so every level is a small negotiation between pressing forward and holding back. Levels run through cities, forests and bogs. At the end of most of them, you pick up a Core or a Shard and the Bastion grows a little more solid under your feet.
Bastion is a 2011 action role-playing video game developed by independent developer Supergiant Games and originally published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.
The weapons are the real draw. Bastion hands out a wide set of unlockable arms and lets you upgrade them, and it wraps the whole thing in practice mini-games and optional difficulty modifiers for players who want the fight to hurt more. None of it is busywork. The modifiers in particular are the kind of feature most games bolt on later, and this one treats them as part of the design.
The Choice on the Ura Homeland
As the Kid closes in on the last Shard, the Ura attack the Bastion, damage it, and abduct Zia. Over the next seven days the Kid fights sporadic skirmishes in Ura territory. When he blasts through an Ura outpost and reaches Zia, she tells him she left with the Ura on purpose to learn their intentions. Rucks had told her the Bastion could somehow fix the Calamity, and she wanted to know what the other side wanted.
The Kid travels to the Ura homeland, once underground, for the final Shard. There he finds Zulf being attacked by his own people. The war with the Kid has wrecked the Ura forces, and they blame Zulf for leading him home.
The player chooses. Drop the weapon and carry Zulf, or leave him. Leave him, and the Kid destroys what is left of the Ura and escapes through a skyway. Carry him, and Ura archers open fire at first, then stop, and watch silently as the two take the skyway back to the Bastion. It is the cleanest moral fork in the game, and it costs you nothing but a decision.
Rucks Offers Two Endings
Back at the Bastion, Rucks gives the Kid one more choice. Rewind time to before the Calamity and try to prevent it, or evacuate the survivors and move on somewhere safe. Rucks is not sure a rewind would stop the Calamity from happening again. There was no way to test it.
Either way the game ends, showing images of the characters flying away or of their lives before the Calamity, with Zulf included if the player rescued him. New Game+ unlocks after a first completion, and it hints that restoring the world did not prevent the Calamity.
A Seven-Person Team in San Jose and New York
Supergiant Games built Bastion over two years with a team of seven split between San Jose and New York City. The studio showed it at the September 2010 Penny Arcade Expo. It was nominated for awards at the 2011 Independent Games Festival and won awards at the Electronic Entertainment Expo before it shipped. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment published it.
Here is how it rolled out:
| Date | Platform | Release |
|---|---|---|
| July 2011 | Xbox 360 | Xbox Live Arcade |
| August 2011 | Microsoft Windows | Steam |
| December 2011 | Google Chrome | Browser |
| 2012 | Mac OS X, iOS | Digital |
| 2015 | PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita | Digital |
| 2016 | Xbox One | Digital |
| 2018 | Nintendo Switch | Digital |
Darren Korb composed and produced the soundtrack, and an album went on sale in August 2011. Logan Cunningham is the narrator, the voice of Rucks.
What Still Works
The reactive narration is the part everyone remembers, and it earns the memory. Rucks comments on what you actually do, which means the game’s voice is never separate from its play. Most games with a narrator use him to explain. Bastion uses him to react, and the result is a story that feels like it is being told about you rather than at you.
The art holds. Hand-painted environments viewed isometrically, floating fragments of a world that broke, paths assembling as you walk toward them. It is a look that could have aged into a gimmick and instead reads as a decision.
The combat is the quieter achievement. Two weapons, an arsenal to swap them at, black tonics for special attacks, health tonics for the bar, upgrades and practice mini-games and difficulty modifiers layered on top. It gives you a lot of dials without ever demanding you turn them all. You can finish Bastion with a sword and a shield and never touch the rest, or you can make it as hard as the game allows. Both are correct.
The weak spot is the ending fork. Rewind or evacuate is a real choice, and Rucks admits he cannot promise a rewind would work, which is honest. But the game shows you the same kind of closing images either way, and the New Game+ hint that restoring the world did not prevent the Calamity undercuts the weight of the decision rather than deepening it. The choice matters more in the moment than it does after.
That is a small complaint about a game that got almost everything else right. Bastion is a seven-person project that out-designed most of the field in 2011, and it did it without a single wasted system. The narrator, the Cores, the Shards, the two weapons, the tonics, the modifiers — every piece feeds the same idea, which is that a broken world gets rebuilt one small decision at a time, and someone is always watching to describe it.
If you have never played it, the versions worth your time are the ones on PlayStation 4, Linux, PC, iOS, Mac, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. Pick whichever you own. The Kid wakes up the same way on all of them, and Rucks starts talking.
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