Transistor

2024-11-20
It's Bastion++. You got the whole "Dude talking in a whispery voice" archetype and the "Woman singing in the background" archetype VOs. You got the maudlin, eerie, "everyone's dead in the world" story that you're thrown in headfirst to out of order and have to piece together through context clues, Christopher Nolan-style. And some top down action-y combat that's fine. The customizeable moveset and freeze-time-then-queue-up-a-bunch-of-moves mechanic is cool but nothing to write home about for me personally.

I will say it was cool to play Bastion in 2011, Hades in 2020 and then come back see how you can really draw a clear through-line from one to the other with Transistor.

2023-10-15
My history with SuperGiant games is I played Bastion stoked to hear the Greg Kasavin my favorite video games reviewer growing up was working on it. I like it a lot but it wasn't like amazing to me. So when they came out with subsequent titles I kind of fell off until Hades.

So here I am, some almost 10 years later playing the next game after Bastion and it's interesting to see them stick so close to the strengths they codified in Bastion while also really mixing it up in the gameplay department.

First, the strengths. The storytelling. Just like Bastion you're kind of just thrown into the action in a new world with characters and lore you're not acquainted with and they just let you figure it all out by pushing you through action scene to action scene with a lot of your context being laid out passively through the art and environment. It's top notch stuff.

The art as I mentioned is just as wonderful and unique as Bastion. You also have some really great VO but one critique I have is they re-use a lot of the same voices and I'm kind of just over the whole "Dude talking in a whispery voice" archetype and the "Woman singing in the background" archetype. That's probably a very subjective take but it just rubs me the wrong way.

Now the actual gameplay is top down action similar to Bastion but this time you have a customizeable moveset where you unlock and equip different abilities, each of which you can augment. On top of this there's a time freeze mechanic where you can line up moves in sequence to have executed all at once. The time freeze is great but the customizeable moveset I found a little onerous given, similar to Bastion, while the combat is fun it's not very fun. After 10 minutes you'll know what the rest of the 4 hours are going to feel like. That being said, I felt that way till I experimented enough with the different moves to find a set that worked really well for me and then I started to have a bit more fun (still not a ton).

Story is cool but also kind of the same Bastion maudlin, eerie, "everyone's dead in the world" fare which, again felt very stale to me after Bastion. There is one weird guy character Royce who shows up near the end who I did like. Mostly because the VO's delivery was very odd and cool. Reminded me of the idiosyncratic delivery of the G Man from Half-Life.

To wrap it all up this does feel like Bastion+ in a lot of ways and while that's an improvement it's still not My Thing. This is probably one to be left in the past because clearly what SuperGiant started to ship later on (Hades) is absolutely My Thing (and most other people's too).w