Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Immersive"

The fear of sleep is killing me these days. But one thought that helps me relax is the thought of waking up with my bed still grounded on the earth and something hard under the sheets. In Bastion, only the latter is true.

In Bastion the world forms under your feet as you push forward, like holding that light orb thing from Closure. But where Closure is a sci-fi black-hole of black and white indie game, Bastion is a LSD trip of vivid colors and a bent spoon. To make the spoon normal again, your mission requires you do the typical action RPG stuff; gain experience, find and upgrade weapons, get special abilities, etc..

Maybe I've just been out of gaming for too long but this is my first experience playing a game where there is a narrator delivering the play by play, like Madden without the repetitions but with just as many ridiculously obvious remarks: "If the guy catches the ball in the endzone then that's a touchdown." Bastion's narrator feels like somebody in the passenger seat telling you directions to a destination that you already know how to get to. On one hand I see how it blends gameplay and story telling seamlessly, but the game has a handful of cut-scenes anyways so why not just shove a sock in the old man's mouth?

Bastion is a beautiful looking game from start to finish. The combat is a bit slow and clunky, like you were trying to control a lightweight sumo wrestler to clear a room with a fruit fly problem. But regardless of that pretentious narrator occasionally sticking a toothpick in your wee hole, the story is still decent enough to keep you whipping the horse's fat behind. Who knows, you might actually see this one to the end.

There's a smell that lives in my bathroom that can't be removed by ordinary measures.