If you asked me what I was looking forward to play the most this summer, my answer would always be Bastian. Ever since I saw its first clip, I fell in love with this new action role playing game. Bastion has a unique charm that grows on you, especially the narrator who literally narrates the game the way you are playing it. Once you dig in this game, you will fall in love and then the game won’t let you go away.
You play as ‘The Kid’, who is responsible for saving his entire civilization from an entity called the Great Calamity. The game takes place in Bastian, a place created for everyone to meet if something would ever go wrong. To restore Bastian, you will be fighting foes in different levels and collect shards as you go along. The game at first will look like just another RPG game with a very typical story, but as you progress you will learn that Bastian is an amazing game with a lot of depth.
Bastian’s graphics are simply astonishing; the art style here is kind of a mixture of glass painting and water color paintings. The narrator is perhaps the heart of the game; he will keep announcing what you do and how it matters to the world. The game lacks co op, which isn’t so bad because of the fact that the narrator will keep you companied.
Bastian’s gameplay revolves around you getting experience and leveling up and as you progress, you keep unlocking powerful new weapons, and if that wasn’t enough, Bastian even lets you upgrade the weapons you unlock. During the levels you will also find idols which make the level more challenging for you, for example, one of the idols made my enemies immune to simple auto attacks, but once I killed them I found out that the rewards were better.
When you finally finish the campaign of the game, you unlock another game plus mode, which puts you through the same story again but now with even better rewards, adding a sense of progression as you play through the second time.
Bastian will keep surprising its players with the unique on the go level design; you will never know what you will find in the next corner until you actually go there.
Bastian is so good that anyone who has never played the game again after finishing it will find it really hard to not play through the game’s campaign again. Definitely a plus one to your library.
