Bastion

Looking back at the debut game that laid the blueprint for Hades

- Henry St Leger

As the Kid takes his first steps in the shattered world of Bastion, tiles rising out of the sky and ether to meet his feet, ragged curtains and broken columns lining the uncertain path ahead, there’s a meeting of sorts. Amid the confusion, clutter and brokenness of what’s before him, he finds “his lifelong friend just lying in the road. Well, it’s a touching reunion.”

The friend in this case is the Cael Hammer: a hefty weapon able to knock aside and flatten enemies. It’s a blunt instrument by definition, its haft about the length of the Kid himself, the weight of it ploughing into stone walls, wooden barrels and floating spectres alike. But it gets the job done.

That’s essentially the feeling we get upon picking up Bastion again, a full decade from its initial release. It’s an old friend that feels half familiar, half unfamiliar; as spirited as any of the games Supergiant Games has released since – the remarkable run of Transistor, Pyre and Hades – but occasionally awkward in the hands, inevitably faltering when compared with the studio’s later, slicker output.

Still, it certainly got the job done. Bastion released to critical acclaim, selling millions of copies in the following years. Inspired by both the Western novels of Cormac McCarthy and the colourful, isometric JRPGs of the ’90s, the action RPG casts you as one of the few survivors of an apocalyptic event known as the Calamity. This cataclysm shattered the city of Caelandia and its surrounding landscape into handily bite-sized levels, now overrun with deadly beasts and deadlier vegetation.