Bastion and Videogame Narrative

Bastion sets out to tell a story, and it tells a damn good story. A story told by a husky voiced narrator, the sort of voice you imagine a seventy year old whiskey barrel has as it's teaching you the ways of the world. Bastion's narrative, in execution, is flawless and it succeeds in creating its own world and atmosphere, one that is heavily inspired by the southern U.S states and the old west.

Videogames have the ability to present a narrative unlike any other medium, and possibly in more various ways. Apart from long running television shows, videogames have an advantage over other mediums in the time that people are willing to invest in a game, and that means more time with the characters and the story. Bastion, for example, takes about seven/eight hours to complete the main story and it's a small independent title. Now that seven/eight hours is still more time than a film (or even a trilogy of films), longer than a season of Peep Show (or other similar comedy show here in the U.K) and longer than the time it takes to read a novella. 

Morid, the coffee connoisseur from Final Fantasy 9.

In a long running, narrative driven series like Mass Effect or Final Fantasy a player will spend about sixty hours with a story. This means the emotional investment a player has with a videogame's characters is far more intense than another mediums, where less time has been spent with a character or environment. There is also the the interactive element of videogames to consider. The advantage and disadvantage to this, however, is that (most) games don't force all of the story upon you, Mass Effect has a fully fleshed out universe explained through the 'codex', but doesn't make a big deal of it being there; it's there if you want to learn more about the in-game history. The flip side, however, is that far more narrative content has to go into creating a game than a TV show or a film.

Bastion does a great job of turning a technical limitation into a strength, much like the fog of Silent Hill 2 masking the amount of background that could be rendered; that fog became an integral part of it's atmosphere. Bastion does this with the ground appearing underneath your feet as you move along the game world. At its core, Bastion is a linear dungeon crawler, but it's the way in which the world is presented and the few choices that the player makes that really creates a compelling game.

The Kid and Rucks.

The narrator is Bastion's biggest strength as it gives the player both the illusion of freedom and that they're creating their own story as they play, when they are in fact following a set path. The narrator responds to nearly everything you do creating a sense of almost unparalleled immersion. Linearity is usually a detracting point in most games, but Bastion makes it a strength. Similarly to Telltale's The Walking Dead, Bastion hides its mechanics with perfect artistic choices, creating a uniquely immersive narrative experience. 

“I guess there's nothin' more to say...” - Rucks.