Bastion

I first played this about 11 years ago for about an hour and then forgot about it. I recently came back and finished all of the achievements and it was overall pretty fun.

The weapon variety is really good: each one has its own style and advantages and the game encourages you to try different ones throughout the story. The narration adds a nice ambiance, though it can feel like too much at certain parts.

The idol system lets you fine-tune the difficulty. You can make things harder for yourself, and you're even rewarded with bonus exp and currency for doing so. (The system is similar to Transistor.)

Art is really good and it's hard to tell this is an older game (except you can't natively select 4k resolution). Music is also very good and fits the overall theme.

The game is not too long but provides some incentives to play through NG+ if you want more.

I can't tell that I did enjoy the gameplay part of things. I kind of wish the game ended after the first half. Simple story with fun mechanics that did not have time to annoy me by then. But it did drag a little bit too long for my liking.
The in-real-time narration of every move was a fun gimmick. The game isn't too hard, at least on a first run, to justify usage of anything but the most upgraded weapon. I feel pretty neutral about this game; I'll never come back and replay it, and I'll never recommend it to my friends as some "once in a lifetime experience." It's just mid.

An early iteration of Supergiant's game philosophy. Simpler than their following games, but it still has a lot of personality, story, art, and music to enjoy.

Bastion is next-level amazing. From the moment I got started, I could tell this was something special. Everything about Bastion — from the user experience to the results it delivers — is top-tier. It’s clear that a lot of thought and care went into creating something this amazing.

Bastion 8/10 - I may have been overleveled for this one, completing it in half the normal time with 0 deaths. Hades clearly gets a lot of it's DNA from here. The combat is pretty okay but nothing amazing. The story is nice for the time you spend with it, I like the slowly learning stuff about this world that was also an influence on Hades. The music fucking slaps because of course it does it's Darren Korb, although the game doesn't utilize it as well as Hades. Really this game is just the first step on the journey to building Hades, and while it didn't blow me away, it is a damn impressive first step.

The gameplay is fine. The scenario is bog-standard but good enough. It's the in-real-time narration of your character's every move that, to me, is completely insufferable even with the sound turned off.

This is a rare breed of game that has me contemplating the experiences I've had here. The story carries weight while staying relatively simple.
Fun gameplay, cool art style and great soundtrack.

The game that started the Supergiant legacy, it's quite good

Coming into Bastion late to the party, there are dated aspects. Combat feels a bit bad compared to Hades. The voice acting is top notch however and pushes the plot along nicely. Music and art are top notch. It's interesting to see the proto-Hades they had here and how they iterated on the features. Definitely worth picking up on sale if you enjoyed Hades

Recommended for: If you like action RPGs within an isometric setting, a good story, great voice acting and amazing music, then you should certainly give Bastion a try.

Bastion's weakest point is probably the gameplay, which is definitely not bad in my opinion, but lacks a certain depth. If you only look at the gameplay, then I think Bastion is more suited for the casual player than the more hardcore action RPG fan. The game is also relatively easy. There are options in-game to make it more challenging, but even then, an experienced action RPG player will probably have no great difficulty beating it. If you consider yourself a veteran RPG fan who focuses only on gameplay and doesn't care much about story, then Bastion might not be the game for you.

My experience: I had a good time playing Bastion. I liked the colorful graphics and the voice acting of the Narrator. I thought the story was interesting, although I think they could have expanded a bit more on it. The highlight in my opinion of Bastion is the music. It's simply amazing and I still listen regularly to the OST.

Although I don't play many action RPGs myself, I didn't have much trouble beating the game. Like many reviews mention, the gameplay is a bit weak compared to the high quality of the rest of the game. For example, during the whole game I mostly used the same two weapons despite there being many others available. I just didn't feel the need to switch them. Even then the game was never boring for me, but I do recognize that the story, the narrator, and the music did most of the heavy lifting.

Technical: I had no technical issues while playing. (Win10,7800X3D,RX7800XT)

Personal rating: 4/5

It's not a bad game, but the alcoholism is wild

Bastion hot take:
After miraculously surviving a world-ending apocalyptic disaster, a young alcoholic goes on a journey to collect all the weapons he could ever need while massacring what little life remains.
10/10 music, sound design and narration script

This game is honestly one of the most beautiful games I've played. Good music in a game can be huge, and this game uses that to its advantage. Gorgeous soundtrack with a lot of fun game mechanics to boot.
Rating: 10/10

Went back and played this after all this time and I enjoyed it! If you have played any other Supergiant games you can definitely see the bones of those games in this one. Especially Hades, this game is like a proto-Hades. A lot of the same systems are present here, in smaller or less developed forms. Bastion is basic but plays pretty well, my one criticism is that the primary check on the player's power is limited-movement areas, which isn't the most fun thing all the time. Still, worth checking out.

honestly bastion > hades.

the dual weapon system is soo good.
the post apocalyptic, reality-torn art style-> peak,
the narrator-> peak,
the story peak-> peak.

all in all it's peak gaming.

makes me cry every damn time i play it. even 10 years after my first playthrough. i keep playing it. partially for the soundtrack, which is also completely worth it.

Supergiant's first game is so good I find it hard to believe they'll ever top it.

Lots of fun and upgrades. Great narration and something would be great to see in other games

Not a bad game. I've had it in my Steam 'pile of shame' for quite a while now. I decided to put some hours into it and have finally completed the game. According to the achievement, only 18% of players have done that. The narration makes the game truly unique as I can't recall playing a game like where the narrator describes your every move. The music throughout the game is also very good. The combat takes a little bit to get used to and you have to make good use of your block or you won't get very far. You can roll and later jump in the game and the weapons (you get quite a few by the end of the game) keep the combat fresh. I wouldn't call it an easy game, the Kid is a bit too squishy. Once you become familiar with the controls and study the enemies, you'll find a groove where things just click and the game is fun.

The most lighthearted doomsday and genocide story I've ever heard. An amazing debut game by Supergiant Games, clearly defining studio's unique style that was expanded on in future games. Simple, but polished and engaging gameplay, charming artstyle and, of course, mesmerizing soundtrack by Darren Korb. Highly recommended.

very much worh it. Lovely and interesting story with great soundtrack and gameplay

Игра которую я искал семь лет, нашел, заного зацепила что аж отдельно купил и игру и саундтрек, единственный саунд который стоит своих денег я считаю

amazing game, I honestly enjoyed it more than Hades on the Vibes alone <3

fun gameplay, even if it feels a bit clunkier than more modern games, it is a masterpiece of vibes

Might be my favorite of the studio thus far? Love it, highly reccomend :) (still need to finish transistor)

First time playing it in 2025 and must say, still a great game!
Narrator and music was the best.

A solid little game, Bastion was Supergiant's first ever title back in 2011. Bastion is built in much the same vein as the other Supergiant games you've played, such as Hades or Transistor. Bastion is purely an Action game, however, a top-down game with short, snappy levels and a central hub area.

You build structures that allow you to upgrade your gear, choosing what to upgrade after each level. The Distillery gives you passive bonuses, one bonus for each level. The Forge lets you upgrade your weapons, etc. You shoot stuff in levels and collect currency to upgrade things. That's all to it, mostly, and that's fine.

I try to avoid spoilers in reviews, so I can't talk about the story much but I really love the general vibes of it. It's hard to put into words but it almost feels melancholy in a way that touches me in a way that I can appreciate.The narrator here does a phenomenal job. He's the only voice you'll really hear speak through a majority of the game, and he knocks it out of the park.

There's a plethora of weapons in this game, and while that's cool, I couldn't help feeling a little bogged down by them as I neared the end. It felt like almost every single level towards the end was introducing a new weapon, and a majority of them don't let you swap them out either, so you're stuck with it for the rest of the level. The other problem with this is that since these weapons are thrown at you so late in the game in back to back to back levels, you don't really get the time to properly use them.

Hence, the pacing of the game feels a little wonky. The game says its 6 hours on Howlongtobeat, but I beat it in just 5 on the standard difficulty. No real deaths, but I did "Carry On" a few times. You get a chance to revive yourself when you die in Bastion, but if you die again (without the passive that gives you an extra chance, for a total of 3 lives), you're done and have to restart the level. I never had to restart. Bastion isn't that hard, and you'll be surprised at how much you can skip by just running past enemies at times, which is honestly a good idea with how much of a bullet hell the game becomes.

I grew a little tired of Bastion's level design by the time I got about 60% through the game. A lot of these narrow passageways where you have to be careful of falling and taking damage combined with enemies that spam bullets at you were fairly tiring. While it's fun for a while, I'm glad that Bastion doesn't overstay its welcome too long, because I don't think I would've enjoyed more than 5 hours of this.

You can see the precursor to mechanics in later Supergiant games in Bastion as well, which I find really interesting and cool. You'll unlock modifiers to make your runs and gameplay much more difficult if you so desire. However, I never really saw the true point of doing so unless you want the challenge. I love that it's there though, and it's so cool to see a lot of Supergiant's ideas appear in a game that came out so long ago. (2011 was 14 years ago, sorry to hit you with that.)

Bastion really has the vibe of the type of game you'd download off of Xbox Live or PSN back in the 360/PS3 days. And I guess it was that at the time, but it's really fascinating to me that it *still* feels that way. It's like a time capsule of downloadable games from that era, almost.

And while I don't think Bastion is perfect or even something that'll blow your mind, it's a nice little game. You can just see the potential Supergiant has as a studio from this initial game alone, and that's really interesting to me. If you're a fan of Hades or Supergiant's other games, I can definitely recommend this to you. In my mind, gamers should go out of their way more often to experience the studio's roots and play their previous work, and understand the way ideas evolve over time.

Unless you're going for achievements or 100% with New Game Plus, I'd recommend it on sale, though. 15 bucks is a little ehhh... but I guess you're getting the full 360/PS3 downloadable game experience by paying that much. Jokes aside, $3 is a steal. Absolutely grab this on sale if you're a fan of Supergiant's work. Otherwise, I'd maybe try Hades or something else first. Bastion, due to the time, still has a little bit of jank and design flaws that hold it back. It also doesn't feel as smooth as maybe you'd want it to be, even on PC - but it's still nonetheless a fun little romp.

Score: 81

Great game!

Pros & cons:

+ Beautiful art style
+ Thrilling story
+ Immersive atmosphere
+ Challenging, yet satisfying, battle system
+ Excellent controller support with fabulous rumble implementation

- At times, the story can be rather convoluted and difficult to follow, especially when the plot is explained during a difficult boss fight
- Some might find it too short (my run, with barely any side quests completed, took me 7 hours)

Overall, a decent title if you like hack'n'slash games with an immersive atmosphere and an intriguing plot.

This game is heart and soul. Supergiant are very special. As a first game from a studio they got it right and have only done better as the years go on. I will say I remember playing this game when I was like 15 and it basically getting me into gaming as an art form and was a 10/10 masterpiece. On reflection, and after about a decade and a half of gaming... DAM IT IS STILL INCREDIBLE!! Maybe not a 10/10 ... but like 8.5? The art style is drop dead gorgeous, the narrator is awesome, and the story has great beats. The combat is great, but they have refined it so much in Hades. The funny thing is you can see Hades in this game. You can see the world / colors of Pyre in this game. You can see the strategy from transistor in this game. What a truly special blue print. I would love a Bastion 2 with Kid, narrator, Zulf, and Zia flying around the world (post evac ending) and trying to fix the world from their sci-fi sky machine. A boy can dream.

The few negatives I have come down to mainly combat and clutter of enemies, and lack of polish when fighting so many different enemies. But this can be dealt with by upgrading weapons and leveling up to get those special upgrades.

If you want to play this in 4k like I did, just add the following to the startup setting in properties for the game on Steam: -windowed -noborder -x 3840 -y 2160 AND DONT FORGET to change your app size from your windows display settings from 300% to 100% so you can see the whole screen lol. Enjoy have fun!

A short and cute 1st playthrough. If you go for achievements or NG+ the lack of depth in the combat starts to make things fall apart.

Neat game. Pretty simple. At first combat is repetitive, but it starts requiring you to use different tools. Recommend purchasing it on discount, I completed it in under 5 hours playing casually.

It shouldn't take 20 minutes of googling just to open the game from the Steam page when every other game just requires you to hit the "Play" button.

Considering it was released in 2011, this is a good game.

Game has good bones. Darren on the track!

Great gameplay mechanics (especially the weapons combinations), great storytelling, lovely visual range, good ratcheting up of difficulty mechanic, and lots of fascinating direction changes in the plot (no spoilers).

Bastion is a must-play. Yes, it does have some flaws embedded in its gameplay, however, they can be considered minute when looking at the bigger picture. It's a very obvious observation but the game's quality is carried by its immaculate presentation.
Full review - https://retrospect-reviews.com/reviews/bastion

If you told me this was made in 2011 I would not believe you, this handles near perfectly
Story, Art, Sound, Gameplay, everything in this game oozes passion, you can definitely tell the people behind this wanted nothing more than to make an immaculate RPG that would hold the test of time, which it has, out of the RPGs ive played over the years, almost none id recommend more than this.

The first of many pretty darn good games by supergiant games. Good gameplay, great music, really good art style/direction. I had a great time, worth every penny. A very introspective sort of game, I still think about it from time to time and reflect on it. Well executed idea.

There is no good reason to play this game in 2025. There are some positives but not enough.
Positives:
- sound track is ok
- it looks pretty interesting
Negatives:
- the gameplay is boring: you walk for a while, trying not to fall off the map, and at the end survive some bullet hell, upgrade your weapons etc. and start over in a different place
- the story is boring especially in the beginning
- the fighting is difficult because of the controls, low player speed and because you have to rely on rolling which makes you fall off the map a lot; also the perspective makes it hard to aim

I'm sure 99% of people don't read reviews. That's why I confess that I love young, beautiful women.

Bastion at it's core is identifiable as a "first game". What a first game provides I believe is a roadmap for what passionate developers want for future creations, and this game alone proved Supergiants right of passage to amazing well-known video games.

For being a relatively short game, the story, gameplay, music, and other qualities synergize greatly. Gameplay's weapon/talent system creates room for what you believe is most effective (or most fun).
Tonic (passive perks), I surprisingly had a lot of fun messing around. While I did default to some tonics mostly, some niche choices interacted with unique weapon/talent choices, and I found room to make use of essentially all of them. Story is brief with intricacies to characters and general "world structure", nonethless, I still found interest in looking into all characters and events mentioned.

Theme/Music I can argue is refreshing and still upholds a unique approach in fleshing out the world with how platforms and landmarks are shown off and introduced, all the while Daniel Korb overture's Supergiants many games to come with audio, music, sound effects, etc.

For replayability, Supergiant's essence of optional difficulties leaves room to decide how much you want to test yourself. You think you can handle onslaughts? Go right ahead. Do you want to run around 1 shot everything? That's fine to!

Game studios must start from somewhere, and Bastion was a passion project that put love not only to the game, but for the players who took their time to try it.

If you are looking for a short Hades-style game where the exoskeleton of amazingly crafted isometric (and supergiant) games come from, Bastion is the biggest reason why we have these iconic games today, and it's nice to see where it all began.

Cool game and fun. Great to see where Supergiant Games started from.
Download Legacy version if the game doesn't boot.

Beautiful, unique, and fun game with a cool narrator and amazing music.

Visually appealing story driven game with a "narrator" voice that provides a just the right amount of humor when you take actions. The game expands your abilities and options as you progress, which seems to build at a good enough speed to learn the items you're getting. Overall, a fun puzzle type game with a unique and fun story to keep you moving forward.

Bastion is a lovely game with novel world building, extraordinary music and a strangely beautiful story. I found myself captivated by the world being built around me as I explored. The narration added to the immersion greatly. It was fun hearing the game trying explain my various nonsense.

I played the game mostly on the normal difficulty and focused primarily on enjoying the story. But for those excited about some challenge in video games, there's quite a bit of that possible as well. By using idols you can introduce a higher difficulty in your game, which also brings with it more rewards.

All in all, I would like to recommend this game to almost anyone.

this game was my childhood for a reason. not sure if it holds up these days compared to others, but it's still a neat game for sure. fun to compare to hades/hades 2, see how the studio's design has evolved

Classic.
That Voice Over is addicting to listen to.

The birth of Supergiant. Very nostalgic and also cool to see how much they improved over the years

Good gameplay, voice-acting, story, music, etc. but I dropped it twice somewhere mid-way through. For me, most of the weapons felt a bit unsatisfying.
Definitely wroth a try tho.

isometric action RPG, made by the studio that would later make Hades. A strange world, solid gameplay and impact during combat and a wonderfully smooth narration.

One of the very first games I've played. A true classic.

I just love this game.
Love the setting, love the atmospheres, the colors of each and every stage and I love the combat system: it's simple but really rewarding.
I've finished this game on other platform as well because I couldn't have enough.
Give it a try, you won't be disappointed.