Where I’m coming from

I enjoyed writing up Wednesday’s post and thinking objectively about the subject of characters in game design. I still have a lot to say on that topic, and on the other aspects of storycraft, so I thought it would only be fair to share some games that I felt satisfied all the necessary requirements to make a really good game, and then some. Before I continue talking about characters, story, gameplay, and art design, you need to know where I’m coming from. Everyone does lists of Top 5, and while 5 is a very arbitrary number, I think it works for me too. If you want, I can always add a 6th later, and we can pretend that it’s a Pokemon team.

I want to preface this by noting how few old games are in the list. This is likely because of my continuous efforts to try to find and enjoy things that are new. I rarely go back and play old games now, but I did play a lot of the good ones when I was a child, so I don’t believe I am too biased. Anyways, let’s jump into this entirely self-serving list. If you don’t want to listen to me gush about a few really good games, you can skip today. I won’t be offended. Also, I never mail scorpions to people.

Inaugural Post! A personal favorite – Bastion!

Bastion is a game that evoked some emotional responses from me, a feat that very few games have pulled off in my lifetime. I felt loneliness, sadness, joy, anxiety, despair, anger, mirth, and hope, all while playing this quirky little indie game. Bastion came out in the summer of 2011, so it is fairly recent. It received a lot of praise and awards, and actually deserved the vast majority of them.

Bastion has you play as The Kid, a boy or man of indeterminate age, although the game leads me to believe that he is between 19 and 25. You explore a jumbled up and mostly ruined world that is now in pieces and floating in the sky following an anomalous Calamity, and you journey to find survivors while trying to protect the Bastion, which is the last remaining safe place for humanity. However, for a ruined world, you may find that it is exceptionally colorful. All of the art in this game is hand-painted, and that stuck out to me as unique and cool, a very nice touch. It isn’t fair, though, to deride bigger budget games for not doing this, though, because Bastion is a much smaller game in scale than most of the mainstream games of the past few years, and also uses an isometric point of view and fixed camera angles. It is important to note that this little bit of beauty and originality wouldn’t work for most games. This is something I will be saying a few more times in this review.