Preview: Bastion

{sidebar id=1}Earlier this year at PAX East I had a chance to speak with Amir Rao of Supergiant Games about their upcoming title for Xbox Live Arcade: Bastion. Amir was more than happy to hear about everything that AbleGamers does and wanted to learn more about the disabled community. Marco Pasqua had a chance at E3 to follow up with Supergiant Games and speak to Darren Korb about how everything has been going since then.

Bastion is an action RPG that has you playing as a character who is only referred to as "the Kid." The Kid's world is being torn apart into a series of floating islands and he is desperately seeking the Bastion, a designated safe area. The most unique aspect of Bastion is the dynamic and omniscient narrator who is constantly describing what the player is doing. For example, if you open a chest containing a food item the narrator will say something like "The Kid managed to find a chest; had some food in it or somethin'." The team at Supergiant Games said that they used their demo sessions with the public to see which actions the players would use most and added more narrator lines accordingly. I was told at PAX East that Bastion would include subtitles for everything that the narrator said as not to exclude those who need them.

The game plays out in a traditional action RPG sense, moving with the analog stick and attack with the face buttons. The player can also roll to evade any sort of danger and you soon gain the use of a shield to help reduce incoming damage. Amir told me that he wasn't sure just how well Bastion would fair in our mobility category which is definitely the category that has seen more low scores than the other categories. Amir also said that there shouldn't be any color troubles since everything also contains a graphical distinction besides color when playing.

Difficulty is handled in a bit of a unique way in Bastion, using a system involving shrines, which Darren was more than happy to explain to Marco. Throughout the game the player will encounter these shrines that, if the player chooses, can alter the difficulty of the game, for example making the enemies faster. This is completely optional and in no way is forced upon the player. If you do choose to make the game more difficult, you will be rewarded with extra bonuses when you defeat enemies. This presents a completely customizable way to alter the difficulty of the game, considering you can have as little or as many shrines active at once as you want.

Bastion is looking to be a very unique experience coming to this year's Summer of Arcade on XBLA. I would like to thank the folks at Supergiant Games for being so open to talk with AbleGamers on more than one occasion and you can be certain that we'll discuss just how accessible this game ends up later this year.