Caltrops - Gamerasutra - Bastion is one for the critics.

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by Jerry Whorebach 01/15/2012, 9:31pm PST

mark wrote:

Apparently if you have sort of a faux-oil paint look to a game, you must also have a ridiculous, nonsensical plot involving time-travel, ethnic cleansing, and something resembling a nuclear holocaust. Actually, I can't remember if Braid featured ethnic cleansing or not, but Jonathan Blow does have a shaved head, so I'll call it even.

It could also be argued that Bastion is really about the aftermath of a breakup, so it's actually even more like Braid than anyone would care to admit. Video games are growing up, and right now they're in that embarrassing high school poetry phase, where every broken heart is like a little Genbaku Dome.

mark wrote:

The enemies are samey (various kinds of turrets and melee-oriented heavies) and extremely easy by default. The game allows you, with great granularity, to increase their difficulty for greater rewards. This is clever, but I didn't fiddle with it enough to see how well it works, or if it adds real re-playability.

Making your game painfully easy by default, then demanding the player sink hours into it just to unlock adequate difficulty options, is pretty much the opposite of clever. The granularity of options is in keeping with the overall design philosophy, which must have been that no one should ever be presented with one iota more challenge than they're equipped to handle at that particular moment, lest they end up spending too much time on (god forbid repeating) a segment, and realizing the narration isn't quite so dynamic as they'd been lead to believe.