To me, Bastion felt like an escape room. As a competitive gamer, my instincts when I took over my keyboard were fully utilitarian: optimize the building, memorize the dodge and attack timings, and find the fastest route possible to the end credits. As the floor of the foreign lands rose to meet my feet, I didn’t fear falling into the void, nor marvel at the beauty of the world building. Instead, I simply held the ‘w’ key and trudged forward, trusting in the game mechanics to catch me as I rushed to the next step. I’d argue, however, that this hyper-efficient playstyle wasn’t a failure to engage with the game’s deeper meaning. Rather, this was precisely the trap that Bastion was setting.
Bastion masquerades itself as a mechanical puzzle to weaponize the players competitive instincts, which in turn molds the speedrunning gamer into the ultimate epitome of a colonizer. By framing the salvation of the world as a checklist, the game manipulates the competitive player into committing the very atrocities that it condemns within its narrative.
In my eyes while playing, Caelondia was not a graveyard to be mourned, but rather an obstacle course to be optimized and extracted from. The Ura were not a marginalized group that had survived a catastrophic event, they were instead simply hitboxes in between me and my next upgrade. This coincides with Mitchell’s reading, where he leaned on Heidegger to describe the essence of modern technology being that “all things are revealed as mere means to human ends that stand in reserve and await use and disposal.” (Mitchell, 26) The ruined world, in this game, has been mechanically reduced into raw upgrade materials such as ‘something heavy’. For me, this further abstracted the deeper meaning of the game and forced me to view it as simply an upgrade tool as opposed to a lost relic or artifact.
Rucks enables this sociopathic efficiency. Mitchell identifies Rucks as Nietzsche’s “ascetic priest”, a guilt-wracked character constructing a comforting lie to avoid the tragic reality. But to me, Rucks served much more functionally as the game master of the escape room. He fed us clear, extractable objectives. Find the cores. Find the shards. Rebuild the Bastion. Restoration sounds like the traditional video game “win”, so competitive players will eagerly accept this framing. Without hesitation I smashed through foreign environments and harvested the surviving Ura because Rucks reassurance that we were working towards the ultimate goal. This worked because my desire for a perfectly efficient run aligned with Caelondia’s imperial desire to erase its own mistakes. But, escape rooms only work if there is actually an exit.
This brings us to the game’s final choice. In critiquing the game, Sparky Clarkson argues that the sudden presentation of two massive blocks of text is a jarring design failure. Clarkson suggests that this explicit menu is “at odds with the game’s otherwise subtle presentation” (Clarkson) and breaks the player’s immersion.
I push back on Clarkson’s view here; for a player trapped in a competitive, unthinking loop, breaking immersion is not a design flaw, it is a necessary mechanical jolt.
If the game relied on subtle, narrative/cutscene driven cues to deliver the ending, competitive games would have simply mashed the spacebar through towards ‘victory’. However, by halting the gameplay loop with a static, un-skippable menu, the game strips the player of their momentum, forcing them to slow down and think. It forces the gamer to realize that there is no optimal ‘win state’ to be found.
This shatters the illusion of the escape room. It forces the player to look critically at the two options, between the restoration which the player has spent hours grinding toward, and evacuating and leaving all the progress behind. Restoration doesn’t actually fix anything, though. It merely rewinds time as we see in the New Game and keeps all the suffering and destruction. There is no ‘victory’ here.
Bastion succeeds not just because of its beautiful art or philosophical underpinnings, but because it leverages how players play video games. It manipulates our desire for efficiency, loot, and happy endings to make us complicit in the cycle of colonial violence. When we finally find the door out of the escape room, the game’s UI forces us to confront our own nature. It proves that the only way to truly win is by evacuating, dropping our weapons and abandoning our competitive instincts.
