Bastion is a game about rebuilding a broken world. It is also a game about who gets to decide what “fixed” means, and who gets destroyed in service of that vision. My reading of Bastion is this: the game uses its narrator, its mechanics, and its ending structure to stage a colonial logic, and then quietly implicates the player in it. What makes this interesting is that the game both critiques that logic and depends on it to function.
The architecture of colonialism is built into the game’s premise. Caelondia, whose name echoes the Latin caelum (heaven), purchased Ura land cheaply, built walls against an “outside” threat, and developed a weapon intended to seal the Ura underground permanently. The Calamity was the backfire of a would-be genocide. And yet Rucks narrates all of this with warmth and nostalgia, mourning a civilization the game quietly shows us we should not mourn. His voice, southern-poetic, weathered, trustworthy, is the game’s most sophisticated piece of colonial machinery. He is not lying exactly; he is curating. He tells you about Caelondia’s grandeur and omits that it rested on exclusion. Rucks, a man so consumed by guilt that he cannot imagine any future that isn’t the past restored, may be the real villain.
This is where the medium does something a novel cannot. The player does not merely observe colonial violence, they perform it. On Mount Zand, we discover that the creatures we have been destroying all game have built their own Bastion, rounded up their own survivors, searched for their own cores. Rucks’ response is to frame their slaughter as mercy: killing them quickly is, he insists, the kindest thing. As Liam Mitchell notes in his academic analysis, the parallels to settler colonial logic are unmistakable, the rationalization of violence, the claim of intellectual and moral superiority, the erasure of indigenous alterity in pursuit of “renewal.” The game makes you do this before it tells you what you’re doing. That sequencing is not accidental. It implicates you.
The Restoration ending crystallizes what colonialism is ultimately about: the refusal to accept consequences. Choosing to turn back time is framed emotionally as hope, the Memorial mechanics, the vigils, Rucks’ narration have all been building toward it. But, from other players’ commentaries who played a new game after, the new game mode strips that illusion away. Rucks’ narration shifts, haunted by déjà vu; he senses he has told this story before. The Calamity happens again. Restoration doesn’t save anyone. It forces them to relive their suffering, because the conditions that produced the Calamity, the fear, the walls, the weapons, are never changed. This is what Sparky Clarkson means when he argues that rewinding time is not mercy; it merely continues the cycle of violence.
Here is where evaluation matters: does Bastion make this argument well? Mostly, yes, but with a significant failure. The critique of Restoration is embedded in mechanics and narration subtle enough that many players miss it entirely. Clarkson identifies the problem precisely: the game frames Evacuation as choosing Zia’s wishes over Rucks’, reducing a structural argument about colonial nostalgia to a sentimental one about a woman who barely speaks. The ending that best supports the game’s own reading, Evacuate, don’t restore, break the cycle, is the harder one to choose, and the game doesn’t give you enough reason to choose it consciously. The colonial logic Rucks embodies is critiqued, but it is also the logic the game’s emotional architecture was built on. The nostalgia works. That’s the problem.
I chose to evacuate, and in doing so I chose against Rucks, against the voice that had guided me, charmed me, and made me complicit for the entire game. The Bastion drifts into open sky with no map and no destination, and for the first time Rucks has nothing authoritative to say. That silence is the point. The anti-colonial act in Bastion is not liberation or justice, those were destroyed in the Calamity along with everything else. It is simply the refusal to restore a world built on the terms that broke it.
