When I first started playing Bastion, I focused on just trying to play well and gather the materials. I was only looking to rebuild the Bastion, listen to the narrative, and try to “fix what was broken.” It took stepping back and thinking through the two readings to understand that the game spends the whole time training us to believe that we are in control, only for that to be completely reversed by the end. What felt like an unsatisfying narrative choice became the whole point of the game: that Bastion isn’t necessarily trying to tell a clean story but rather to make us think about our relationship with our own pasts.
To be completely transparent, I wasn’t able to finish the entire game myself (though I do think that the next free weekend I get, I’ll sit through and try to play it out in its entirety). I made it to the point where you bring Zulf back to the Bastion and start learning more about the history of the Ura, but I have an understanding of the ending of the game (from reading the assigned paper and watching the rest of a full playthrough). This helped me piece together the storyline and understand the readings with better context. By the time I reached the ending, I was already bought into the game’s logic, to gather and rebuild, then restore and fix. As Clarkson mentions, I felt more pulled into the world and its backstory than by the immediate plot. I kept thinking about the Calamity and Caelondia, and the collapse of the civilization.
The final choice, to restore or evacuate, did make me confused because I just really wasn’t expecting it. The game up till that point felt like I was grasping for straws, and to know more, and then suddenly to be given such a choice felt like a large, unprecedented step. My feelings aligned with the point Clarkson seemed to be making, that the choice was jarring and surprising compared to the subtle storytelling in the rest of the game. It felt like the game had shifted tone and forced me into a decision that I wasn’t prepared for.
Mitchell’s argument helped me reinterpret that moment. I thought about how he said that the game builds up that sense of control on purpose through the combat/rebuilding, only for the player to be confronted with a choice at the end that shows the limits of the control that we think we have. This perspective suggests that the ending isn’t “breaking” the game’s logic but actually revealing it. My immediate response to want to choose restore was because the game had prepared me to do so at that point, in working to fix things up to that point. The discussion prompt also helped, as it primed me to look for and rationalize the disagreement between Clarkson and Mitchell. Clarkson saw the moment as a failure, where the game sets up a type of experience, but then suddenly shifts and makes the final decision feel disconnected from everything before that. On the other hand, Mitchell seems to be arguing that the disconnect is the point, because it shows (which I experienced) that the player has internalized the idea that everything is within their control, everything can be repaired, and even optimized.
Reflecting on my experience (playing the game, watching the playthrough), my experience convinced me more than either of those arguments. Until that moment, I wasn’t questioning why I was rebuilding (this could be my personal limitation, though! I’ve noticed in all the games that we have been playing, I’m often focused on the current task and less about the greater context of the games), and just assumed that was the right thing to do. The narration reinforces that the whole time, framing the Bastion as a way to fix everything, implicitly justifying all of my actions. Mitchell’s argument made me realize that this isn’t just narrative bias but is built into the game plan, where the system rewards progress and completion, making the final restoration feel like a natural, attainable end goal.
Overall, coming back to that disagreement, I found myself thinking less about whether the ending “works” or not, but about what I expect games to do and end. Clarkson sees Bastion as a story that should be guiding the player towards its message, and by that requirement, the ending does feel somewhat misaligned. Mitchell sees the games as an experience that uses what the players expect to happen as an argument, and thus, the ending is successful because the players have to face that tension directly. I would argue that it is somewhere in between those two and that while that choice was jarring, my reaction makes Mitchell’s interpretation more believable. The discomfort wasn’t a sign that the game had necessarily failed, but just showed how much I hadn’t realized I had bought into the logic. In that sense, Bastion isn’t just about telling me to move on from the past, but shows how hard that actually is when everything in the game and the way that I was playing it was pushing me to try to fix it instead.
