This week, I played Bastion, an action role-playing game made by Supergiant Games. The game begins by putting you in the role of “the Kid,” who wakes up after a devastating Calamity and begins restoring a fractured Caelondia by rebuilding the Bastion. At first, Bastion makes restoration feel like the obvious choice by offering didactic narration to present rebuilding as good and the hostile Ura as enemies, framing your violence as the Kid as necessary. But as the game progresses, it becomes clear that Caelondia’s colonial history and the Ura’s position within it is not so cut and dry. By training the player to desire restoration before revealing what restoration would actually preserve, Bastion uses the pleasure of rebuilding to critique the fantasy that restoring the past is the same as fixing the future.
[Image of first scene waking up in Bastion.]
As you begin the game and wake up after Calamity, restoring the Bastion feels like the natural response to disaster. Rucks’ narration of the story strengthens this early trust. His baritone voice initially reminded me of a movie-trailer narrator, and that familiarity made him easy to trust. In “The Political and Ethical Force of Bastion,” Mitchell reads Rucks as an ascetic priest trying to convince others to live inside his fantasy of fixing the past, which I definitely resonated with as Rucks became more influential with his pseudo-tutorial voice. It seemed as though he was simply describing what is happening, but he’s actually actively teaching the player how to interpret it through his own moral perspective. In doing this, Rucks eliminates the potential for questioning your actions and feeling discomfort by implying that all of this is necessary because the Bastion will eventually “fix everything.”
[Image of Rucks’ dialogue that the Bastion can fix everything.]
In “Scenario and Story in Bastion,” Clarkson argues that the game’s storytelling system mostly provides background about Caelondia and the Calamity rather than a deeply developed plot. I agree, but I do not think this imbalance is a weakness, as it makes the idea of restoration in the game more attractive. Since Caelondia is presented by Rucks as a lost world, it helped resonate with wanting to bring it back to its former beauty. Even the level design reinforces the fantasy of repair: as the Kid moves, the ground is assembling with him.
[Image of the Kid walking as the world tiles assemble behind him.]
As the game progresses, the story begins to shift as you learn that Caelondia isn’t fully innocent. Clarkson reads Caelondia as a colonial power, associated with walls, skyways, empire, and a “civilizing mission,” while the Ura are othered by Caelondia’s idea of order. This changed the meaning of my actions as the Kid completely, as my goal of fighting enemies and gathering materials to “heal the world” was really shrouding the fact that the Kid is rebuilding the same society that had produced the violence in the first place. This shift reminded me of the story in Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In Omelas, the city’s happiness depends on the suffering of a hidden child. In Bastion, Caelondia’s order seems to depend on the suffering and exclusion of the Ura, who are treated as threats so that Caelondia can imagine itself as civilized and secure. But as the player, I also took on a strange version of that burden. The Kid is the one asked to carry the weight of rebuilding, fighting the Ura, and anything else that blocks the Bastion’s completion. The Ura suffer as the ostracized people sacrificed for Caelondia’s fantasy of order, while the Kid suffers as the person tasked with making that fantasy possible again.
This supports Mitchell’s argument that Bastion begins as a power fantasy, not only because the player defeats enemies, but because the player masters systems of upgrading, understanding enemy patterns, and ultimately the rebuilding loop itself. Mitchell also asserts that the ending turns this fantasy against itself by making Evacuation, not Restoration, the more ethical ending. This flip is particularly interesting since Restoration may look like saving the world, but it actually preserves the Omelas dilemma of restoring comfort without confronting the suffering that made Caelondia possible. Evacuation, by contrast, does not erase guilt or loss. The violence is still attached to you, but you can accept what has happened and refuse to rebuild a world that depends on repeating the same violence. I agree with Clarkson that the Restore/Evacuate choice feels blunt in a game that has guided you for hours up until that point without a choice. But I also think that direct choice is intentional and useful. For example, after hours of letting Rucks narrate my actions, the sudden explicitness of a choice puts the responsibility in my hands. Until that moment, I could keep moving, fighting, collecting, and rebuilding without fully confronting what those actions meant, and the final choice interrupts that flow. It asks whether I want to remain complicit in Caelondia’s fantasy of repair, or accept that moving forward means giving up the comfort of “restoration.”
Bastion ultimately builds toward the question: what does this restoration we want actually preserve? The game shows through further playthroughs that restoring the past does not create a better future, and repeats the same world that made the Calamity possible. That is the crux of Bastion’s fantasy of rebuilding: it makes repairing the world feel right and satisfying, but ultimately reveals that the desire to fix everything is perhaps another way of refusing to learn from what was broken.
