Most games ease you in; Bastion drops you into a world that is, quite literally, falling apart underneath you. Bastion is the kind of game that does not offer much direction in how to play. For someone like me who does not have much experience playing video games, even getting used to utilizing the WASD keys instead of the arrow keys was somewhat of a learning curve. In the middle of me trying to get my bearings in the world of Caelondia, trying to not fall off the edge of the world (or at least, the edge of the self-assembling path), bam—I get hit with the slow story of the Calamity and how the Kid literally has no one left. Wait what? Everyone’s dead? It was such a mismatch in vibe: I was just trying not to die at the hands of various squishy monsters, but now I had the heavy weight of knowing about a world-ending tragedy on top of it. When I first started playing, I was simply learning the controls, dying, dodging, and getting better. Meanwhile Rucks, the narrator, was telling me about apocalypse and irreversible loss. I argue that Bastion deliberately puts the player in a tonally absurd position: the trivial mastery of a video game is the only response available to a world-ending tragedy.
Mitchell argues that videogames typically operate as “power fantasies” in which mastery of algorithms substitutes for genuine engagement with the world. He sees most games as training the player in control and calculability, which are the very dispositions Nietzsche’s amor fati opposes. Bastion, in Mitchell’s reading, is exceptional because it ultimately denies the player the satisfactions of control. In the first couple hours of playing the game, Bastion operates exactly like a power fantasy: I learned how to wield the hammer, dodge-roll, level up, and overall, just try not to die. Mitchell himself acknowledges this: “Bastion, in other words, operates in much the same way as any other power fantasy, offering the player the chance to learn and master the game” (p. 29). But Rucks’s narration is simultaneously dropping little bombs of information about genocide, apocalypse, and irreversible loss. Bastion deliberately stages the inadequacy of videogame competence as a response to tragedy. The player in the form of the Kid is being trained in the very disposition—like mastery and control—that Mitchell identifies as ethically bankrupt, and the gap between gameplay tone and narrative tone makes that inadequacy palpable. The mismatch is the game showing me, in real time, that getting good at a videogame is not a meaningful response to the loss it depicts.
Meanwhile, Clarkson observes that “even if the Kid kills dozens of innocent animals and Ura in the quest to activate the Bastion, it’s still all right, according to the narrator, because the Bastion will take it all back.” Clarkson also notes that Rucks’s narration mostly stays out of the Kid’s head and instead delivers worldbuilding, meaning the player, in the first hours, is hearing about Caelondia’s destruction while the Kid remains an opaque figure swinging a hammer. Clearly, the player is not given access to grief or moral reflection through the protagonist; the Kid is given mechanical competence on one channel and historical catastrophe on the other, with no synthesis offered.
For example, there were a few moments where the Kid encountered people who had turned to stone in the various lands we explored in search of the Cores. One that stuck with me was Old Rondy the Bartender, petrified by the Calamity. The way Rucks simply brushes over Rondy’s death is a little alarming because he plays it off with an offputting joke. We get no sense of how the Kid feels about finding the stone body of someone who, presumably, used to pour him drinks. Instead, we get a quip and a cue to keep moving, keep fighting, keep collecting Cores. This is exactly the split Clarkson describes: mechanical competence on one channel, historical catastrophe on the other, and no synthesis. I just kept swinging the hammer and I eventually smashed Rondy’s stone body to pieces. Rucks had a quip about this too.
Clarkson treats the gap between scenario and story as a flaw. The worldbuilding is more compelling than the protagonist’s journey, which dilutes the theme. Mitchell, on the other hand, treats Bastion’s ethical work as happening primarily at the level of the final choice between Restoration and Evacuation. I want to suggest something different: the gap itself, the tonal mismatch between learning-to-play and learning-what-happened, is doing ethical work throughout the whole game, though I felt it most acutely in the first couple of hours, when the learning curve was steepest and I was most unfamiliar with this videogame world. This mismatch makes the player feel that their growing competence is somehow obscene against the backdrop of what Rucks is describing, and that feeling is Bastion’s opening argument about the limits of videogame mastery as a response to loss. It is also, I think, the game’s earliest gesture toward amor fati: before the player ever faces the choice between Restoration and Evacuation, Bastion is already teaching them that mastery is not enough and that some things have to be accepted rather than controlled.
