[Beware spoilers for Bastion.]
In the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram ran an experiment measuring participants’ willingness to commit violence when encouraged by an authority figure. Many participants administered what they believed were painful electric shocks simply because they were told to. But what happens when obedient subjects know their victim has done nothing to deserve punishment? Do they still comply? Do they rationalize their complicity? Supergiant Games’ 2015 action RPG Bastion sets up this exact moral scenario, and then refuses to let players genuinely grapple with it.
Bastion‘s narrative unfolds through Rucks, a gravelly-voiced narrator who tells you you’re rebuilding your hometown of Caelondia in the wake of a catastrophic event known as the Calamity. Your mission is straightforward: scavenge resources from neighboring areas and kill any plants, animals, and people that stand in your way. Unfortunately, Rucks delivers crucial narrative revelations while you’re dodging attacks and managing cooldowns. As games critic Sparky Clarkson observes, the narrative “thread is too subtle, too far buried in the layers of Rucks’ narration to reach the ears of anyone who isn’t paying very careful attention.” And paying careful attention means dying, which halts narrative progress entirely. (On a personal note, this made grabbing screenshots for this piece nearly impossible.) Bastion asks you to think critically about violence while incentivizing you to ignore everything except the violence itself.
When you finally piece together what Rucks is saying, the revelation lands like a punch: Caelondia caused the Calamity. “At the heart of the Calamity was a simple idea. We never wanted to go to war [with our neighbors the Ura] again. We wanted to rule it out.” Caelondia built a weapon and it backfired catastrophically.
Rucks isn’t the hero of this story, he’s the villain. He believes the only way forward is killing “dozens of innocent animals and Ura in the quest to activate the Bastion … because the Bastion will take it all back.” (Clarkson, 2011) Rucks tells the player “[the] best thing we can do for those beasts right now is put them down quick and clean… it’s either them, or us… Takes a lot of convincing, and our mortars have to do the talking.” (Rucks, quoted in Mitchell, 2016) Rucks makes the player complicit in his violence.
Here’s where Bastion should transform from a good game into a great one. What do you do when you realize you’re part of the problem? The moment I understood I was perpetuating undue violence, I wanted to stop. But Bastion offers no such option. You cannot progress without violence. As Rucks intones, “For now, the Kid had little choice but to pick up where the Calamity left off.”
This disconnect grew unbearable as Rucks continued playing the victim and justifying the unjustifiable: “Yes our people caused the Calamity. But here we are trying to fix it… Too bad the Ura ain’t exactly willing to collaborate on that front… Shame the opportunity for civilized discourse is over.” I desperately wanted to point out the flaws in Rucks’ logic and chart a different course but the game wouldn’t let me. This lack of agency doesn’t deepen the game’s critique, it undermines it entirely. It breaks immersion and prompted me to stop relating to the Kid and Rucks.
Bastion‘s finale attempts to address these tensions by offering a binary choice: reset time to possibly prevent the Calamity, or evacuate to start fresh elsewhere. But both options ring hollow.
Resetting time might prevent the Calamity, but as Rucks frames it (“Caelondia will be whole again”) it’s about restoring Caelondia, not achieving justice for the Ura. As Clarkson notes, “rewinding time is not an act of mercy. Doing so merely allows the cycle of violence to continue.”
Evacuation seems more promising but, as researcher Liam Mitchell asks, “how is the player not expressing yet another fantasy–this time, the nostalgic fantasy of establishing a fresh beginning? As the Bastion sails … away from the thousands of Caels, Ura, and animals that Rucks and the Kid have murdered, how could it be that the player is not disavowing responsibility?” Without agency to challenge Rucks’ violent logic throughout the game, why would a future elsewhere be any different?
Bastion contains the seeds of a genuinely powerful meditation on violence and moral complicity. That shocking realization that you’re the villain of someone else’s story could have anchored something profound if it wasn’t lost in demanding mechanics and lack of agency. Instead of exploring violence and complicity, Bastion forces complicity while commenting on it from the sidelines. That’s not exploration, it’s observation. And in a medium defined by interactivity, that’s a fatal flaw.
