Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The headline doesn’t refer to an extravagant orchestral rendition that you’d have to pay money to see, but rather a short video containing two of Bastion’s most glorious audio treats. I’ll never find these songs as powerful as I did when they first drifted in, just as the structure of the world and the melancholy of the situation slotted into place around my gun-toting kid, but I still get shivers up my spine when that vocal starts. An intimate performance by audio director Darren Korb and vocalist Ashley Barrett, this is a lovely way to start a Friday, or any other day. Pretty good way to end one too. Listen down yonder.

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Supergiant are apparently fully aware that when talking about Bastion over the summer, they say they designed the original game to be complete, and therefore not really requiring of DLC. Needless to say, that stance has changed a little, as they explain: “HOWEVER! In the weeks following the release of the game, we decided to put a little something together for the holidays as a show of thanks to our fans. So, on December 14, we’ll be pleased to bring you the Stranger’s Dream DLC for Bastion, which should give you some good reasons to come back to the game while preserving the core experience just as we intended.” The Stranger’s Dream will be “a new fully narrated Who Knows Where sequence, bigger and more challenging than the others”, and there are two other new game modes, too.

The Stranger’s Dream is out Dec 14th. It’ll be free, too.

Beautiful, beautiful hack and slash dungeon-crawler (if a shattered archipelago of floating islands in the sky can be said to be a dungeon) Bastion is now half-price on the Steam digital computer game distribution pipe. I would use this opportunity to direct you to John’s review, where he implores you to buy the game. But you don’t need to believe his big lying face, because there’s also a demo you can play to try it out.

Then, once you have fallen in love with it, you can read this interview to learn a bit more about the making of this lovely thing. Hooray!

Released today is Supergiant Games’ gorgeous looking action-RPG, Bastion. It’s available to purchase from Steam at a price of £11.49/€13.99/$14.99, and you can take a poke at the launch trailer here. Despite being temporarily wrapped up in a web of Xbox exclusivity, Bastion has always been PC bound. As you can see if you compare PC screenshots to Xbox screenshots, the PC version has access to far higher quality assets for those of you with grown-up sized monitors. There is a demo available and you can read Jim’s hands on impressions here.

Check back tomorrow for a full review.

If the Steam page is to be believed then SuperGiant’s esoteric dungeon-crawler is set to arrive on 16th of August (SuperGiant just confirmed this to us over email.) I am honestly expecting this to be one of the games of the year: it’s a beautiful blend of compelling, click hack ‘n’ slash action with artful indie sensibility. What the screens and talk of whacking monsters doesn’t quite get across is how exquisitely the world is delivered as it drops into place ahead of you, a process that is oddly dreamlike, especially when framed against the hard-boiled, wise-cracking voiceover. Anyway, I am sure we’ll ramble about this extensively when it arrives on our Windows boxes.

Awesome-looking (and even better sounding) esoteric action-RPG Bastion has arrived on the console boxes this week, but should also making its way to PC soon. Supergiant told us that the PC version has no set release date yet and explained: “We’re still sorting out the controls and making a few other changes to make sure the PC version feels like a proper PC game.”

You can check out the trailer below, and read my hands-on impressions of the PC version of the game.
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One of many pleasant experiences at GDC this year was sitting down to play SuperGiant Games’ awesome IGF-nominated fantasy action game, Bastion. I’ve just gone back and played the same build this afternoon, and remembered why I was quite so delighted by seeing this game in motion. Today has also seen the announcement that the game will be distributed by Warner Bros, which is great for SuperGiant Games. The deal means that they’re remaining independent, while getting some marketing and sales clout for one of the best-presented indie games I’ve encountered in the past year. Well done them.

Read on for some thoughts on the game, and the trailer.
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