Supergiant's Bastion follow-up is unapproachable and rewarding in equal measure.
Transistor is cool. It's confident. It walks into the party knowing that everyone will approach it looking to talk, so it doesn't have to make the first move. Transistor won't meet you halfway. If you want meaning, you're going to have play by its rules. This makes the game feel a bit off-putting, but it's also more rewarding for those willing to engage.
On the surface, Transistor seems very similar to Supergiant Games' previous release, the warm, welcoming cult hit Bastion. Both games use an isometric perspective and take place in brightly colored, gorgeously detailed cartoon environments. They both involve light role-playing elements in controlling a single character and are dominated aurally by Darren Korb's trip-hop music and Logan Cunningham's gravely vocals.
But Transistor's overall tone is very different from its predecessor, and that fact bleeds into every part of the game experience. Bastion's perspective was zoomed-in; Transistor's is distant. Enemies in Bastion were colorful and magic; Transistor's opponents are monochromatic and technological. Bastion's combat was action-oriented and immediate; Transistor's is halting and strategic. The older game's soundtrack was upbeat and catchy with a West Asian flair; the new one is dark and spacey with catchy melodies nowhere to be found. If Bastion was Supergiant's remarkably successful attempt at creating a very specific kind of game, Transistor is its supremely confident attempt at pushing the boundaries it previously established.
The tonal differences between the two games are most apparent in the way Cunningham's vocals are treated. Bastion's narrator Rucks, also voiced by Cunningham, describes what's going on with wry humor and an implicit promise of final explanation from his position of expertise. The vast majority of speech you'll hear in Transistor is from Cunningham, but his voice is that of your character's sword—the titular Transistor—reacting to what's happening in the game. Rucks' default mode is storytelling, and Bastion is about storytelling. The Transistor's default mode is confusion, and Transistor is about confusion.
You play a pop/opera singer named Red in a dystopian, cyberpunk city named Cloudbank. A group called “the Camerata" has stolen Red's voice, but Red hunts them down with the help of the powerful talking sword she finds. As she does, robots called "the Process" chase her and destroy the city.
But Transistor stubbornly refuses to connect these bits of plot to anything definite. Cloudbank feels like a generalized idea of what a cyberpunk city might look like, but it's not connected to Earth history or, well, seemingly anything except itself—the only other location mentioned is “the Country" which may well be death. Red's voice is stolen, but for what reason?
Perhaps most crucially, what is the story behind the Transistor sword? Its voice seems to come from a specific deceased person, and as you progress through the game the sword gains strength by absorbing the dead. The aesthetics of this absorption are distinctly digital—is it downloading their personalities?—but it could easily be interpreted as taking, or stealing, the souls of the recently dead. With its detailed focus on the action of the moment and complete lack of anything resembling an overall explanation, Transistor reminds me of the confusing and mesmerizing Aeon Flux cartoons that aired on MTV's Liquid Television in the '90s. The confusion is part of the appeal.
This seems to align Transistor with the recent wave of experimental narrative games, where progressing through the game world itself is less important than externally putting the puzzle of the game's story together. Dear Esther may be the best example of this, with its unreliable narration and multiple plot threads weaving together into a Rashoman-style story that can never be completely resolved. Transistor has a similar lack of settled conclusion built into its narrative structure, although it's one that, with its swordfights, conspiracies, and robots takes a more familiar form in games than Dear Esther's literary stylings.
Yet unlike Dear Esther and other “walking simulators," Transistor very much has a game-like challenge attached to it. Red and Transistor gain levels and skills, and players choose how to structure those skills in order to match their style—all quite normal for the genre. But here's where Transistor gets clever: each of those skills is associated with one of the souls Red has downloaded into the sword. This adds a mildly disturbing vampiric element to the proceedings—your character improves by stealing skills from the dead. But it also finds a neat way to let players alleviate their confusion about what the hell is going on in Cloudbank by using those souls to tell more of the story.
Each skill can be used in three different ways. For example, the skill Help() functions as a sort of charm spell. As an active skill, it lets you “convert" enemies into souls directly. Use it to augment a different active skill, and it will charm enemies when you hit them with the other skill. If you use it as a passive skill, it spawns robot friends for you when you finish enemies off.
Transistor brilliantly harmonizes this upgrade mechanic with its story by giving you background on the character each skill is associated with when you use it in a different way. So when you use Help() in each of its different forms, you get different background on its associated personality, Sibyl Reisz, and what she did in Cloudbank while she was alive and why. Experimental narrative structure and experimental gameplay mechanics are directly intertwined in Transistor. There's no division between "arty indie game" and "RPG progression."
Unfortunately, this confidence and coolness comes at a price. Transistor can also be quite aloof. As much as I intellectually enjoyed the challenge the game's story presented and the variety its progression encouraged, I rarely felt totally engaged by it as a full experience. I ended up preferring to play in short 30- to 45-minute bursts rather than hours-long marathons.
This is partly because the combat system, while effective, is rarely satisfying. While Transistor can be played as a pure action-RPG with some difficulty, it encourages players to use a time-halting planning system similar to modern Fallout games' VATS system. You pause time, plan your moves, and Red executes them. There's much more complexity in Transistor's planning system than there is in VATS, and it feels good enough to keep the story moving. But I found that when I got to a point in the game where combat-only challenges appeared, my motivation to push through them plummeted.
I loved Bastion, but Transistor is not the sort of game that inspires love. Transistor is a game that invites respect—offered from a distance—in order to even start to unlock its potential greatness. That coolest person at the party might have the smartest and most emotional things to say, but she's still not as approachable as she should be.
The Good:
Gorgeous art direction
Impressively constructed setting
Demanding storytelling
The Bad:
Mildly unsatisfying combat
The Ugly:
Nothing, really—this game is the exact opposite of ugly
Verdict: Buy it when you have time to unpack it.
Mar 20 2013, 12:20 AM, updated 10y ago
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