Just got to chapter 3 - Impressions

[Bastion]

I played the demo during nextfest on steam, I bought the game on PS5. I love the setting and the gameplay concept is cool, but the more I've played the more I'm realizing this isn't as fun as I thought it was going to be.

This game is WAY too handholdy (pardon the pun). Every ledge is an invisible wall. Even the one with a ladder you just climbed up. Want to go back down? You can't grab that ladder, you can't jump off from the ledge, you need to place your piton into a wall nearby to enable yourself to go lower than your current platform. This sounds small, but the sooner you realize this the sooner you realize this is nothing more than a walking sim (which isn't the worst thing, I like walking sims, but I was expecting this to be A LITTLE more of a climbing sim).

There is effectively no risk of failure. You can never accidentally fall off the tower and plummet to your death, since the game auto-uses your piton at every little nook at the start of a climb (and those nooks are EVERYWHERE). If you dislike when games like Horizon, Tomb Raider or Uncharted overtly mark their climbables with yellow markings to make it obvious to the dimwitted players out there, this game does the same thing with these piton holds. Which completely takes any sort of "puzzle" solving out of the equation. You always know exactly where to go, partially due to these things being everywhere you need to go and partially because you are led around by the nose via invisible walls.

So, the game doesn't have anything in the way of even the most rudimentary of player agency in terms of traversal or exploration. You can only go along the pre-determined path that the devs so graciously laid out for you via these piton holds (or the odd detour here or there, more on that in a second). That's fine, again, its a walking sim. Some of the best walking sims don't even have a jump button, you literally just hold forward to progress the story. And that's again where this falls short.

I mentioned some detours. There are only 4 "collectables" (if you can call them that) in the game, so far at least: Sea shells that force you into an unskippable 30 second cutscene as the camera pans around your surroundings as you listen to random sounds that used to fill those surroundings before current day, tiny rock formations that you can place another rock on top of, random scattered notes left behind by the previous inhabitants of the tower and glowing wall art that your little creature friend can illuminate.

That's it. None of them do anything. The worst offender being the notes, imo. Bioshock using audio logs to tell the background story as you progressed was novel. Repeated implementation of that mechanic has gotten stale over the years. I can only care so much about setting/backstory of the game world, but reading about the random goings on of people that aren't even in the game? I'm sorry devs, I just can't be bothered to read these walls of text. I find them, spam the continue button until the note is off the screen, and go back to climbing the tower.

If these collectables did anything, or were more interesting, I'd be more inclined to care. The glowing wall art is kinda neat, I see where they're going with it, but again, kind of a weak reward for finding some random cave off the beaten path you can swing to.

I'm still looking forward to playing through the rest, but the rigid safety net of invisible walls, and lack of any fail state or meaningful to collect or find has me growing more and more ambivalent as I progress.

TL;DR: This is a game about climbing a massive tower in a strange environment and yet theres no reason to ever be careful or any incentive to even try exploring beyond what the obvious path forward is, and that's a real let down.

[groover]

Thanks for taking the time to write this up. Have a great week bro

[ChubbiChibbai]

Yeah i have to say i agree.
I love the concept. I've been really looking forwards to this game releasing.

The aesthetic and mood of the game is great. It really feels great but like you said there is no risk. I was expecting there to be more of a challenge with climbing. More of a risk. I wanted this to be a puzzle game about climbing - but also a game about 'how high can you get' with risk of falling.

I wish there was more in terms of challenges. I sort of expected it to almost be a bit of a rogue like where the climb was randomised each time and you got different gear as you progressed.

It's still a really lovely game but not sure i'm ready to commit to it at the current price for the amount of content there is. It really feels like a one and done type of game and with run-time of 5 hours (apparently) to me that isn't quite worth it right now.