Telling a Story — Bastion vs. Risk of Rain
My point today is to finally let go of this write-up that's been gathering dust on my hard drive for 5 months without attention! It's specially for Janne who in his latest CAN-A-WORMES requested some write-up of "that side-scrolling action platformer that's not Shovel Knight". He can only mean Risk of Rain. So here goes! :-)
(All the images below are stolen from the Internet. Thanks to their authors!)
This all starts from Bastion. In case you don't know or might not remember, it's an action-based game released on PC in 2011 (though I played the later 2015 PS4 release) about a boy who adventures in a surreal world in an isometric view. It's heavy on spoken narrative and it pushes the story of the game world on the player at every occasion.
Risk of Rain, for those who don't know or might not remember, is an even more action-based platformer released in 2013. It's about a pixel-art character stranded on a weird planet with lots of hostile aliens. You shoot and dodge your way through a number of levels and defeat at least as many alien bosses.
Now, some (long) time ago I had the idea to write to you about Bastion. I wanted to describe all the aspects that I disliked in it. Then one day I understood something about Risk of Rain. Risk of Rain is quite different from Bastion in style, and I think the intentions of the developers of these games were very far apart, but despite this Risk of Rain did for me successfully what Bastion tried to do but failed; to tell an emotive story. To me Bastion seems to be all about setting the mood and getting immersed in the game world and its story. Risk of Rain on the other hand is primarily about tight gameplay mechanics, fraction-of-a-second dodges, and finding a balance between aggressive and careful styles of running, jumping and shooting.
So, the question is, why didn't Bastion succeed in delivering an interesting story to me? Bastion is heavy on story and spoken content. It tells the background stories of a number of characters, each carefully handcrafted. It gives hints about what has happened to the game world, explaining piece by piece why the world is as it is. It's full of mystery and includes pieces of drama.
Risk of Rain also tells you bits and pieces about the alien world you're exploring. These stories are mostly short descriptions of the monsters you encounter, written as journal entries. The text is discovered during gameplay and you have to go dig the text out from the game menus between plays. When you play Risk of Rain, there's practically no story text, and that's very good because any longer run of text would break the intense action that continues from the first seconds of a play to the last.
On a broad level I think Risk of Rain works for me so well because I can get "into" it. I have always been interested in gameplay mechanics and I feel it's important that the controls of a game feel fluid and responsive. The wide but concise palette of combat actions that Risk of Rain presents to the player is like a unique version of speed chess. Each of the 10 playable characters have their own set of four skills. Usually at least one of them is a basic "fire gun" but the rest can be pretty imaginative such as "spit poison that deals damage over time to one enemy and spreads to two other enemies after three seconds". You have to learn to know the actions and choose which ones to apply in a given combat situation, and you have to make those choices in fractions of a second.
When you die in Risk of Rain, it's game over. You can start over and try again. A good play might last 30 minutes. The game limits playtime in a unique way. For every 5 minutes that you manage to stay alive the game steps the difficulty up a notch. There's a gauge in the corner of the screen showing how many minutes you've survived and how high the difficulty has risen. Eventually the game will get so difficult that you'll die by the sheer amount of enemies that surround you. There's no way around that. The inevitable doom of the player creates a kind of melancholy that shades the whole game. I can feel that the inevitable doom makes me a little bit distressed when I play Risk of Rain. Could that perhaps be counted as a mistake in the game? Games are supposed to be "fun", right? Wrong. :-) At least I don't think so.
On the contrary, I believe that this melancholy and distress is ultimately what makes Risk of Rain a Really Good Game in my book. I can't play it just for a short while because getting immersed in the game is an investment in the emotional stimuli I have described above. I'd like to compare it to reading an engaging novel; I can't just read a bit here and there for the sake of it or just to waste 15 minutes. Opening the book is an investment of my time in immersing in the book world. I owe it to the story to dedicate my attention to it and to respond to its events inside my head. I must live the book or else I have failed it. (Disclaimer: Although I haven't read any proper novels in a couple of decades, I have done so before and I think I remember how they work for me.)
Risk of Rain also knows how to keep me curious. It throws me into situations where I can't immediately identify all the elements and simultaneously I need to make quick decisions. I believe these conflicting goals (figure out how things work vs. make quick decisions) severely slows down the speed in which I drain the game of interesting content, nearly preventing the game from getting stale over time. When I see something unusual that I'd like to explore and analyze, the game forces me to blast my way past it or else I die. It wakes up my curiosity and doesn't let it get satisfied too quickly. Because interesting settings fly by quickly they stay alive in my imagination even after finishing a play of the game. I might come up with theories to explain what I saw, and I want to go back and find out more evidence to support or refute my guesses.
Bastion on the other hand—while also mainly based on running around and fighting monsters—is more laid-back in its mechanics. You don't need to make quick decisions or plan ahead. All you need to do is trot forward and react to situations as they appear. These situations are mostly predictable and repetitive. The action keeps a moderate pace at best and feels lazy overall. If you fail, you're not punished much. Just retry until you get through. You are provided with multiple weapons but in the end it doesn't matter much which one you use. If you have a long-range weapon and a melee weapon you're pretty much set for the whole story. There's no need to learn the controls well because the game doesn't provide the urgency. I believe this lack of urgency is the key fact that keeps me from getting immersed in Bastion's game world.
It feels as if Bastion mixed up computer games and books. It reads a story out loud on the condition that I mash buttons on the controller and keep the narrator talking. (Note: Most of the time the narrator is describing the very actions my player character is doing. In itself it's a very exciting thing to see in a game, and it's executed well.) I don't really feel involved in what happens in the game world. I'm just there to listen to what someone else tells what is happening to some kid in some story that someone wrote. Why would I care? It's not really me on the line there. I'm playing a game so I expect to be able to drive the story myself. Books, not video games, are the medium where I follow a story that someone else wrote.
Towards the end of Bastion I grew quite fed up with the narrative. I do admit the style of narration is cool. The voice sounds like a gunslinger from Western movies (think Clint Eastwood). The music also supports the mood. On the other hand the Western theme is not reflected in the characters and visual art style of Bastion. It's a bit jarring but I can overlook that. What is much more annoying is how the game demands me to listen to the story even when I'm no longer interested in it. Bastion is all about going through the story but somehow the game is also an action game. The action feels very much glued on. Even if the action parts were well made (i.e. with more intensity and urgency) you can't just enjoy it because it's subordinate to the story.
A great example of how Bastion squashes action under story is the battle arena. It's a small area in the game world's main hub where you can fight a series of enemy waves. That place, if any, should allow me to just get immersed in the action. But no. Each enemy wave comes with a piece of some endless background story that never succeeded to catch my interest enough so that I could understand its purpose. I faintly recall the narrator talking about the main character's past and his parents and maybe how the father was evading taxes, or something silly like that. I don't want to hear that stuff! Give me the action!
A technical problem I encounter with voiced narrative in Bastion and some other games is that background noise in my living room may prevent me from hearing all the words. Bastion didn't seem to provide an option to switch on subtitles. It's quite frustrating to miss a piece of the narrative and risk losing the plot while still being unable to switch the plot off.
Music is another huge factor in the success of Risk of Rain. Actually, why don't you go and listen to the soundtrack yourself? It's all offered for free by the musician, Chris Christodoulou, on his Bandcamp site. For me the music is full of atmosphere, mystery, and a little bit of sad lonely feeling. That's also pretty much the situation of the protagonist of Risk of Rain. The music sets the mood and paints the story with broad strokes. You hear the story in the music while you are busy handling the game, fighting aliens on the surface of a desolate planet that you crashlanded on.
Bastion tells its story through spoken dialogue. It also happens during gameplay as you walk around and fight monsters. I feel that Bastion blocks the gameplay from me. Maybe it's because you have to pay more attention to the words, or maybe because the dialogue is naturally more detailed in its statements than Christodoulou's purely instrumental soundtrack. Or maybe it's because in between the action you also stop and talk to non-player characters. I'm not very keen on listening to stories unless they are super awesome (and preferably with scifi elements and psychological tricks).
I'd like to say that Risk of Rain lets me express myself through the game's mechanics. That in some way allows me to get immersed in the game. This thought surprises me as I write it down here. I'd normally think that self-expression in a video game means that I'm making choices in the branches of the storyline. Will the alien planet be destroyed or will the conflict be resolved in a peaceful way? There are no such choices in Risk of Rain.
Another typical meaning for self-expression is that the player can customize the appearance of his avatar. You know how just about all RPGs start with you spending an hour modifying the slightest details on the face of the character you're controlling. Self expression. Risk of Rain has none of that either.
The kind of self-expression that Risk of Rain offers is perhaps better compared to dancing. A dance is formed by a sequence of bodily movements chosen to match the mood and situation. Similarly a sequence of dodges and attacks constitute the expression of the player. Executing the most appropriate moves in a given context rewards you with prolonged gameplay, some experience points for leveling up, and perhaps loot to upgrade your character, all while you watch aliens get blasted away and your tiny pixel hero surviving against the odds.
Compare this to Bastion and its melee weapons, for example. I didn't feel comfortable with them. In order to hit enemies I had to walk pretty close to them. Bastion being presented in an isometric projection meant that it was all too easy to accidentally walk into an enemy instead of just getting close enough to hit him with a hammer. It felt unfair and I didn't feel like I was in full control of what my character was doing. It makes no sense to walk up to the enemies and get hit by them, so why does the game cheaply trick me into doing that? Ranged weapons, on the other hand, were auto-aiming. I could cycle the locked target with two buttons. Imagine when there's half a dozen enemies on the screen and you'd like to target one particular one of them. Cycling through the targets to find the right one is not a very intuitive thing to do. It gets in the way of self-expression.
What is the basis for the critical praise that Bastion has received in general? My interpretation of the reviews is that Bastion is a unique attempt at an independently developed game that revolves around a strong story. Bastion has its unique aspects that stand out and make the game easily identifiable. The ample narrative that plays continuously and reacts to the player's actions is great. The artwork is great. The world appearing block by block out of nowhere as you walk is great. Those three things are great. But the whole isn't that great. My high-level experience was that a story was shoved down my throat while I mustered up perseverance to keep the low-level mechanics running forward in order to finish the game.
In funny contrast, reviews of Risk of Rain focus on the mechanics of the game, just about completely ignoring the emotional side; how the game has ways to set the mood and tell a story in its own subtle way, and how the player can express himself. Maybe it's just me who feels this way about Risk of Rain. Perhaps it's just a bunch of mechanics for most players. I just think that most reviews miss two important aspects; how Bastion fails at gameplay and how Risk of Rain excels at emotional engagement.
-Ville
(All the images below are stolen from the Internet. Thanks to their authors!)
Bastion "explained" in a nutshell.
Risk of Rain, for those who don't know or might not remember, is an even more action-based platformer released in 2013. It's about a pixel-art character stranded on a weird planet with lots of hostile aliens. You shoot and dodge your way through a number of levels and defeat at least as many alien bosses.
Risk of Rain explained in a nutshell.
Now, some (long) time ago I had the idea to write to you about Bastion. I wanted to describe all the aspects that I disliked in it. Then one day I understood something about Risk of Rain. Risk of Rain is quite different from Bastion in style, and I think the intentions of the developers of these games were very far apart, but despite this Risk of Rain did for me successfully what Bastion tried to do but failed; to tell an emotive story. To me Bastion seems to be all about setting the mood and getting immersed in the game world and its story. Risk of Rain on the other hand is primarily about tight gameplay mechanics, fraction-of-a-second dodges, and finding a balance between aggressive and careful styles of running, jumping and shooting.
So, the question is, why didn't Bastion succeed in delivering an interesting story to me? Bastion is heavy on story and spoken content. It tells the background stories of a number of characters, each carefully handcrafted. It gives hints about what has happened to the game world, explaining piece by piece why the world is as it is. It's full of mystery and includes pieces of drama.
Risk of Rain also tells you bits and pieces about the alien world you're exploring. These stories are mostly short descriptions of the monsters you encounter, written as journal entries. The text is discovered during gameplay and you have to go dig the text out from the game menus between plays. When you play Risk of Rain, there's practically no story text, and that's very good because any longer run of text would break the intense action that continues from the first seconds of a play to the last.
***
On a broad level I think Risk of Rain works for me so well because I can get "into" it. I have always been interested in gameplay mechanics and I feel it's important that the controls of a game feel fluid and responsive. The wide but concise palette of combat actions that Risk of Rain presents to the player is like a unique version of speed chess. Each of the 10 playable characters have their own set of four skills. Usually at least one of them is a basic "fire gun" but the rest can be pretty imaginative such as "spit poison that deals damage over time to one enemy and spreads to two other enemies after three seconds". You have to learn to know the actions and choose which ones to apply in a given combat situation, and you have to make those choices in fractions of a second.
 |
| Risk of Rain's ascetic look. The hero in the middle deals damage to the right. |
When you die in Risk of Rain, it's game over. You can start over and try again. A good play might last 30 minutes. The game limits playtime in a unique way. For every 5 minutes that you manage to stay alive the game steps the difficulty up a notch. There's a gauge in the corner of the screen showing how many minutes you've survived and how high the difficulty has risen. Eventually the game will get so difficult that you'll die by the sheer amount of enemies that surround you. There's no way around that. The inevitable doom of the player creates a kind of melancholy that shades the whole game. I can feel that the inevitable doom makes me a little bit distressed when I play Risk of Rain. Could that perhaps be counted as a mistake in the game? Games are supposed to be "fun", right? Wrong. :-) At least I don't think so.
On a tangent, check out Errant Signal's "An Aimless Diatribe On Fun" if you haven't already.
On the contrary, I believe that this melancholy and distress is ultimately what makes Risk of Rain a Really Good Game in my book. I can't play it just for a short while because getting immersed in the game is an investment in the emotional stimuli I have described above. I'd like to compare it to reading an engaging novel; I can't just read a bit here and there for the sake of it or just to waste 15 minutes. Opening the book is an investment of my time in immersing in the book world. I owe it to the story to dedicate my attention to it and to respond to its events inside my head. I must live the book or else I have failed it. (Disclaimer: Although I haven't read any proper novels in a couple of decades, I have done so before and I think I remember how they work for me.)
Risk of Rain also knows how to keep me curious. It throws me into situations where I can't immediately identify all the elements and simultaneously I need to make quick decisions. I believe these conflicting goals (figure out how things work vs. make quick decisions) severely slows down the speed in which I drain the game of interesting content, nearly preventing the game from getting stale over time. When I see something unusual that I'd like to explore and analyze, the game forces me to blast my way past it or else I die. It wakes up my curiosity and doesn't let it get satisfied too quickly. Because interesting settings fly by quickly they stay alive in my imagination even after finishing a play of the game. I might come up with theories to explain what I saw, and I want to go back and find out more evidence to support or refute my guesses.
***
Bastion on the other hand—while also mainly based on running around and fighting monsters—is more laid-back in its mechanics. You don't need to make quick decisions or plan ahead. All you need to do is trot forward and react to situations as they appear. These situations are mostly predictable and repetitive. The action keeps a moderate pace at best and feels lazy overall. If you fail, you're not punished much. Just retry until you get through. You are provided with multiple weapons but in the end it doesn't matter much which one you use. If you have a long-range weapon and a melee weapon you're pretty much set for the whole story. There's no need to learn the controls well because the game doesn't provide the urgency. I believe this lack of urgency is the key fact that keeps me from getting immersed in Bastion's game world.
 |
| Bastion's pretty visuals. But where's the action? |
It feels as if Bastion mixed up computer games and books. It reads a story out loud on the condition that I mash buttons on the controller and keep the narrator talking. (Note: Most of the time the narrator is describing the very actions my player character is doing. In itself it's a very exciting thing to see in a game, and it's executed well.) I don't really feel involved in what happens in the game world. I'm just there to listen to what someone else tells what is happening to some kid in some story that someone wrote. Why would I care? It's not really me on the line there. I'm playing a game so I expect to be able to drive the story myself. Books, not video games, are the medium where I follow a story that someone else wrote.
Towards the end of Bastion I grew quite fed up with the narrative. I do admit the style of narration is cool. The voice sounds like a gunslinger from Western movies (think Clint Eastwood). The music also supports the mood. On the other hand the Western theme is not reflected in the characters and visual art style of Bastion. It's a bit jarring but I can overlook that. What is much more annoying is how the game demands me to listen to the story even when I'm no longer interested in it. Bastion is all about going through the story but somehow the game is also an action game. The action feels very much glued on. Even if the action parts were well made (i.e. with more intensity and urgency) you can't just enjoy it because it's subordinate to the story.
 |
| Aiming a bow at an enemy in Bastion. |
A great example of how Bastion squashes action under story is the battle arena. It's a small area in the game world's main hub where you can fight a series of enemy waves. That place, if any, should allow me to just get immersed in the action. But no. Each enemy wave comes with a piece of some endless background story that never succeeded to catch my interest enough so that I could understand its purpose. I faintly recall the narrator talking about the main character's past and his parents and maybe how the father was evading taxes, or something silly like that. I don't want to hear that stuff! Give me the action!
A technical problem I encounter with voiced narrative in Bastion and some other games is that background noise in my living room may prevent me from hearing all the words. Bastion didn't seem to provide an option to switch on subtitles. It's quite frustrating to miss a piece of the narrative and risk losing the plot while still being unable to switch the plot off.
***
Music is another huge factor in the success of Risk of Rain. Actually, why don't you go and listen to the soundtrack yourself? It's all offered for free by the musician, Chris Christodoulou, on his Bandcamp site. For me the music is full of atmosphere, mystery, and a little bit of sad lonely feeling. That's also pretty much the situation of the protagonist of Risk of Rain. The music sets the mood and paints the story with broad strokes. You hear the story in the music while you are busy handling the game, fighting aliens on the surface of a desolate planet that you crashlanded on.
 |
| Free game music. I like it! |
Bastion tells its story through spoken dialogue. It also happens during gameplay as you walk around and fight monsters. I feel that Bastion blocks the gameplay from me. Maybe it's because you have to pay more attention to the words, or maybe because the dialogue is naturally more detailed in its statements than Christodoulou's purely instrumental soundtrack. Or maybe it's because in between the action you also stop and talk to non-player characters. I'm not very keen on listening to stories unless they are super awesome (and preferably with scifi elements and psychological tricks).
***
I'd like to say that Risk of Rain lets me express myself through the game's mechanics. That in some way allows me to get immersed in the game. This thought surprises me as I write it down here. I'd normally think that self-expression in a video game means that I'm making choices in the branches of the storyline. Will the alien planet be destroyed or will the conflict be resolved in a peaceful way? There are no such choices in Risk of Rain.
 |
| Close to choices, there are secrets in Risk of Rain, like "Acrid's crate" here. |
Another typical meaning for self-expression is that the player can customize the appearance of his avatar. You know how just about all RPGs start with you spending an hour modifying the slightest details on the face of the character you're controlling. Self expression. Risk of Rain has none of that either.
The kind of self-expression that Risk of Rain offers is perhaps better compared to dancing. A dance is formed by a sequence of bodily movements chosen to match the mood and situation. Similarly a sequence of dodges and attacks constitute the expression of the player. Executing the most appropriate moves in a given context rewards you with prolonged gameplay, some experience points for leveling up, and perhaps loot to upgrade your character, all while you watch aliens get blasted away and your tiny pixel hero surviving against the odds.
 |
| Multiple magma worm bosses rush the poor player. |
Compare this to Bastion and its melee weapons, for example. I didn't feel comfortable with them. In order to hit enemies I had to walk pretty close to them. Bastion being presented in an isometric projection meant that it was all too easy to accidentally walk into an enemy instead of just getting close enough to hit him with a hammer. It felt unfair and I didn't feel like I was in full control of what my character was doing. It makes no sense to walk up to the enemies and get hit by them, so why does the game cheaply trick me into doing that? Ranged weapons, on the other hand, were auto-aiming. I could cycle the locked target with two buttons. Imagine when there's half a dozen enemies on the screen and you'd like to target one particular one of them. Cycling through the targets to find the right one is not a very intuitive thing to do. It gets in the way of self-expression.
***
What is the basis for the critical praise that Bastion has received in general? My interpretation of the reviews is that Bastion is a unique attempt at an independently developed game that revolves around a strong story. Bastion has its unique aspects that stand out and make the game easily identifiable. The ample narrative that plays continuously and reacts to the player's actions is great. The artwork is great. The world appearing block by block out of nowhere as you walk is great. Those three things are great. But the whole isn't that great. My high-level experience was that a story was shoved down my throat while I mustered up perseverance to keep the low-level mechanics running forward in order to finish the game.
In funny contrast, reviews of Risk of Rain focus on the mechanics of the game, just about completely ignoring the emotional side; how the game has ways to set the mood and tell a story in its own subtle way, and how the player can express himself. Maybe it's just me who feels this way about Risk of Rain. Perhaps it's just a bunch of mechanics for most players. I just think that most reviews miss two important aspects; how Bastion fails at gameplay and how Risk of Rain excels at emotional engagement.
-Ville
And a Risk of Rain sequel has been sighted... in 3D! Crikey! https://www.gamespot.com/articles/risk-of-rain-2-revealed-makes-jump-to-3d/1100-6449894/
ReplyDeleteDarn, you beat me to it. It'll be interesting to see what you make of the added dimension. You are going to play it, right? :o)
DeleteLet's see when Hopoo manages to finish developing the game first ;-)
DeleteVille, I'm on the verge of writing a piece about Transistor, and by extension, Bastion as well. This article has been stuck in my head ever since I first read it. Again, thanks! :)
ReplyDeleteBy the way, have you played Spelunky? I recently heard it can be a really good co-op game, which we're looking for at the moment, me and my brother.
And then there's Rain World, which is, I've read, excruciangly tough, but might really have something that you loved in Risk of Rain. Have you played it?
Never played Spelunky, though I've heard good things about it and would like to get to it one day. Rain World I tried out briefly, and it didn't work for me. It has that Bastion feature that it doesn't let me express myself but forces me to a specific experience which seems to contain a lot of maze navigation. The lack of in-game music also dilutes the experience, and I quite couldn't come to terms with its controls. For example throwing stuff didn't seem to amount to anything. So, I'd have named Rain World rather Bastion World, eh. :-) Slug cat is a cool idea, though.
DeleteLooking forward to that Transistor piece!