Why Bastion Lies to You

I never interpreted Ruck’s voice at the end telling you to get up as aggressive. Just encouraging the kid to finish what he started instead of laying there at the finish line, basic grandpa behavior.

One of my favourite details of Bastion is that if you do the combat challenges you can get rare upgrade materials early. Even for weapons you don't have yet. They're generic items like "Something Heavy" for the Hammer, "Something coarse" for the Scrap Musket, and "Something Foul", a sulphurous material for the flame bellows. Surprisingly early on you can get "Something Wrong" which is described as a kind of crystal not found in Caelondia before the calamity. Sure enough, the final weapon in the game is the Calamity Cannon, made my Rucks himself to harness the same power that ended the world. And you get this so late in the game that the main enemies you'll be using it on are the Ura. I also think it might be meaningful that the Calamity Cannon and the Ram you get in the last level are both very powerful but feel kinda bad to use. Like... you really left an old friend to die so you could carry this big cumbersome piece of shit?

Everything about the final walk with Zulf on your back is tearjerkingly beautiful. The music, the way you unflinching keep on when pelted with arrows, the visual story telling with the Ura ceasing fire, it alone is worth playing the game for.

There's a lot of truth in that final statement. "No one voice is exactly reliable. But that doesn't mean you plug your ears. It means you listen more."

Just to point out a few things about Rucks... You describe him later as not caring, maybe that's why he doesn't ask the Kid's name, right? I read it completely differently. Rucks knows the names and stories of every character you meet. The statues, the gasbags, all of them. I don't think you can know those things if you don't care about anyone or anything. Rather, I took something else entirely away from it. Rucks doesn't ask the Kid's name... because he already knows it. He knows the Kid's story, and the kid's mother very closely. Even the name "The Kid" is meaningful here. I am pretty certain Rucks is the Kid's father. Not just any kid, but his kid. That Rucks left his family and by extension, the kid, to work on engineering for the city. And that his narration around those events belie his guilt. I don't think it's any coincidence that Rucks and the kid both share white hair, and both throw away their lives and what was important to them to be used by the militaristic forces of their city.

Bastion is an all time favorite game. It's THE game that convinced me buy every SuperGiant game. Transistor-Pyre-Hades. It convinced me to allow myself to be open to other types of gameplay and story telling. I thought Transistor/Pyre played strangely but I enjoyed them. I picked up the habit from Bastion of just pausing and listening to music in games and taking them in. Pausing and taking in the scenery as well (that was really nice in Skyrim+several other games).

The first time I played this game, I was in a mourning period from the death of a friend who passed suddenly and unexpectedly. The last couple hours of this game just had me constantly in tears. When I got to the choice at the end of restoration/evacuation, I tried to weigh what I had learned about the world, and I think a mix of the Grief Brain and my own desire for second chances lead me to picking restoration. I knew what had happened before could happen again, that the people who had brought the world where it was were bad and that this had happened because of them. But I wanted to believe that there was a chance things could be okay, that things could start over and be different and terrible things didn't have to happen. Then when the credits showed them all in the exact place they were just before the calamity happened... idk I got really overwhelmed. Then the new game+ narration implying the time loop happens and well... I was well and severely fucked up for a bit haha. Finishing the game and choosing evacuate ended up being an important milestone in my recovery from grief. You can't go back, you can only go forward, and you have to do the best with what you have. I do think both choices are valid, but the way I experienced them at the time I experienced them forever colored my feelings about the game.

I always figured the kid was a young adult and the narrator referring to him as the kid simply in the way the older generation calls anyone around 20-30 children. After working with an 18 year old as a 35 year old, I fully understand it.

I think the game has a hidden meaning not communicated directly throughout the game, and that is of loss. I noticed during my many play throughs of this game was that the City Crest is also the symbol of the Goddess of Loss and Longing, and looking at the game through this lens I noticed that every single survivor of the calamity has experienced some loss of some kind, each character forlorn and melancholic and the four survivors of Caelondia have experienced it heavily throughout their lives. Contrasting between the four Caelondian survivors is the huge swath of monsters and animals and the Ura people who have persisted after the calamity. Loss can separate us, put us on a floating island, where one could only wallow in the past and drinking ourselves in a stupor to forget the pain. In this light the two endings takes on a different meaning to me, Restoration brings us back into the past to relive the same moments that break us on the inside over and over, but the Evacuation ending is leaving the past behind and moving on from the pain that isolates us. The advocates for the endings I feel represent this perfectly. Rucks is stuck in the past, obsessed with returning to what was, and urging The Kid to mow past enemy after enemy under the false hope that the Bastion will undo all this death and destruction. Meanwhile Zia is hopeful and is among people that accept her for who she is which gives her a future to look forward to, the past system only scrutinized and oppressed her and put her down for not being the correct race. This, I feel, makes Evacuation the correct choice, because there's only one true path in all of this and it's forward through the pain.

A little thing I remember is the implication that Zia's father caused the Calamity. He tells Zia to stay home, and not come out, before going and tampering with the calamity. He knew it was going the Calamity was going to happen, and I assumed he triggered it as a desperate or vengeful way to protect his daughter.

When I played Bastion, it struck me as important that the Reconstruct ending leads directly into a New Game+ play through once the credits finished rolling, while the Evacuation ending goes back to the title screen. At least, that's how I remember it happening. It implied that if you activate the Bastion, it resets everything all right, but only to immediately after (or maybe as) the Calamity occurred.

Rucks reminds me of someone who knew they made a mistake and is trying to do better but let's his biases get the best of him at time. It shows that he is trying to be better and is relying on the kid to help him achieve that. In the end he understands his way isn't the only path and chooses to let go, its the youth's turn to choose what the path forward is, be it his way or the other way. Ironically I took the endings as "Do we try again, try better and use what we know to avoid this crisis" while evacuation was "We can't save our mistakes and must move on from there. Using what we did to do better tomorrow"

Clever that you completely omitted Rucks's Who Knows Where segment (unless I somehow missed it, in which case whoops). Feels like a very intentional choice given the narrative thrust of the video.

I saw the ending of the game as 2 different neutral endings. Restoration being the "greater good" where you sacrifice the few personal story's you have seen for the thousands of ended ones like the barkeep and zolfs wife. The move ending being a taking what we learned to try to be better at the sacrifice of what it took to get there. Both endings made people suffer and we know the future of neather. The information needed to justify one being better is left off like how much if any is remembered in the restoration or is it just a reset button. But we used the power of the shards to move so what happens to the world now that they are gone and how much of the world is left. The only real good ending is to play the rest of the games.

Nice job with the writing on your part. The switch over where "you lied as well," was really clever. Awesome editing and video. I'm always happy to see more content on one of my favorite games. Nice work.

I'm glad for part 5. I wanted to push back hard on the closing of part 4, solely due to the costs. The Calamity didn't JUST destroy Caelondia, it also destroyed the Ura and not just the cultures of both but its people. If the Kid is worth saving, then everyone else is as well. If the kid isn't worth saving, then the Ura are. Putting aside the potential time loop stuff for the moment. 4 survivors leaving a totally destroyed land, country or even continent is by far the worse choice then making it so everyone survives. This is the inherent promise of Restoration and the gleam of doing it all but better, of everyone coming back, the promise of that very idea is why Rusk pushes for it and why he's been telling the Kid what to do all game. To my mind, this too is part of the criticism, where ideas and ideals can have such an appeal and sway that they can make folks excuse and ignore the actions that are required to make them happen. Because Restoration doesn't just bring back millions of people's lives or the destroyed cultures or even the natural world and all its creatures. It brings back the weapon that caused the calamity and the very people who made the decision to use it. The promise is immense. but the cost is it all happening again plus everything the Kid has done up to this point, all the peoples killed and lands destroyed in an effort to make the Bastion functional. After the Calamity large sections of the world around Caelondia remained. But after making the Bastion? Well the Bastion itself was all that's left. I'm an optimist, I really want the best and I damn well want the Ura to get their land back, I don't want the last tragedy of Caelondia's evil culture to be the final destruction of the people they hurt and stole from as well as the destruction of all of its own innocents. I picked Restoration as I will every time, just for that chance for the weapon to not be used, for another way to prevail. Is this right? Am I just dooming everyone to the very same fate? Maybe. I'll have to live with not knowing if the decision was right. However, picking back up the time loop stuff. On new game plus, the natation changes. Rusk feels like this has happened before, his sense of dejuvu and his occasional remembering of sequences proves the dream of restoration to be a lie. The Calamity happened long ago and the weapon firing and destroying the world was only its final consequence, you can not undo the culture that drove to this point by undoing its most recent action. It would be like trying to stop the usage of the nuclear bomb, by the time the Manhattan project came around it was already far too late. Because of that, Restoration only holds the inevitable off, not even long enough to save one life. Thus that you can Evacuate and save 4 make the choice obvious. 4 is greater than 0, not that maths often comes into morality. You save anyone at all. Taking the time loop to be real, Evacuation seems the only choice there is.

The point on silent protagonists is great timing given that for some reason a PCgames article came out saying that "mute protagonists make games...unable to communicate anything coherent" But that's a small topical thing. I appreciate your ability to delve into stories while doing far more than just summarizing, interspersing meaning and perspective.

Man, bravo! I just finished the Bastion Making of and then watching your game analisys its just like a masterclass on all things Bastion related. Keep the good work!

I think this is the first essay on Bastion I’ve seen that points out its distinctly American themes. Really interesting and insightful. For the record, on my first ending, I went back with Rucks because I wanted to believe he was right, even after everything that had happened. I wanted to believe we could fix it, prevent it, repair what was broken. But hearing that first line again “not so simple with this one” sealed it for me. We’re going to keep screwing it up unless we find some way to do something different. We can’t undo what’s been done - even what we ourselves have done - but maybe we can make different choices in the future as long as we’re not obsessed with recreating the past.

I've been binging your content and I'm a little biased because we share a lot of interests, but your essays hit home for me every single time. Just keep that blue sky aesthetic moving forward for your channel, I love it wholeheartedly.