Mento's May Mastery '16: Day Four: Transistor

Transistor

Transistor is a very striking game. I haven't yet decided whether I like it or not, but it's hard to fault the immense level of style it has right out of the gate. Very few details about its plot or setting are afforded to the player early on, starting as the game does after a momentous, bloody occasion that the heroine, Red, and her talking sword need to am-scray from tout de suite. As these early areas continue, you're drip-fed a few tidbits about the setting, the protagonist's past and what may or may not be going on with the talking sword that can absorb souls. I imagine the game will continue in that vein for some time to come, so for now I'll leave the story details at that.

As a game, Transistor is immediately evocative of Bastion; it's a 2D action-RPG with an isometric perspective in a really fantastic looking world, though in this case it's a cyberpunk city at night rather than a series of floating islands (more on the setting in just a moment). The similarities are more than skin-deep as well; the game has a similar sense of pacing and withholding information, as well as an omnipresent narrator (more on that guy in a moment too) who offers contextual quips and statements depending on the player's present actions. If you wander in one direction or look at some incidental background detail, he'll most likely remark on it.

Which, briefly, brings me to my first reservation with the game: That sword talks a lot. I haven't seen a Chatty Cutty like this guy since Baldur's Gate's Lilarcor, though in Transistor's defense his observations have a bit more wit behind them, though really are just as ultimately banal. It's always things like "checking the terminal, eh?" when you walk near a terminal, or "let's get back to it" every time you stop reading a terminal or working on your loadout, or "good idea, let's check this area out" whenever you walk near an exit. I get that he's doing the talking for both of them, the songstress Red having lost her voice as the game begins, but I sort of like that Red's motivations aren't always clear and the player is having to piece together what's happening from a sort of natural exposition, where the concerns of the plot are being brought up organically because of where Red is or what she's doing or looking at. What I don't understand is why the game goes to all this trouble to establish an enigmatic (cyber)noir atmosphere with a crime story that starts in media res and offers a thin promise of answers to come, and then has a character that never shuts up about the minutia of what you're doing. But hey, I suppose that was Rucks' role too. Maybe it's one of those auteur things.

Transistor does look really good though. The cyberpunk aesthetic tends to find its groove in two usually discrete areas: the neon lights and flying cars of a futuristic city of night, shown from the very lowest and grimiest of streets where the Utopian promises have yet to reach and people scrabble for food credits and get hooked on odd-sounding drugs and spend their time in whatever the internet has evolved into, wherein lies the second half of the cyberpunk visual style: the virtual reality of this new internet, where the distinction between man and machine has become blurred and there's usually a lot of light blue cubes and lasers and scratchy visual glitches everywhere. Transistor, somehow, manages to merge the two worlds, to the extent that I wonder if the entire city is a simulation and the people merely programs. I hope I'm off-base, because I'm a little Tronned out already after The Talos Principle. (Also, suffice to say given Bastion's music direction, but the music of Transistor is superlative too. A lot of actual songs from emotive singers, just like last time.)

Then you have the game's second biggest distinguishing feature from Bastion: the turn-based mode. While Red can fight enemies without relying on this tactical setting, the battles are a lot harder to pull off without it. It'd be like Fallout without V.A.T.S., or Might & Magic without tactical pauses. What's more is that most of Red's abilities don't seem to work outside of the turn-based mode, so you're more or less forced to use it if you want full access to your abilities. If the game switches to real-time, it's usually because it has to recharge the cooldown before you can use turn-based mode again and is thus your cue to escape all the enemies you just pissed off with your last array of attacks. Each of Red's abilities can be acquired naturally in the world - the circuitboard-shaped sword and game namesake Transistor appears to absorb the souls of the recently deceased and repurpose them as combat abilities that relate to who that person was in life, though I'm sure it has more to do with the aforementioned possible virtual nature of the game's city Cloudbank (which, honestly, has "this is a computer world" written all over it) - or earned through leveling up after enough battles. These abilities have this Luftrausers style power-up symbiosis in practice, where you can only equip a few at once but they all seem to offer differing levels of compatibility with one another and can create devastating, potentially game-breaking combinations with the right ingredients. Add to this too the way that non-equipped abilities can be installed as modifiers for the ones you do have equipped, and you're looking at a pretty complex and versatile system. Well, but for the fact that every non-boss fight so far has been a complete cakewalk. I guess when there's so many choices on offer, you want to ensure that the player can succeed with any broken or gimped combination they might come up with. Ultimately, the combat really isn't the draw, for as much of it as there is; I'm usually eager to end each little skirmish quick so I can move on (which is another aspect that the game shares with Bastion). The combat engine is built for speed, thankfully enough.

Anyway, I'll save some of the other observations I have for tomorrow, and I promise not to mention Bastion so much. I don't have a sense for how long Transistor is or how many more abilities or destinations it has to offer me, though the fact that enemies seem to upgrade themselves every now and then has given me a slight hint: they've all recently started hitting level two, and there was only room for four levels on that little "enemy power-up" pop-up. Let's say slightly less than halfway, then? About to jump into a boat, if you folks who have beaten the game already want an idea of where I'm at and can quietly scoff at my estimation on my progress thus far. I'll just be over here holding down the hum button if you need me.

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