Transistor

Transistor is an extremely frustrating game to play through. This isn't because it's particularly difficult - it isn't. Instead, the sense of frustration comes from the sense that it wasted much of its potential. Like the city of Cloudbank it takes place in, Transistor is a game with a lot of great ideas. Unfortunately those ideas never successfully mesh together, or worse, actively work against each other. The result is a dichotomous game, with every high that pulls you in being followed by a low that makes you, well, not want to play anymore.

On the plus side, Transistor is a great looking game. Bastion veteran Jen Zee has done a great job of creating a cool neo-noir aesthetic that’s generally nice to look at. It doesn’t quite reach the level of Bastion, and I wish that the environment designs had done more to differentiate the various areas and tie them to the story, but overall the art style is one of the high points of the game.

And speaking of that story, it's kind of a mess. It certainly aspires to a great deal, attempting to engage with topics like the subjectivity of reality and the balance between majority versus minority rule. It's pretty heady stuff, which could have been the basis for a really compelling tale. Unfortunately, as is frequently the case with Transistor, the game can't seem to get out of its own way.

The primary issue with the storytelling is that Transistor tries to be too clever for its good, frequently hiding important story points in bits of text you find in terminals or brief lines of spoken dialogue. In a longer game that gave the story more time to develop, this might be OK; in a five or so hour downloadable morsel it just ends up confusing the player. The opening isn’t so much cold as it is glacial, with little more than a nice piece of art and a couple of spoken lines that don’t really do much to explain what’s going on. The subsequent blink-and-you’ll-miss-it story points do little to alleviate this problem. I constantly found myself wondering if I was too stupid to see what Supergiant was getting at, or if I had just missed the one critical terminal that would have explained it all.

The other star of the story is the titular Transistor itself. Voiced by Bastion’s Logan Cunningham, it’s a clear attempt to trade on the success of the narrator from that game. Unfortunately, that success isn’t replicated here. The genius of Bastion was that Supergiant knew the value of limiting the narrator’s participation in the story. He commented on your actions, sure, but he was never an intrusive presence. In contrast, the Transistor pretty much never shuts up. From the time you pick it up until the end of the game, it offers nothing but a constant stream of banalities that soon threaten to drive the player mad. It’s obnoxious to the point that about halfway through the game I turned the voice volume off just so I wouldn’t have to listen anymore.

Story issues aside, you will eventually have to take part in Transistor’s gameplay, which is where many of my central issues with the game reside. Character advanced lies primarily in collecting various skills, or “functions” for the Transistor. These skills run the gambit from direct damage, to charming enemies to fight for you, to summoning a robotic dog. Each skill can be used in one of three ways; as an active attack assigned to one of the face buttons, as a modifier for an active skill, or as a constant passive buff. Additionally, each skill also has backstory for various characters attached to it which unlock as you use the skill in a different way. Ultimately you can unlock four passive slots and two modifiers for each skill, creating a metric ton of possibilities. It’s an impressively deep system, and there is a lot of satisfaction to be had in experimenting with various crazy loadouts. It’s unfortunate then, that Transistor chose to hamstring that experimentation with some poor design choices.

For one, you can’t change your skills any time you want. To do that you have to find one of the “access points” that are scattered around the environment. Not only does this limit your ability to experiment with your loadouts, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the access points are placed in odd spots. Sometimes you will find one after almost every fight. Sometimes you can go several battles without having access to one. Such unpredictable placement creates constant doubt in the mind of the player. Faced with the possibility of going back to an access point I knew existed or forging ahead in uncertainty I often choose the former, leading to a lot of unnecessary backtracking that broke up the flow of the game. The placement also means it’s possible to put yourself into a rough spot, as evidenced by this thread. Obviously some basic forethought would have avoided such a problem, but the very fact that something like that can happen is evidence of a poorly thought out system.

The menus also don't do the game any favors. In a classic case of form over function the menus look good but fail to actually work very well as menus. Important information about your skills, like damage or duration of effect, is in text so small it can be hard to read. That information is also scattered about rather than being in one place. For example, the screen that shows you how a skill affects others you might link it to is buried in the same spot as the character backstories, a place you'd not think to look for it. There is also no way to easily compare skills either. You have to select one, see what it does, then back out and select another skill to see the difference. These may seem like small complaints but its something that should have been done right, and is a noticeable enough problem that it's hard to believe it didn't come up during play testing.

Once you’ve picked your favorite set of skills, you need to use them in Transistor’s combat system, which comes with its own set of problems. The central hook of combat is the “Turn()” system, which allows you to pause combat, plan a series of moves, and then execute those moves all at once. There is the potential for a lot of strategy in this system, and for the first few hours of the game it's really fun to wreck your opponents with a single, well thought-out plan. Unfortunately, as the enemies become tougher and the groups of them larger in the later part of the game the issues with the system become more and more apparent.

One consistent issue I had with the combat is that what the game claims will happen in Turn() is not always what plays out when you choose to execute your plan. I frequently had situations where the game would tell me that I would kill an opponent, only to find it still alive after launching my attack. This was usually because the game either failed to show me that my first attack moved my enemy enough for subsequent attacks to miss, or the game straight up did not calculate damage correctly, leaving enemies with a smidgen of hit points when Turn() implied they would be annihilated. For a system premised on making smart, strategic decisions, this constant moving of the ball is frustrating.

Once you've used Turn(), you need to wait for it to recharge before using it again. By itself, this wouldn't be so much of an issue. However, something about the pace of the system feels off. Turn() takes a little too long to recharge and unless you are specced in a very specific way, you can't use most of your attacks during recharge. These issues combine to make for some tedious combat, particularly against large groups of enemies in the late game as you are forced to spend a lot of time running away waiting for Turn() to recharge. Additionally, character movement feels sluggish, particularly in relation to your enemies. One enemy-type in particular that moves so much faster than your character that I found avoiding its attacks almost impossible. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to have found the proper strategy to deal with that problem, but the result was a lot of damage that felt cheap rather than being the result of my own failings as a player.

Once you complete the game, there is a new game+ mode for those who care to play through a second time. I can't say I wanted to. That's a shame, because there are enough things to like about Transistor that I should want to play through a second time. Unfortunately, those high points are buried beneath so many issues that Transistor was a five hour game that felt like a ten hour game. In another context, that phrase might be used as a complement. Here, it's just a testament to how much potential Transistor wasted.