Transistor

(I originally posted this review on my lil' portfolio site but figured I post it here as well for giggles and such)

The world of indie development has seen no shortage of great debuts over the last half a dozen or so years but that didn't stop Supergiant Games' 2011 game Bastion from sticking out as a bloody great debut for a lot of people. It showed the team understood how to use art and sound design to paint beautiful and broad emotive strokes and then tie them together with well paced evocative storytelling that filled in all the blanks. All the while keeping the player diverted with a combat system that had plenty of options and customisation built on top of a simple but satisfying foundation of isometric brawling. I wasn’t quite as hot on it as a lot of people were but nonetheless it’s qualities are not lost on me.

Now, three years later, we have Supergiant's second effort Transistor. It shows the studio experimenting with the same basic ingredients they put into Bastion but this time using them to concoct a different end result. It's not as successful an intertwining of these techniques as Bastion was, but it does reinforce my assumption that whatever Supergiant comes out with it will contain some extraordinary elements that are unique to their games.

Transistor focuses on Red, an acclaimed singer in the game’s setting of Cloudbank City, who appears to have had her voice taken from her. We are introduced to her as she stands in front of an anonymous corpse, buried in which is the titular Transistor, a big ol’ glowing blue sword that resembles a circuit board. As you learn early on, the Transistor seems to have absorbed the personality of this unidentified man and it begins to talk to Red, urging her to take him and get out of Cloudbank. As they attempt to make their way out they are attacked by the “Process”, an inscrutable robotic cadre that is able to take on various forms which resemble strange cybernetic creatures. All of these things are linked by a connection with an enigmatic group known as the Camerata. They seem to be the source of all Red’s troubles and also perhaps the cause of the Process’ appearance.

After the (relatively) breakneck intro with all sorts of names and concepts being thrown at you one after another Transistor’s story slows down considerably and begins explaining itself using much more ambient techniques. Audio logs, character profiles and in-world news reports. You interact face to face with very few other human characters. On a basic level, I have no inherent issue with this kind of storytelling. I absolutely loved it in From Software’s Souls series for example, but those games use these methods to coax out a person’s own imagination, enticing them to try and align the disparate pieces of information they’ve absorbed in a way that makes them all gel together. It’s almost equivalent to a kind of fluid secondary puzzle-solving that is constantly going on the player’s mind.

Transistor however approaches this kind of design in a frustratingly dry manner. The knowledge you find stashed away inside the monitors that are hidden in the corners of the levels is plainly written and far too face value. By the end of the game’s short 4-5 hour runtime all of your questions about the world and the characters that inhabit it have been disappointingly answered by some form of stale text dump or monotonously voice acted audio log. The few specific plot surprises that remain are still not hugely captivating but they are told in a much more traditional style and are far better off for it.

The Transistor itself is voiced by the same actor who voiced the narrator in Bastion and to a certain extent he fills the same role in this game, commenting on the world around him in a way the protagonist can’t. Here though the tone is more conversational, or as conversational as you can get when conversing with a mute person. Most of the time he does the talking for both of them, telling Red his perception of their situation, elaborating on their relationship to each other and guessing out loud at how she herself is feeling. Voice actor Logan Cunningham is just as solid as he was as Rucks in Bastion, doing a commendable job essentially covering for two characters, the Transistor and Red. But at this point I must admit I’m starting to get tired of Supergiant’s use of this narrative approach. Hearing the same voice enumerate it’s emotions for hours at a time with little to no rest can make a tale feel a little bare.

Thankfully, Supergiant has not lost any of it’s talent for presentation and the art and soundtrack in Transistor handily picks up the slack where the storytelling fails to. The visual style is quite similar to that of Bastion but the design of the world it presents is almost the complete opposite. Whereas that game’s setting of Caelondia was very organic and natured, Transistor’s Cloudbank City is a goddamn futuristic wonderland. If you’re a fan of cyberpunk and art deco aesthetics this place is gonna be like heroin for your eyes, every screen is a painting as beautiful as the last. I actually found myself getting annoyed sometimes that I had to move on from certain areas because I was just so caught up in staring at all the details to be found in the environment.

The music pulls a similar 180 from the team’s last game, swapping out Bastion’s various acoustic tones for a host of synthetic textures to match the change in the visuals. There’s far more programmed drums, synths and upfront effects work this time out that hang in the background while you’re wandering around, but that’s not to say the soundtrack has lost any of the humanity that was to be found in Bastion. Composer Darren Korb and singer Ashley Barrett return for Transistor and when the music is not purely instrumental they come up with some incredibly expressive tunes that soundtrack some of the game’s most emotionally resonant moments. The final sequence especially hit harder for me than any other moment so far this year thanks to a striking mix of sonorous imagery and beautifully crescendoing music.

The action in Bastion was far from the strongest part of the game for me but it was entertaining enough that It never dragged down the package either. On the surface Transistor’s gameplay seems to resemble Bastion’s but aside from the isometric viewpoint and some systemic similarities the actual feel is radically different.

Rather than having different weapons you can equip the Transistor with four different skills called “Functions” that act as your attacks. You earn Functions as you level up through enemy encounters and they range from fairly standard ranged and close-up abilities to more exotic ones that allow you to call in allies or leave storms of energy on the play field that damage the enemy Process. In addition to their effects when equipped in your main four ability slots all Functions also have slightly altered secondary properties when you equip them in a passive slot or as a buff for one of your four major active Functions. The Transistor has a limited memory and each ability has a memory value associated with it meaning you have to do some smart managing of what you have equipped to keep it all under the limit. It’s a well designed system with an impressive scope for flexibility but with the large amount of terminology plastered all over the customisation screen it can get a little overwhelming later on to keep track of what you’ve got equipped.

Red is entirely less mobile than her predecessor the Kid. She’s a slight figure and the Transistor is a hefty greatsword, lugging that thing around leaves her with very little opportunity for graceful movement. As a result you’ll find yourself reluctantly absorbing attacks a lot of the time in active combat as most enemy types are much faster than you, even when you equip the ‘Jaunt’ function which allows you to instantly zip a short distance across the room. The counter to this is the ‘Turn()’ system. This mode freezes time allowing you to plan your movements and execute them safely. Red has an action bar that only allows you take a certain amount of actions within Turn() and when you exit this frozen state the abilities you can use is reduced until the bar refills.

Successfully using Turn() to finish off multiple attackers can be immensely invigorating but the restrictions on it can just as frequently end up being suffocating. All too often you’re presented with a group of enemies where the most effective way to take them out is to just enter Turn() mode, attack them, run around while it recharges and then rinse and repeat. How much enjoyment this system provides you with is pretty much dependent on the combat scenario you find yourself in.

The most direct reference back to Bastion comes with the return of that game’s difficulty-increasing Idols in the form of “Limiters”, optional gameplay modifiers that can either strengthen the enemy in some way or reduce your own capabilities. Each one you turn on slightly boosts the amount of experience you gain from combat and although for most people they won’t affect how fast you level up enough to bother with them, they’re still a smart addition for players looking for more of a challenge.

I don’t doubt for a second that from conception till delivery Transistor was anything but an unadulterated labour of love for Supergiant. For two games straight now they’ve showcased some of the best presentational chops in the industry and I also applaud them for attempting to explore into other areas as much as possible while still holding onto the traits that made their last effort such a success. It’s just a shame that their experiments didn’t pay off this time around, for me. Transistor so regularly flits between being sometimes completely spectacular and sometimes completely inert that it becomes a bit of a downer. There’s worse things for a game to be than “Sometimes completely spectacular”, but there’s few that are more disheartening. Still though, here’s to next time.