Transistor

[Dracos]

*glances left*

*glances right*

I'll say it.  This was a better game than Bastion.  Not a better experience, persay.  I mean the narrator isn't as powerful as the one in Bastion.  And they're a bit timid on the musical numbers which should've been a powerful part of the experience.  But the gameplay is just clearly better and the story is better communicated.  Transistor is an interesting delve into how much spiking in one area can make a difference.  As a more well rounded game, it gets a lot of crap for not being bastion, for being meeeeh, or whatnot.

And it's not wrong to say so.  The game struggles in tone variation over the experience, in relaxing and then bringing up to wow dramatic peaks.  I can agree with it coming across as bland at points.  That it holds so tightly to its narrative that it somewhat strangles "I wanna go play".  Struggling on having a really impressive spike of quality in an area is what I think really have folks sort of being underwhelmed by it.  Well, that and a pretty lame villain set.  It instead provides a more reasonably balanced combat affair, with a good 'switch it up' model on its weapons and less 'don't even bother' challenge missions.  It tells its story clearly without the ambiguous 'we're not really sure what happened here' delivery that Bastion achieved (As clear as it was to me, I saw enough 'what just happened' threads).

Transistor is a romantic tragedy, a story of a young and brilliant song artist called Red and the supportive stranger that died for her at the hands of the Camarata, a shadowy cabal of manipulators that stole her voice as well (somehow), despite also losing the powerful transistor sword thing.  The transistor is sort of a magical doohickey that can eat souls, and so the mysterious corrupted stranger is your narrator, going along the heroic Red who he loves dearly, carried about as he tries to hold on as a shattered fragment of a person.  They take a really undefined take on him, aside from being tall, supportive, and caring which pretty much sets him as a classic romance novel male lead.  Red meanwhile is a vengeful survivor, in her city where strange robot creatures are coming to kill her.  The entire thing is overlaid in a computer theme-d world.  It's pretty obvious its supposed to be a story inside a machine, with all moves and various hints to it being programs traveling about.  It is a pretty well told story really.  Sad, but well told.

The game is a one way road.  There's short little side steps to read a terminal, but there's no real agency in the action, even though you do make choices.  I think this probably dragged people down.  Even if it is as little as choosing one of two roads through the same small space, it helps feel more in control.  It certainly completely controls level grinding by providing almost no choice in what you face.  For your entire first play through, it will just be going forward, encountering the enemies that are there, and that's it.  It's a well trodden style, but it really diminishes there being a background or wandering around the setting.  The art is nice and consistent, but so little of it is interactable, so it feels like walking inside a painted world, rather than playing inside it.

The combat of Transistor focuses around a Turn based system.  It can just be played real time, aside from the final boss who would be impossible that way, but it is meant to be a strategic turn based affair.  The enemies all act in real time, but Red can pause the world to do a series of attacks and moves, after which she mostly can just move until her turn bar refills.  She can just attack normally with a full bar, or even do some opening moves before switching into the bar.  It was a clever enough system, and since it would mostly tell you the result before you activated a turn, you could spend a bit of time strategizing, moving, or adjusting the move order for the best effect.  It did a good job of encouraging varying things up as in order to get the dossier for each of the people behind your abilities you had to win a fight with their ability in each of three slot types (Passive, Support, and Active Use).  There was just shy of enough combat to get all of them by the end of the game.  Possibly if I turned on all limiters the whole way through, it might've made it, but not sure.  I was one short when I beat the game, covering the dossier for the final scientist.  Overall it meant that almost every fight, I'd fiddle a bit with an eye toward unlocking the little story bits and making a different effective combat setup for the unknown next fight ahead.

The simple short cinematic scenes were a pretty clever and pretty way to communicating Red as a person instead of just a roaming kill machine.  It was cute seeing the simple 2-d art slowly flowing across the screen, bringing out the sense of more over a couple of moments.

Anyhow, if you have time and feel like a romantic tragedy, it's a pretty nice one.  Not a great game, largely lacking something to bring it up, but also not really worthy of the 'it's mediocre" that it tends to get.

Stealing someone else's line about it, because it really communicates:
"Transistor is like a virtual croissant. It is layered and delicious, but there is a lingering airy emptiness to it that makes it hard to fill up on just one. "-Scot Nichols.

[Kaldrak]

Nice review. I'll have to check this game out sometime. Definitely sounds like my cup of tea.