Transistor and its images belong to Supergiant Games and its respective whatevers.

Well, how about we review something that isn’t four years old, hm?

It was the holidays which means presents, sales and free time to get some things off the old backlog. One of the games I crossed off was Supergiant Games’ new(ish) release Transistor. Supergiant is the studio behind the much lauded Bastion. I picked up the title amidst the swirl of good word and awards. It’s a charming little number that I quite enjoyed (and is also four years old). It wasn’t the best released in good old 2011, however I still thought quite highly of it. Its gameplay was rather straightforward but the nice touch was that the player set the difficult not through a menu toggle but by activating handicaps within the game. Thus, the top down action combat became more difficult not because enemies were turned into enormous health sponges with fists of steel but because they now exploded upon death, touching them was harmful to the player, they periodically turned invulnerable or the like. Of course, succeeding with these additional challenges produced a higher score so there was reward for making this difficult. The art was nice, the music gorgeous and the voice narration was incredible all wrapped in a seeming incomprehensible world where some great disaster had destroyed a city.

Transistor is a top down action combat game set in a city being destroyed by some incomprehensible threat wrapped in pretty art, alright music, alright voice narration and a difficulty the player sets by activating handicaps within the game.

Alright, I’m not the first one to make this reductionist joke but that’s the price of being late in reviews. However, I can’t help but feel a lot of the praise held for Transistor feels so… hollow. But instead of focusing on what’s the same, let’s examine the one area that Transistor differs from its predecessor.

The combat in Transistor revolves around the titular weapon. The protagonist–Red–wields a giant circuitry sword which allows her to pause time and execute a flurry of actions in the blink of an eye. Whereas in Bastion the player was encouraged to experiment with different weapon combinations and active ability, in Transistor the player is able to choose up to four special attacks which can be upgraded as well as equip passives on themselves. These are represented by the poorly explained ‘functions.’ Each function will revolve around an idea. For example, the Get function when set as an attack will do marginal damage and pull the target towards the user. When it is used as an upgrade for another attack, it adds a pull attribute to the primary attack. When it’s a passive… I can’t remember. Something really underwhelming. Maybe increases the range that dead cells are pulled towards Red?

It’s an intriguing system that could open up a number of unique and variable playstyles. However, much like Bastion, there isn’t a whole lot of balancing between the factions. I do think some personal preference does play a role. I’m not convinced that the mortar in Bastion is considered as good as I valued it. The game encourages experimentation by unlocking dossier details on the functions “history” whenever the player uses it in a different capacity. Thus, I obsessively tried to unlock all the little details though the reward was ultimately rather underwhelming as the information really doesn’t provide any greater revelations to the Transistor story proper. It also meant I discovered that there is a ‘fail state’ in the game when I hilariously waddled into the second boss fight with only a single actual attack equipped and promptly got it disabled the first time my health bar depleted.

Which brings us to a second curious difference between Transistor and Bastion. Instead of outright dying when your health reaches 0, Red will instead find one of her functions disabled while she pops right back to full health. In theory this gives the player a second and third chance to get through the combat. In actuality, this really diminishes the game’s difficulty even with multiple limiters installed unless the player has a combat style that is reliant on one single attack. This, to me, was highlighted in the final battle where your opponent has transistor like abilities and will also not be defeated the first time you empty his health bar. The first time I fought him, I was–once again–loaded with some useless functions I was trying to unlock. After I lost my primary attack and had some hilarious running around of pulling the opponent to me which just set him up for repeated Turns, I fixed up my load order and while he managed to take out my primary attack, I was victorious three times in a row that a true failure was still well away from occurring.

I think part of the problem with this system lies in the fact that the transistor power is so strong on its own. The ability to freeze time in order to execute a furious combo generally left the opponent obliterated. I took the faster Turn refresh passive and would spend time between freezes skirting the periphery of battle until I could leap in, murder a target and rush out before anything was capable of retaliating. On the other hand, Bastion required a lot of timed rolling and dodges to keep alive in some of the more hectic combats though my strategy there was quite similar in that I would dance around the edges of battle only that time I would lob great explosive mortar blasts that generally did the trick before I faced the maker.

Granted, the player won’t really ‘break the system’ in Transistor right away. This is mostly due to the fact the game gives you no direction in how to play or what the hell is going on. It is a prominent ‘narrative device’ with both games and I was a little surprised to see it spill over to the gameplay this time around. On one hand, I do like the element of discovery and the lack of hand holding in a day and age where games provide the player with hours of forced tutorials. On the other hand, it takes most of the game to really understand what the hell you’re doing in a battle. It seems to me that the greatest pleasure in the system comes from planning and executing complex procedures during each of the player’s Turns and you won’t really ever get there until the game is coming to a close. I’m going to give the game a ‘recursive’ play (which means doing the damn thing over to get achievements but at least the new game+ mode keeps intact all the functions you had on your first run) so maybe I’ll have more fun the second time around.

There is, of course, one big stumbling block. 

I really don’t like Transistor’s story.

Now, I wouldn’t have said Bastion’s story was something praise-worthy. It existed in a functional sense and there general confusion of the world was an alright motivator for keeping the player intrigued. Truly, the biggest draw of Bastion’s narrative was the narrator himself. Had they a less robust and powerful voice actor, I think the plot’s general lack of… well… everything would have cropped up more in criticism. Transistor has that problem. It’s sole voice, some unidentified benefactor who took the sword blow for Red in the opening, is an alright actor. He is no Rucks but it is a passable performance. Unfortunately, because he doesn’t have that engaging delivery, the fact that the vast majority of time he’s called upon to spout nonsense really stands out. He also narrates perhaps one of the least convincing love stories since the latest Final Fantasy release. What really got me, however, is how more obtuse Transistor is. Bastion wasn’t particularly forthcoming with its narrative structure and really we don’t have much more than racist scientists make a stupid superweapon that backfires and destroys their city. However, this seems like a coherently thought out and well developed line compared to Transistors.

Which is unfortunate because there’s some neat ideas floating about Transistor’s head. The game takes place in Cloudbank, a supposed futuristic super democracy where everything is tied to voting and public discourse. One of the examples that comes up frequently is that the citizens have the power to vote and decide the weather on a day to day basis. The villains of the game, a shadowy group called the Camerata, do not like this arrangement. They developed the transistor to stop this… because.

Motivation is super lacking in the game which makes some of the story’s twists seem rather… well… hollow when they occur. From what I can gather, the Camerata developed the Process–Apple-esque robots which serve as the primary mooks Red runs her circuitry through–in order to stop the constant changes in Cloudbank. And, in true Supergiant fashion, the Process immediately spiral out of control and are the force that are destroying the city… for reasons. Just like the Camerata, if you’re expecting some justification for these actions then you’re putting in more thought than Supergiant did. The villains’ goals are hand-waved away with a paradoxical creed that even on the shallowest look comes across as meaningless: “When everything changes, nothing does.”

The hell is that suppose to even mean? Don’t expect transistor to explain. There’s also the element that all the functions in the transistor are powered or fueled or inspired by individuals the Camerata identified and absorbed… also for reasons. Nothing makes sense because there appears so little effort to tie the ideas together. I couldn’t help but think how the game’s themes could be stronger and tie into the gameplay better with just a little more planning and forethought. For example, the player comes across a number of OVC terminals which generally just dispense news but always allow the player to either participate in a vote or comment on the news. What I would have liked to see is the idea that the player’s voice in these matters really means nothing. Have it so no matter what the player chooses, the end result is always the opposite of what they picked. Make it even more clear that no one is reading the comments and have that impact the story’s progression. This would tie in nicely with the protagonist’s literal loss of voice and the transistor could shift less into some bizarre weapon meant to–I think–have complete control over the city’s malleable form and turn it into a repository for individuals and their consciousness. The Camerata could view themselves closer to a stewardship rather than moustache twirling mad scientists who see the loss of valuable individuals in the overwhelming sea of public opinion. Their prior targets, instead of being prominent people always poorly excused for why no one found their disappearances distressing, be instead individuals who had great merit or skill but either fell from grace or could never curry the public’s favour to get the recognition the Camerata felt they would deserve.

This would elevate the game from a simplistic bad guy wants to take over the world and perhaps take a look more at problems in a system that its audience is going to consider inherently good. Red could, instead of being a highly successful singer overly self-conscious about her public impact into a struggling artist adorned by few and failing to build the fanbase she needs. Then, perhaps, her mysterious lover’s sacrifice and consistent loyalty would be all the more powerful. All I felt over the closing montage as relationship to Red was revealed was how absurdly hamstrung it felt. The sword first confesses his love to Red when high off Process vapors (or whatever) as though this confession were some great secret when it’s made immediately clear that the two were in a relationship when she pointlessly commits seppuku by his body.

Like I said, the love story is atrocious. But really, the story in general is atrocious because, much like the combat system, Transistor struggles from having too many disparate elements with no clever way of tying everything together. It’s a poor mish-mash in the end that reveals far too starkly how reliant the company is on the success of its first product. And really, you had the perfect set-up for there to be four main boss battles with the different Camerata members. How the company bungled this opportunity still baffles me.

The art, though, is really pretty. I think it’s the only thing I like better than in the original.