He had retained a reminder of what was to come out of the previous cycle, now living as a fuzzy voice in the back of his mind. But perhaps this was the second chance for the Kid to set things straight. I wondered how it was possible for them to fall into the same mistakes again. I wasn’t expecting to hear those words in the background when I started NG+. One of the last things the Narrator tells you before the restoration is that ‘he hopes to see you in the next one’. It wasn’t until I returned to the main menu and started New Game+ out of curiosity that I realised what had truly transpired. I was satisfied with that ending back in 2011. This meant forgetting every experience the Kid had lived through, in the entire course of the game - including his memories and the faces of the people he met. During my first playthrough, I chose to undo the Calamity. I didn’t get to know the answer to that question until many years later. But an alternative presents itself: what if you carry on instead?

And at the end of Bastion’s story, you’re given the choice to do just that. And we’re caught in the midst of things, trying to put this fractured world back together, amend for past mistakes. After a failed genocidal attempt to prevent this from happening again, only a few remnants of the world survived the consequences. The Calamity was a weapon targeted at the Ura, a human race that had fought a war with the folks at Caelondia decades before. I was equally angry and sad when I found out it was the same people that had triggered the apocalyptic event. With Cael Hammer and Dueling Pistols, I cleared a tide of enemies as I slowly rebuilt the Bastion under the promise of reversing the Calamity – a catastrophic event that had destroyed Caelondia’s streets and most of the townsfolk that used to inhabit them. We’ve seen this time and time again with Supergiant Games, most recently with the superlative Hades, but this is an ethos that started ten years ago with Bastion. Bastion always returns to the same place, but it’s never stuck in it. One of Bastion’s biggest standouts is the way the story unravels itself, told in cycles that the player navigates over and over. Spoilers for Bastion, Transistor and Pyre to follow. READ MORE: Gorgeous, God-like and… bisexual? How ‘Hades’’ developers made sexuality part of the power fantasy.It was also the time when Humble Indie Bundles were my sole approximation to what was happening in the scene outside the mainstream lens, serving as curated libraries to discover and explore new worlds. The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, To the Moon, and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP were all critical darlings, each of them paved the way for hundreds of experiences to come. 2011 was an unparalleled year for indie games, but I only had eyes for one.

Which came first bastion or transistor