Bastion

Bastion is an action RPG you can download for Xbox Live Arcade or several different computer operating systems. The game blends isometric dungeon crawling with plenty of typical action-adventure elements such as leveling up, acquiring new weapons and skills, and exploring secret areas. The game had a stunning art style, both visually and soundtrack-wise. Its most memorable attribute was certainly its narrator, a gruff-voiced omniscient guy who adds plot to the game where there otherwise is none and also provides running play-by-play commentary. "Kid is just going to town on those windbags," he'll say as you swing your hammer around wildly. "They've got some big guns," he'll note after you get hit by an enemy projectile; fire back and kill said enemy, and you'll hear, "...but the kid's guns are bigger." The plot was kind of strange. The world has been more or less destroyed by an event known as the calamity. You head to the bastion, which is where everyone was supposed to go in the event of an emergency, but the only people to make it there are you and the aforementioned narrator. You spend the rest of the game trying to collect shards and cores with which to get the bastion up and running so that you can undo the calamity. Or is there something else going on entirely? The game stays very vague on a conceptual level, despite being relatively straightforward in terms of gameplay, and in that respect it reminded me a great deal of some other recent XBLA games like Braid and Limbo. Honestly, this may have been its biggest shortcoming. Don't get me wrong - I had a lot of fun playing it and it resonated thematically with me. I just think a straightforward medieval setting would have worked better. But maybe that's just a personal preference. Regardless, this was a decent little game that I could see myself revisiting one day for completion's sake. But not yet. Not yet.