Transistor

Things I liked: Combat system let me play it like a CRPG. The character's abilities have a crazy amount of flexibility: you can use them as active abilities, passive abilities, or upgrades for active abilities. You have a lot of choice for how to spec your character's combat abilities. Things I didn't like: I had no reason to care about the story or the characters. I had no sense of the world nor of the stakes. I spent most of my play-time trying to figure out whether anyone was actually dead. While I loved the combat system, I didn't enjoy the game-play loop very much and there wasn't enough lore, characters, or story to keep me interested. I realized as I played that I wasn't really enjoying what I was doing.

I loved Bastion but compared to Transistor what made Bastion so great to me was its gameplay in *combination* with the story telling. Transistor, at least in the beginning, is all about a mysterious, pretentious "something happened here, something is going on" vibe with shallow, unpolished gameplay mixed inbetween. This bored me so much that I stopped playing after an hour or so and then promptly forgot about it. :(

If you look for story in games, this one might not be for you. If you want good gameplay and graphics, you will find those things here. The visuals and soundtrack of this game are it's strengths. The backgrounds and effects are beautiful. The soundtrack is very atmospheric and haunting. The voice acting is good quality. These things are compelling. The combat system has depth. You can combine a range of abilities in many unique ways. Combat is semi-turn based. You pause and map out your moves then unpause to execute them. Enemies attack in real time and you can also attack in real time but the system is built around the idea of pausing and mapping out a sequence of moves and attacks. It's just hard to care. The storytelling is so minimalist in style you get little to no context for anything going on. There is no depth at all. The atmospheric soundtrack and beautiful visuals provide an illusion of depth. You feel like there has to be more, but there never is. There is never a satisfying answer for who the voice in the Transistor is, why we should care, or what the whole point of the attempted assassination on Red was. Things are just happening. You learn about the characters only from info bulletins accessible with each new ability you find. They are "info-dump" style world-building though. They tell you about a characters history in the world, but they don't add to the story and are not compelling.

I love this game. The art, music and overall atmosphere are incredible, the combat is solid and all aspects of the game fit well together. However, the devs made certain design choices which some people might really enjoy and others not so much. I'll focus on the story, since that's likely the most polarizing. The plot is fairly straightforward. However, many details of the plot and setting are uncovered by reading NPC bios (unlocked by using abilities associated with each character), interacting with computer terminals, etc. Additionally, Red (the protagonist) loses her voice at the beginning of the game, and one of the ways she communicates with her partner is by typing and then erasing text at various terminals. As a result, players who are focused primarily on moving from one fight to the next might end up missing many details, and things that happen later in the story might make less sense and have less impact. Some things are intentionally left vague and open to interpretation: for example, what is "the Country" exactly? This is not a story where absolutely everything falls into place and is explained at the end. Whether this is good or bad is down to taste. There's a difference between using vagueness as a tool that synergises with other aspects of a work and makes it better and vagueness as a cheap way to make a work seem deeper than it is. I feel that Transistor is in the former category. On the other hand, some things that at first might seem weird and contrived (e.g. why are these two characters now trapped here and only one can get out?) end up having simple explanations compatible with the game's setting and plot, though the explanations are not stated explicitly. Finally, many games (like Pyre, from the same devs), have a blank slate player character, and choices made by the player drastically alter the ending. Transistor is on the other extreme, where Red, not the player, makes the final choice of the game, and the player cannot change the ending.

Transistor has a gorgeous art style which is let down by unsatisfying game play, an annoying narrator and a mediocre story. Game play - Combat is a mix of turn-based and real time combat, in the turn base portion you pause the game and have your way with the enemy. In the real time portion you run around waiting for your turn-based ability to recharge. It has neither the tension of turn-based combat nor the adrenaline of real time. I found myself repeating the same series of moves on one enemy after another in each combat, there's no strategy, just repetition. Some of the enemies are also incredibly annoying- you'll know the ones. The Narrator - I wasn't a big fan of Bastion either but the narrator there added a lot to the otherwise uninteresting story and okay gameplay. In Transistor, the narrator sounds like a guy you're hanging out with who isn't your friend (someone else invited him) but really wants to keep talking to you. It's worse when the story often doesn't have much to talk about, but the narrator really wants to give you some dialogue anyway. The story - Robot apocalypse. Cognitive dissonance for an ending. The end Like all games I have some satisfaction in finishing it but I feel I largely wasted my time.