So I started to write up a whole long thing comparing the indie film movement of the mid-late 80s and early-mid 2000s to the indie game design movement of the mid 2000s-early 2010s, reflecting on how in these types of "industrial" art forms there are these brief windows where the tools of production and distribution are sufficiently accessible but also the competition is relatively sparse and it becomes uniquely possible for nascent creators to make a mark for themselves with their scrappy, clumsy, deeply flawed but often innovative first projects, but then how within a few years those windows of opportunity always slam shut again as things get rapidly more competitive and the technology gets better and even the "independent" end of things becomes highly professionalized and the expectations of minimum technical competence quickly become inflated to such a degree that were those early pioneer works to be made just 5 or 10 years later they'd be considered amateurish or straight up bad and go completely unnoticed... but then I got kind of lost in the weeds talking about Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo and ended up deleting the whole thing.

Anyway, the point is that playing Bastion today, the thing that stands out the most is just how clunky and stiff it is in just about every way—from the controls, to the animation, to the implementation of the mechanics themselves, to the way the climactic final level awkwardly forces you to both swap out a key movement mechanic with an entirely new one, and swap out both of your weapons and your special attack with a cumbersome, kind of shitty new weapon that radically slows down the pace of the game and imposes a very specific play style. The thing that stands out the second most is how much this game serves as a trial run for a lot of the design innovations that would ultimately go into Hades.

I wouldn't really recommend this to anyone who's not a game historian.