Bastion

Story

The game is set in the aftermath of the Cataclysm, a catastrophic event that suddenly shattered the city of Caelondia and the surrounding areas of the game world into many floating pieces, destroying the ecology and turning most people to ash. Players take control of Kid, a taciturn protagonist who awakens on one of the few remaining parts of the old world and makes his way to the eponymous Bastion, where all people should go in troubled times. The only survivor he meets there is an elderly man named Rucks, the game's narrator, who instructs him to collect the cores that once powered Caelondia. A device in the Bastion can use the power of the crystalline cores to create landmasses and structures, and allow Kid to travel further via "skyways" that transport him through the air. During his quest, Kid meets two other survivors: Zulf, an ambassador of the Ura, an underground-dwelling people with whom Caelondia was once at war, and Zia, a Ura girl who grew up in Caelondia. Both return to the Bastion, but after reading a diary that Kid discovers, Zulf intentionally damages parts of the Bastion's central device (the Monument) and returns to Ura territory. Kid learns that the diary belonged to Zia's father, Venn, who had worked for the Caelondians. He had helped Caelondian scientists ("Mancers") build a weapon that would completely destroy the Ura to prevent another war. Venn manipulated the weapon so that it backfired. When he was finally forced to trigger it, the resulting disaster also destroyed much of Caelondia. To repair Zulf's damage to the Bastion, Kid begins collecting shards, a weaker form of the cores. When he obtains the penultimate Shard he needs, the Ura attack the Bastion, damaging it and kidnapping Zia. Over the next seven days, The Kid engages in sporadic skirmishes in Ura territory. When he finally blasts through a Ura outpost and meets Zia, she tells him that she has voluntarily set out with the Ura to find out their intentions; Rucks had previously told Zia that the Bastion has the ability to somehow fix the Calamity. Kid travels to the once underground home of the Ura to retrieve the last shard. There he discovers that Zulf is under attack by his own people: The battle with Kid has destroyed the Ura forces, and they accuse Zulf of bringing Kid to their homeland. Kid has a choice to drop his weapon to help Zulf, or leave him. If he leaves Zulf behind, Kid destroys the remains of the Ura and escapes through a skyway. If he chooses to take Zulf with him, the Ura archers initially open fire on them, but eventually cease fire and silently watch as Kid and Zulf take the skyway back to the Bastion. After the Kid returns and recovers, Rucks presents him with another choice: he can let the Bastion rewind time to before the disaster to prevent it, or use it to evacuate the survivors and move them to a safe location. Rucks isn't sure if there is a way to prevent the disaster if time is rewound, because there was no way to test the process. Either way, the game ends showing images of the characters (including Zulf, if the player wants to save him) flying away, or of their lives before the disaster, and the credits. In "New Game+" mode, which is unlocked after you play through the game once, it is implied that restoring the world did not prevent the disaster.