Okay, so I've reached the end of Transistor, Supergiant's follow-up to the superb Bastion. The game gives you a lot to think about, a lot of questions without clear answers, and while I very much enjoyed the journey - it has some really clever and beautiful ideas - I can't help but wish some more of the wonder of this post-game wondering had made in into the game world itself. As the end of an opening paragraph, that may sound like more of a complaint than it really is; I haven't figured that out yet.
The game begins in media res - and not even a menu asking you to click Start, a nice touch in itself - with the player character, a singer named Red, pulling the titular Transistor from the body of her apparent lover. The "sword" has physically killed him, but his consciousness has been absorbed into it and he serves as the game's voice. Red's voice, meanwhile, has been somehow "stolen" in the altercation that lead up to the game's beginning. Red and boyfriend/sword head out to find the Camerata, a secretive group responsible both for his "death", and the unleashing of something called the Process which has begun to take over the city.
For the first hour or so, the game didn't really grab me. The world had given up a few interesting tidbits, like that the citizens of Cloudbank - the city in which Transistor is set - can change even the weather and the colour of the sky through a democratic vote at terminals dotted across the city. But mostly I was just going through the motions; pressing E on every object the game automatically highlighted for me, and engaging in honestly pretty bland combat with the Process - start planning, get behind enemy, hit them three times, run away, repeat.
But the systems that drive the combat gain complexity fairly quickly, thanks to the fact that each ability ("function", in the game's terms) that you gain can be used in three different ways: an active attack, an upgrade for other abilities, or a passive boost. You only need to gather about five of them before the amount of combinations you have in front of you starts to hit a comfortable breadth, and there are sixteen in total. They can be rearranged, plugged into each other in different ways at regular locations which double as save points, and the game actively encourages you to try new combinations by rewarding you with bits of narrative.
Because actually, the functions are four things, not three: they're also characters, or the remnants of characters. You receive many of the functions (perhaps all of them, I don't quite remember) in much the same way as the opening scene plays out: a dead body will leave a "trace" of the person, and your boyfriend/sword can speak to them and absorb them into the Transistor. But this aspect of the game felt underplayed to me; in terms of both mechanics and narrative, the functions are less characters than files on characters. These files, gradually built up as you play, perform much the same function as audio diaries in Bioshock, just earned through exploration of ability combinations rather than exploration of the game world.
Now I've nothing in particular against audio diaries, so that's not really a criticism in itself - they're there to both paint a backdrop of Cloudbank as a vital, diverse city and to dripfeed you important nuggets of exposition, and they do that. My problem, I guess, is that they weren't enough. I wanted to know these characters better than three paragraphs of backstory allows. I wanted to know Cloudbank better than that allows. The game is very much about tragedy and perhaps there is real tragedy in this not getting to know more, but only if I know enough to care first, and I never really felt that I did. The gradual "destruction" ("overwriting") of Cloudbank by the white plague of the Process should be wonderfully horrific, or at least sad (sad would probably be more tonally consistent with the rest of the game, I guess). But the Cloudbank I knew never felt like a living city, it felt like an empty series of alleyways and rooftops populated with unfeeling robots for me to dutifully smash. The game took so long getting around to telling me (not showing me, perhaps importantly - as much as I generally dislike that mantra) about the city and its inhabitants that I didn't have time to feel a sense of loss because the game was already over.
So Cloudbank, for me, wasn't an interesting city. It is an interesting mystery though. The most straightforward mystery is whether the city is "real" - the game throws a pretty long list of indicators at you that it is in fact "virtual" in some sense. The name Cloudbank itself evokes some kind of online storage, and the names of other places, like the club where Red sings, The Empty Set, as well as various mentions of Ports and Channels (and of course, the Transistor and the Process, Functions, etc), add up to a feeling of more-than-coincidence - these don't seem to be "just" a bit of cyberpunk wordplay.
There's also the notion of the city as the extent of the world. You hear a news story about the uncontrolled and incredibly fast spread of the Process, and your companion worries about the fate of "this town". Nobody mentions the fate of the world, even though the Process don't look like stopping. Why not worry about that, unless there is no broader world? Similarly, "going to the Country" is used repeatedly as what sounds like some kind of euphemism for death (or perhaps "going offline" or something similar, I'm less interested in that) - which carries an inherent acknowledgement that not existing, in whatever sense, is the only alternative to being in the city. This aspect recalls the Thief series, where to its inhabitants, the city is so all-encompassing and all-providing that it doesn't even have another name, it's just The City. I still can't decide whether it was a mistake for Thief 2 to take you beyond The City in that submarine level - whether it would have been better to uphold the mythology.
I don't mean to sound like these are major, unique insights (or even "correct" perspectives). As I said this is one of the simpler mysteries of the game; I'm well aware plenty of people are spending a lot of time discussing every little detail and building grand theories about the nature of the Transistor, Cloudbank, the Process, even the game's Recursion mode (New Game+). I just mean to highlight how much I appreciate the care with which the game was clearly put together, down to little linguistic cues, and to point out what seems an oddity: that in many ways this is a game that's more interesting to me in retrospect than during play. While I was playing, the narrative didn't really grip me - I wanted to love Cloudbank, but I didn't; I wanted to be horrified/disgusted/saddened by the advance of the Process, but I wasn't. And yet, with the game over, it's occupied a lot of my thoughts since, mulling over motivations, possibilities, connections I didn't make at the time because I was too busy being funneled along a robot-filled path (not that I didn't enjoy killing robots in 42000 different ways!).
The soundtrack is predictably excellent, bridging the gap between the electronic mechanics of Red's encounters with the Process, and the softer noir undertones of the city. I especially loved the "hum" button, which does exactly what it says, letting you take some downtime to have Red stop and layer her own version of the game's melodies over the existing music. I love this appreciation of "non-gameplay" gameplay. Things that exist for no mechanical reason, and not really any strict narrative reason, but they nonetheless bring an important degree of humanity to the game world.
On the less humane front, the core gameplay is basically a series of semi-turnbased battles with a variety of Process creatures, and with all the complexity allowed you, it's very solid by the end of the game. You can fashion a huge range of playstyles from the various function combinations; some of my favourites were:
a passive ability that spawns an explosive "packet" every ten seconds, coupled with a bouncing main attack that will set them off whenever they appear,
adding a "splitting" function to the conversion function, letting me run around converting multiple enemies to my side and having them kill each other,
take a dash move, add a slowing, damage-over-time bolt, and that same "splitting" function, and you can dash around the battlefield dropping electric balls in your path and slowing groups you land near
and for laughs, adding the summoning function to the previous multiple conversion tactic summons a huge amount of tiny annoying drones to your side. Mass distraction, little damage, graphics overload.
For endgame battles, I settled on an uninspiring-but-effective technique of lowering an enemy group's defences three times, running behind them and unleashing a large, powerful area attack; this killed pretty much anything instantly. Potential balance concerns aside though, one problem I had by endgame was that the "semi-turnbased" nature of the battles had been evaporating over the course of the game. When my "pause and take your turn" ability was recharging I felt close to useless, and increasingly relied on the dash, conversion and invisibility moves to basically wait out this period...at which point I may as well be playing an actual turn-based game, right?
To be fair, there are doubtless skill setups that work better in the realtime aspect - there's a health regen function which only works when it's not your turn, and a function that can upgrade any other skill to be faster and usable while your turn is recovering. I'd be concerned I'd feel like I was missing the point then, but maybe I'll give it a try when I "Recurse" through the game again.
The Process creatures that you face gradually learn new tricks as you progress, and are all pretty well-defined with their own roles that often complement each other well - chasers that can turn invisible, artillery that leave a slowing trail when you chase them yourself. But generally speaking I had very little trouble fighting anything on my first run through the game. There are special "challenges" available which are a bit more puzzly though, which insert a bit more thought into the whole affair.
What I would really have liked to see would be a bit more activity other than combat. The Transistor is quite literally the key to the city - it can change anything up to and including the colour of the sky at whim. But for plot reasons it's just a weapon for 98% of the game, and the "functions" absorbed into it, seemingly the "essence" or even consciousness of living people, just end up being shooty beams or bombs or stat debuffs. I started just briefly into a second playthrough and was reminded that very close to the start there's a small "puzzle" where you have to use the time-stop feature to plug the Transistor into two switches simultaneously to open a bridge. This is literally the one game mechanic that never occurs ever again in the game, and as such it feels really odd now, like this sort of puzzle aspect was intended to be part of the game and then abandoned. Combined with the lategame scenes where the Process aren't hostile, just doing their "work" or even staring at your poster, showing that there is perhaps space in this world for "NPCs" of some variety, I'd have loved to see what the devs could have come up with in a game that wasn't entirely filled with fighting. They say it's not fair to judge games for what they're not, so I should reiterate that Transistor was excellent and I'm glad I bought it, but I would have loved to have seen that Cloudbank.