Transistor (2014) by Supergiant Games

Supergiant Games is back to challenge anybody who thinks this medium isn't ready to be called art.

This is a beautiful, engrossing game. The oversaturated, colorful art style combined with the ethereal soundtrack provide an incredible feel for the game.

The art is incredibly colorful, ranging from extremely warm to extremely cool, and it's all hand-painted. The "cutscenes" (if you can refer to them as that) are incredibly beautiful, and prompted me to take several screenshots in order to preserve them. Red's character design is excellent, and the enemy models and city are both really creative and interesting. A lot of cyberpunk art is cool, hard, metallic; you don't see that here. There's a lot of blur, a lot of soft edges, a ton of bloom. It's a game bursting with color.

If you've read any of my other reviews, you already know that music and sound design play a big part in shaping the experience for me. This game has both in spades. The excellent soundtrack ranges from jazzy and uptempo, to soft and bluesy, to straight downtempo ambient (see right video). The sound design is utterly phenomenal. When paused, the game continues playing the background music, but at a slower tempo, and muffled, as if it were being played inside a car next to you with all of the windows and doors sealed tightly. Click out of the game's window, and you get a very quiet, bassy hum in the background. I've got the game paused in another window as I type this review, and I feel the quiet bass rattling on and off in the cans even now. It's a really phenomenal effect. Whoever worked sound on this title definitely earned their wages.

There's also an extremely simple, yet very likeable feature that causes Red to hum along to the background music merely by holding down a button. This is just as simple as it sounds, yet I found myself sitting for minutes on end with the left bumper on my controller compressed; mesmerized and staring into my screen as my focus slowly deteriorated.

I feel like I'm floating drunk in a hot tub when I play Transistor. It's that kind of game.

As someone with an overclocked 1440p display the lone criticism I have with the game is the lack of 1440p support, but this qualm is rendered moot by the fact that these are hand-painted designs. It's difficult to justify creating these designs with a 1440p resolution in mind considering how small of a userbase it is, so I can forgive Supergiant for locking the display at 1080p. That's what the art looks best at, and I experienced the game at this resolution in windowed mode.

It has a voice acting schtick similar to the narrator in Bastion, though in Transistor it takes the form of a speaking sword rather than a narrator. So if you liked that kind of thing in Bastion, you'll like it here. The voice acting is very well-done, but it rubs me a bit wrongly; about half of the lines feel like they're jammed into the game in a very hamfisted manner. I seem to be the only one who felt that way about Bastion, though, so take this criticism of Transistor for what it's worth.

The core gameplay is your basic isometric action RPG stuff with a couple of neat concepts thrown in. The ability to pause the game and plot out your next actions -- which happen extremely quickly and automatically once you unpause -- is a key aspect in what keeps the combat from becoming a bit stale. There were plenty of times when I felt I didn't have enough control over where my attacks were headed. Certain "functions", as the game calls your attacking skills, felt like they were a bit too hard to properly line up, and as a result I frequently missed some enemies I should have been hitting. But the nifty pausing function takes care of most of it, and it looks really cool. It makes you feel like the badass that Red is supposed to be.

The other thing I really liked, and the thing that kept me playing most, was the ability to junction functions into each other in order to modify their actions. You have a set amount of function attack and actions and only four slots in which to place them. Each function has an active ability that becomes usable when placed, but they also have a specific modifying ability when junctioned into another active function. This all seems complicated when I write it out, but it's really fairly easy to understand in the game; no tutorial is really necessary after a few minutes of tinkering with it. The combinations are almost literally endless, and I found myself constantly resetting them in order to try new ones. It really adds some meat and some depth to a game that I felt would have easily succeeded on its artistic merits without these systems.

In conclusion, I'd say this game is worth a few hours of play simply for the art style and the soundtrack. But the neat combat and function features here will keep you coming back for far longer than that. This is a very worthwhile experience and Supergiant Games continues to offer some really unique, polished, artistic gaming experiences.

⭐⭐⭐⭐