Transistor, Supergiant Games' New Game

...actually i got the impression the kid went for anothe tour on The Wall as a deathseeker.

the way the game talks about the wall does not help at all. its described as basically a suicide mission and the kid is the only one to go back a second time. the fact that his mother had just died kinda pointed towards him going back in grief rather than moving on.

the game is definitely about moving on. everyone who doesnt is miserable for it; zulf, rucks, the ura. zia states for the record she doesnt miss the old world too much and is the first to suggest just moving on to adventure, and of all the main characters seems the pluckiest aside from the kid, who isnt shown to have any problem moving on, though obviously the ultimate choices in the game are a reflection of whether he did or not.

edited 8th Jul '14 4:43:28 PM by Tarsen

Agreed re: Kid and Wall.

I quite like the tone of Transistor, personally. It's hauntingly well done.

Rather than outright suicide, I saw it as him not having anywhere else to go not anything else to do. After all, for all of his prowess, he's still The Kid.

A new Update for transistor has a bonus for those who bought the soundtrack.....

The EXTENDED soundtrack includes hummed version, Instrumentals of Vocal Songs, and 3 Processed track including:

If you have the soundtrack it's in the same place where the original OST was.

C:/.....steam/steamapps/common/Transistor

it can also be found http://supergiantgames.com/index.php/2014/07/transistor-original-soundtrack-extended/ and other places, if you dont feel like downloading it for whatever mad reason.

Ooh, nice. Did it come with the standard version of the game on Steam, or only some special edition?

You only get it for free if you bought the soundtrack. Though you can still buy the updated soundtrack on steam.

edited 3rd Aug '14 2:24:05 PM by TwilightFalchion

Can finally take this game off my spoiler list. A very enjoyable experience, all around.

Finished the game. Wow, it's good. And dark. Wonderful music, as always.

Am I the only one who thought Cloudbank was a computer the entire time? It just seems...like the blatantly obvious twist, with all the programming references, the sometimes disjointed spaces, the reality warping and the Process. Not to mention that no one ever seems worried about the Process threatening anything outside the city. Why would they? Setting one server back to factory default isn't going to hurt another.

That's one interpretation, yeah. Explains the Country.

Just read an interesting article on the themes of transistor

Intro,Part 1,Part 2.

Thanks for the links, 'twas thought-provoking. Went on to read a few of the other articles on the site too.

Very nice.

So, I just finished this game. A bit late to the party, but it happens.

It was good. I enjoyed it, definitely worth the price of purchase and the time I put into it. That said, I didn't like it as much as I did Bastion. Part of that is pure gameplay — I like Bastion's real time action/adventure gameplay better than Transistor's weird Turn()-based whatever you want to call it. But most of it is the fact that I think Transistor went a little too far with the minimalism thing. Bastion was intriguing because there was enough information there for the player to fill in the blanks themselves. Transistor, in comparison, felt like it raised a bunch of basic questions without really giving enough information to even come up with our own answers.

For example, the true nature of Cloudbank. It seems pretty clear that Cloudbank is at least partially digital in nature. Okay, so... what does that mean? Is it some sort of virtual reality, a la The Matrix? Are the residents of Cloudbank programs, a la ReBoot? If it's digital, then it's by necessity artificial — so who created it? None of that is addressed, even indirectly. Yeah, it's not really vital to the story they're telling, but it bothers me that they create this setting that raises a bunch of really obvious questions that we don't even get hints at answers to.

The ending also struck me as an Esoteric Happy Ending. It's clearly intended to be Bittersweet at worst, but I can't get over the fact that it's a Kill Em All ending. Yeah, they stop the Process, but who cares? Cloudbank is almost entirely Processed, and won't be rebuilt because everyone is dead. I wouldn't have minded if it ended with Red doing some sort of Heroic Sacrifice to bring back the people of Cloudbank, or if she was forced to remain apart from her lover while she rebuilt the city and rescued the Processed citizens. But nope. Instead it's a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story, where everything is rendered pointless in the end. Oh, except Red and her beau are Together in Death.... maybe, because they don't really explains what happens to people absorbed by the Transistor. So it's unclear if they're dead, or having some sort of psychic mind-meld soul union, or what, exactly. Except that they're happy about it, which is worth something, I guess.

Anyway, like I said, I did enjoy the game and I would definitely recommend it. It's just that there were some significant issues that brought it down in my mind, especially compared to Bastion which was damn-near perfect.

Incidentally, I've just decided that the MAn in The Transistor's name is Matt. Just because. So that's what I'm calling him from now on. Go go gadget headcanon!

I go with Boxer. Also, you might want to take a peek at the links above. They are pretty good when it comes to understanding the game.

I think overall the game was not as strong as Bastion. It felt very much unfinished. Maybe they ran out of budget?

edited 24th Dec '14 6:24:02 AM by lazybanshee

Didn't feel unfinished to me. In fact, I feel that it ended perfectly.

It felt unfinished because Cloudbank was being destroyed piece by piece. So the later levels ended up looking like a blank canvas with a few enemies scattered around.

It didn't feel unfinished to me, so much as... shallow. "Narrow" would be a less-negative way to describe the same thing — Transistor is about Red's story, and that's it. We know almost nothing about her lover, because he's not important except as Red's lover. We know almost nothing about the nature of Cloudbank, because it's not important except as the place where Red's story takes place. There's a whole world of things in the game that we're shown but not given enough information to understand, because understanding them isn't necessary to telling Red's story. Transistor does an excellent job of telling Red's story, but it does nothing to fill in the blanks in the world around it — which is in sharp contrast to Bastion, which is almost more about the setting and its (former) inhabitants than it is about the Kid.

They had one good boss fight, and that was only good in concept due to void void void crash cull X3

edited 1st Jan '15 8:41:11 AM by lazybanshee

Both the Spine and Sybil had cool fights. The fact that they're too easy means that you don't have enough limiters turned on.

I never turn off Limiters. That's probably a mistake, though.

I only turned them off long enough to get the bit of text that goes with them, and then turned them on again. Difficulty isn't something I particularly value in games.

I like them. The game got a bit too easy with all the buffs you get throughout the game, so I activated a bunch of them for kicks.

It's like Bastion. Bastion got super easy once you went through the game once or twice with all the liquors and weapon upgrades you can get. Turning on all the idols was the only thing that made the game difficult again.

So I finished it a few days ago...and I kind of not getting the story...why is everyone dead, can't they run out of the city? The Transistor says basically that there is...if then, is the whole vote to change thing confined to Cloudbank only, or apply to everywhere else? If so, why there's no real news about other place, or say that they also vote? If Cloudbank's Process is separated from other places yet you can reach there physically, why doesn't all other people try to get out instead of...well, most likely commit mass suicide (if the whole thing about the Country really is afterlife/"waking up"/something? ...I'm kind of rambling here, but it seems to have so much contradiction.

Ok, reading Native Jovian's comment...and pretty much agree there...then again I may be a person who likes to see a great world being explored and integrated into the story instead of "it takes place in x, but x doesn't really matter, it's all on the character"...and this game just doesn't do it. Same thing with Bioshock Infinite.

Gameplay's definitely quite fun tho.