My initial experience with Bastion was not a pretty one. After being gifted the game on Steam once it was available for Macs, I could not get the game to display. I gave it another few weeks and tried again. Still no luck. I began trying everyday until I sent Supergiant Games an email reporting my problem. They did their best to help, and I appreciated the response, but I still couldn't play this game everyone kept bugging me about.

Fortunately, with the Humble Indie Bundle, I was able to get Bastion and several other indie games at once to play without using Steam! And so my journey began.

It's been a while since I played a game on a computer, and Bastion gave me a bit of a challenge in the beginning, but it explained all of the controls, and you can change them to your liking in the options menu anyway. The default felt comfortable, so I didn't mess with them.

The first thing I noticed about Bastion was the beautiful art style. It's unique (and I truly mean unique -- I have yet to see something like it in another game). The illustrations are beautiful, the map is gorgeous, and even the stages are pretty.

Equally as beautiful is the music. This is a soundtrack you need to get with the game. I put on some headphones after getting the gramophone in the game so that I could spend some time just listening to the different music tracks. Several of them remind me of a western-style adventure. This is something I want blasting in my car on the highway.

The narration is amazing as well. Logan Cunningham voices Rucks, an older man with much wisdom and a great storyteller as well. Cunningham's voice is perfect for this kind of character. He portrays emotion well, his voice is a little raspy, and it's easy to hear. It's a voice I can imagine reading out stories on old radios. The music is what most gives Bastion character.

You play as The Kid with the aim of restoring the Bastion. It seems rather straightforward -- you travel to new places to collect cores and pick up new weapons. It's not a complicated story, but it's told well -- mostly thanks to Rucks's narration.

Fighting requires a lot of movement, which is a little frightening at first (you can fall off of stages), but once you figure out how to best fight enemies, it becomes fun. You receive many weapons both short- and long-range, so you can play around until you find the right fit for yourself and the stage you're going to. It's also easy to practice with the weapons without too much fear of dying at the proving grounds for each weapon.

Beyond the game, Supergiant Games is wonderful. They're easy to get in touch with -- and when you're having problems, sometimes they go straight to you! At one point when I was complaining on twitter about how I couldn't get Bastion to work, they replied to my tweet and asked me to email them about it. They were helpful and easy to talk to. Thanks again, Supergiant Games! Even if I wasn't able to get a fix for my copy on Steam, it was definitely worth buying through the Indie Bundle.