Playing Bastion as a Solastalgic Game: A Case Study of Supergiant Games' Avant-Garde Era

This DiGRA 2024 paper by Heather Blakey reads Supergiant Games' 2011 action game Bastion as a "solastalgic" game, drawing on Glenn Albrecht's concept of solastalgia, the distress of experiencing environmental and place-identity loss while still at home. The author argues that Bastion's reactive narration and environmental storytelling cultivate a longing to preserve Caelondia, the game's fractured world, even as the game undercuts that longing. Through unreliable narration, limited player agency, and hyperbolic depictions of class division, the paper contends that Caelondia's social order is itself the source of the Calamity, so restoring it to its prior state would trap the world in a stasis where collapse remains imminent.

The analysis focuses on three design elements: the narrative role of found objects, the narrator's function in shaping the player's relationship to the world, and the way the environment continually forms and deforms in response to player action. Together these are presented as producing a tension between desire for stability and critique of systemically unjust systems, a tension framed within the Capitalocene.

The study forms part of a wider PhD project on affect, aesthetics, and video games centred on Supergiant Games. Its method combines close playing and analysis of the studio's four releases from 2011 to 2021, interviews with the development team, and consideration of their social and cultural context. The author braids this with game-oriented aesthetic scholarship and contemporary philosophy concerned with changing aesthetic relations to the world over the past century.

The paper also proposes that solastalgic affect offers a foundation for understanding the evolution of Supergiant's body of work, particularly how the concept of home recurs as a motif across genres and gameplay styles. It further suggests that studies of solastalgic narratives in games can illuminate broader cultural experiences of environmental change.