It’s something that happened about 12 years ago at this point, but I have no difficulty at all remembering the precise moment when the art of Supergiant Games first caught my rapt attention. I was in the midst of a first playthrough of 2011’s Bastion–included in one of those incredible early Humble Indie Bundles, I expect–when the haunting voice of singer Ashley Barrett first broke the tranquility of the scene with the song “Build That Wall.”
It happens perhaps an hour or so into one’s playthrough, in a moment I’m thinking any Bastion player also likely remembers with crystalline clarity. The player character, The Kid, has just dropped into a new stage ready to smash and shoot his way through waves of deranged flora and fauna … only to freeze in surprise at the sweetly delicate voice of Barrett wafting over the scene from afar. In that moment, the ostensible action gameplay of Bastion falls away, and the player’s entire focus becomes the source of the beautiful melody. Like The Kid, I remember freezing in place, not even wanting to “play the game” in favor of simply listening along. Even when you discover the singer, you’re loath to interrupt her reverie, knowing that it will cause a pristine moment to conclude.
That little moment of tranquility, and the yearning in the singer’s voice, remains symbolic of the heart of the Supergiant Games ethos more than a decade later, threaded through follow ups that have since included 2014’s Transistor, 2017’s Pyre, 2020’s Hades and the still-upcoming Hades 2, the company’s first direct sequel. As a player, I’ve subsequently experienced all of Supergiant’s output, but in a decidedly odd order: After being totally enchanted by Bastion in its initial release, I largely lost interest in the company’s games until the breakout success of Hades thrust it back into the wider videogaming conversation. This, I’m embarrassed to admit today, but it’s the truth: Only after Hades have I finally gone back to truly give the likes of Transistor and Pyre their due, but I walked away from that experience with a far greater appreciation for everything the small team at Supergiant Games has achieved to date. In some ways, in fact, it feels like only now can I fully grasp the interconnected narrative, musical and gameplay decisions that truly link the studio’s titles into a lush mosaic of gaming experience.
Supergiant as a Player
It’s safe to say that Bastion was a formative gaming experience for me. It was one of the first PC games I played that could accurately be described as an indie title, which was a more substantial watershed moment than it might immediately sound like. I was a kid who had grown up on PC gaming primarily from AAA studios, from strategy (Starcraft, Total War) to simulators (The Sims), to first-person shooters (Battlefield, Half Life). Bastion raised my awareness of how creative and non-linear smaller games were often able to be, starting me down a rabbit hole that likely led the discovery of so many other classics of the era, from Braid and Super Meat Boy to the likes of VVVVVV, The Binding of Isaac or FTL: Faster Than Light. My gaming world had broadened substantially in this period.
I was thrilled, then, to first hear that the studio behind Bastion had put out its sophomore game, Transistor, in 2014. I quickly gave it a try, but was crestfallen when I didn’t seem to connect with the game in the same way. I remember being less enamored with the pause-and-go combat of Transistor, and feeling as if the story was being held at arm’s length by its opaqueness and lack of much traditional dialog or exposition. It still possessed an engaging art style and catchy music, but my frustration with the core gameplay ultimately led to me stopping before I ever reached Transistor’s ending. For years to come, I would occasionally replay Bastion and think about firing up Transistor again, but the memory of the title as a “letdown” couldn’t fully be dissipated.
My level of interest then bottomed out in 2017 with the arrival of Pyre, a game I never even gave its due diligence when it was released. Primarily, I was leery of the gameplay I saw in Pyre’s early trailers and previews: The concept of fusing a sports-adjacent style of game into the “combat” side of Pyre seemed like a fanciful step further away from my cherished memories of the likes of Bastion. Variably described as a high fantasy-infused version of basketball or soccer, “The Rites” of Pyre seemed to signal a studio exploring novel material that simply wasn’t for me, and I began to think of Bastion as a high water mark that they likely wouldn’t reach again.
Of course, I was entirely wrong. The 2020 arrival of the complete, post-Early Access version of Hades was a revelation, revealing a slick and sublimely balanced action rogue-like with seemingly infinite replayability. Elements like its isometric view and weapon upgrades might evoke obvious comparison to Bastion, but that’s where the direct combat similarities end–on every level, Hades’ central hook (its combat) is exponentially more polished, complex and complete, making the more basic action of Bastion look elementary. In terms of combat alone, it feels nearly impossible to exhaust the permutations available in Hades as you mix different weapons and abilities with various Olympian boons that transform their effects. But when you then factor in the slowly unfolding story of Zagreus, his divine family tree and the residents of the Underworld, Hades becomes an equally satisfying web of relationships that you take joy in nurturing and guiding to fulfilling conclusions. The amount of dialog alone is staggering–you can easily sink 100 hours of playtime in and still find new conversations on every run.
Playing and replaying Hades in the years that followed, then, slowly convinced me that I had likely overlooked other great gaming moments from Supergiant, something that should be corrected. Earlier this year, that resulted in finally revisiting and playing through Transistor to its finish, finding more appreciation for its more subtle form of storytelling and similarly complex combat upgrade systems. This one will never likely be my favorite in the company’s library, but it’s easy to now appreciate how its combat system serves as an even more direct inspiration for that of Hades than the rudimentary combat of Bastion.
The real revelation, on the other hand, was finally giving a chance to Pyre, a game that now ranks as one of my favorite Supergiant experiences. Easily the most boldly original and individualistic of the company’s titles, Pyre places narrative, emotional resonance and player choice above everything. It really feels like two games, though both of them are good–on one hand there’s the visual novel approach set in a high-fantasy universe that sees the player assembling a close-knit group of refugees and attempting to guide them to liberation from the crumbling backwaters of The Downside. And then there’s the oddball wizard rugby/soccer hybrid that makes up The Rites, a minigame that becomes significantly deeper than it first appears, especially via character upgrades and higher difficulty levels. You want a challenge? Try avoiding at least a few heartbreaking losses while playing a campaign on the “True Nightwing” setting.
The joy of Pyre, though, is how the anticipation of those losses is baked into the narrative itself. The results of a loss are not automatically negative, instead having branching consequences that are difficult to foresee, taking many possible shapes. And even if you win every possible match in The Rites, there’s still not enough opportunities to liberate every member of your group, meaning that the player will invariably have to make some agonizing decisions about which team members to leave behind. The game even asks you to consider the possibility of intentionally losing matches to allow your foes to go free in place of your own teammates, when those foes are presented as just as ideologically worthy–or even more so–of their own freedom. Even in the midst of a Rite, the game may pause for dramatic narrative revelations or appeals to the player to change their thinking. Pyre trusts that you can be moved by these appeals to emotion.
This focus on relationship building in particular would go on to be one of the keys to Hades, balancing out its far more prominent focus on combat. In fact, so much of Pyre ultimately feels present in Hades, from the hand-drawn character portraits to the increasing use of leitmotifs for each character in Darren Korb’s fantastic musical score. But nothing unifies the Supergiant aesthetic quite like the overall quest for freedom or liberation.
Supergiant Games and The Pursuit of Freedom
The pursuit of freedom, or the consideration of freedom’s true meaning or consequences, ends up being the crux around which all the games of Supergiant have revolved, something that is now far easier for me to see after finishing Transistor and Pyre. Each game positions the player character as someone seeking either their own liberation from literal or figurative bondage, or ultimately fighting on behalf of others to absolve them of their own burdens. Often you are asked to choose: Who deserves liberation most? What is the value of personal freedom, measured against duty or responsibility to friends, or even to an entire society? It often boils down to the same question that is a central prompt of NBC’s The Good Place: “What do we owe to each other?”
In Bastion, this kind of choice is present in the game’s conclusion, when you are asked to choose between restoring the city of Caelondia to its state before The Calamity–even knowing that events will likely repeat–or strike out on your own to explore the world beyond the ruined one that Caelondia’s leaders created. This creates an ethical quandary, when it comes to which choice best represents putting value in “freedom.” To repeat a possibly endless cycle of The Calamity is arguably the most selfless choice, representing the player’s valuation of the lives of Caelondia’s citizenry above their own. But the more traditional depiction of personal freedom sees the player sailing off into the sunset with their new friends, tinged with the inescapable reality that they are doing so by giving up on the attempt to restore thousands of lives in order to pursue their own interest.
Transistor sees the player character in rebellion against an oppressive state in which digitization and technology have run amok, the citizenry long having surrendered many of their basic freedoms to layers of bureaucracy. With the robotic Process seemingly bent on assimilation of the entire city, former lounge singer Red grapples with a promise to restore liberty to those who have become little more than shards of digital consciousness, trapped inside her own weapon, the titular Transistor. It’s a somewhat more straightforward story of liberation.
Pyre’s narrative ambitions, in contrast, are far grander and require a much greater degree of thought and decision making from the player. Its story sets the hook of liberation–the promise that you’ll be able to bring freedom to all of your new acquaintances one at a time–before revealing that with the cycle of The Rites coming to a close, freedom will instead be impossible for the full group to achieve. This turns each subsequent Liberation Rite into a contest fraught with both thematic and practical concerns, as you must simultaneously weigh the stated dreams or desires of the characters against your own needs as the player. Can you really afford, for instance, to let your most effective performer of The Rites go free? If that character manages to escape the purgatory of The Downside and ascend, but you’re left with a weaker team unable to prevail in subsequent Rites, then haven’t your choices negatively impacted the quest for freedom as a whole? Ultimately, this structure of Pyre more or less demands that the player map out a sequence of which characters they’d like to free, and when … but that sequence can always be thrown into disarray by the development of the story or losses in The Rites. The game demands both your planning, and your ability to abandon the plan at any moment.
Hades, on its surface, inherently looks like another straightforward quest for freedom: As soon as we meet Zagreus, we can see he has the bearing of a recalcitrant teenager determined to escape the stifling responsibilities of his stern father’s house in the Underworld. His subsequent attempts to reach the surface and reconnect with his vanished mother sow the seeds that perhaps there’s more he should be considering in his valuation of life’s experiences than the simple freedom to go where he wants. Perhaps “escape” was the short-sighted expectation of a child, and Zagreus should instead be using his influence to slowly but surely lend agency to the numerous other faithful denizens of the Underworld who are chafing in their own rigidly defined roles after millennia of ceaseless labor. In the process, Zagreus learns to bring light and vitality back to a place that starts out as dour and sodden, improving the Underworld for literally everyone spending time there … even a begrudging Hades himself.
These narrative threads of the Supergiant Games library are simultaneously tied together via the aural experience–twisted as frail threads into a stronger braid, to quote one of Darren Korb’s own compositions in Pyre. The presence of Korb and Barrett in each and every Supergiant outing nails home the feeling of a shared thematic space, like parallel universes branching off from a main continuum. You know from the start that every new setting will at some point include beautiful ballads and heart-rending duets from a pair of familiar voices, regardless of which flourishes and influences Korb draws upon for each setting. The stylistic choices evolve like the imagery of a toy kaleidoscope as it turns, from the frontier/western influences of Bastion, into the chamber pop/lounge music of Transistor, to the orchestral swells of Pyre and the frantic heavy metal of Hades. It’s all still the soundtrack of striving for liberation, the soul of Supergiant.
Regardless of which of those earworms has forcibly set up shop in my brain–and it’s so frequently one of them–the experience of finally playing through the studio’s entire library has undeniably enriched my esteem for each individual game, and the consistency of the company’s aesthetic. The year 2024 will bring anticipation of our first look at the hotly anticipated Hades 2 in motion, and more likely than not the cementing of another Supergiant classic, even in what could be an interminable Early Access period. I suppose that’s fitting, in the end: Without the hard, transformative path toward a final release, would it even be a Supergiant game?
Jim Vorel is Paste’s resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for film and booze content.