Transistor

a relatively-hidden gem. fantastic music, fantastic art style. this game was the reason I started following Supergiant Games.

Ok, wow. Transistor is really one-of-a-kind experience that I am shocked I haven't seen more hype about. I mean, I saw some of the coverage back in the day when it first released, but the fact that it didn't have a lot of lasting power to be still talked about in the same way that people talk about other indie classics is surprising to me. Transistor is an art-deco futuristic RPG with a pasu mechanic like in old-school CRPGs a-la Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age. Of course, unlike those games this one is a bit more simple, but it's systems actually allow for quite a bit of depth. The game starts in jarring way, with our protagonist, whose name we learn is Red, standing over a corpse of a man that was impaled by a giant green sword that looks like a circuit board, which we later learn is a titular Transistor. We know that Red lost her voice and the guy, who got killed, got stuck inside the sword and can talk to Red. Outside of that, the game really doesn't go out of it's way to tell much about the world or characters. In fact, it actually obscures quite a lot of it, leaving a lot of room for speculation and theories that will never be confirmed. I guess you can call approach of the storytelling similar to Dark Souls, where most of it's lore comes from item descriptions, most of the story of Transistor told through terminal entries and biographies of people, that integrated within the Transistor and their personalities are transformed into new abilities. I don't really understand quite a bit of what is going on in this story anyway, but it really sticks in your head and will probably get stuck in my head for a while. The graphics are a master class by Supergiant Games. It is a massive improvement over Bastion, which already looked really nice, but the level of detail and animation in models and environments is a big step up. Even robotic enemies have some really interesting designs, even though you would expect most of them to be form-over-function. There are optional scenes with beatiful illustrations where Red is hanging out with the sword. And the music is great. There are different arrangements of each track, where you hear the song normally, and the version where Red hums the melody of the track, as well as couple of fully vocalised tracks. The presentaion is A+ here. The only issue I have is the fact that the game's resolution can't get above 1080p, so if you are on 1440p, or even 4K, the game can be a bit blurry up close. Also, I guess it might be a bug with the Linux version, but the game doesn't instatly recognize external sound sources. I use a DAC with my headphones, but the game on launch tries to use motherboard sound, so I always had to Alt+Tab to switch sources back and forth until it worked. But if you are using a singular source like from the motherboard directly it shouldn't be an issue. The gameplay on surface is simple. It's a real-time with pause system like in old-school CRPGs, but you still control Red directly with her movement and abilities. When activate the pause, you can freely move and choose your actions. You can do a limited amount of actions during the pause, and your actions will be queued up and quickly executed, but then the pause and most of the abilities will be on cooldown, so you need to account for that to not get stuck in a bad position and get killed. Where the magic happenes with this system is with it's abilities. So, you use ability directly as an attack or a direct option, but also each ability slot has up to 2 upgrade slots, so you can put an ability as an upgrade to another ability. So, for example, the first ability you have is Crash, which is a fast attack with a short range that can stun enemies for a second and does pretty decent damage. If you add this ability as an upgrade to another ability, it will enhance it by giving it capability to stun enemies. Additionally, later you can unlock slots for passive abilities, and any ability also can be used in passive slot and provide unique benefites, from more health and immunity to certain status effects, to improvements to the pause mechanic, by extending it's time or adding unique abilities there. I don't know if I did a good job explaining this stuff, but there is a lot of depth with how each function interacts with another, and with experimentation you can do some broken stuff. Transistor really is an underrated gem. Even now searching it on Youtube, outside of old reviews and playthroughs, I don't see much of the discussions of it's lore, or any theories. Maybe it just came too soon, or maybe it just didn't get the chance to get stuck in a collective subconsious that other indie darlings got like Undertale or some other pixel RPG that I probably will never play. I mean, Dark Souls lore gets milked dry by the community with any item description and every dialogue being dissected, every little thing getting turned into a meme. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Transistor is really good, and if you are interested in beatiful indie games with good music and interesting mechanics and somewhat confusiong plot that won't be completely clear after a full playthrough, please play Transistor.