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Transistor isn't the first game to put its soul into its sword, but it is the first to be quite so transparent about it. Hundreds of action RPGs have already made it clear that the heft and feel of a blade is the focal point for so many loving tweaks and balances, yet Transistor also allows its eponymous weapon to narrate the storyline and play a crucial role in how it unfolds. In the city of Cloudbank, silenced songstress Red stands over the body of a man whose life has been transferred into the perspex skewer that now sticks out of his chest. Draw the sword and start the adventure. Hundreds of games do this stuff too, but none do it in quite this way.Traditional ideas delivered from an unusual perspective? That was the ethos of Supergiant's debut, Bastion, and it's changed very little here. Bastion buried an old-fashioned hack-and-slash under hand-painted visuals and a lattice of narration delivered in whiskyish, conspiratorial tones. It offered, in the process, a carefully controlled action game that somehow felt like it was running to catch up with you. Compared to such rough-housing, Transistor is a self-conscious study in elegance, yet it still works within an established genre while laying on supplementary ideas. We're deep in action RPG territory, with all the skill bars and cooldowns you might expect, but the story's daringly elliptical in its telling, and the combat dances between real-time and a clever spin on turn-based battling, always flirting, never settling, and drawing its restless energy from an underlying system that encourages tinkering.
At times, Transistor's story may be a little too elliptical. You can race through the campaign and well into New Game Plus before much beyond the basics of the plot have taken shape in your mind. Supergiant enters late and treats you like a grown-up who's really paying attention. Even then, it merely nudges you towards the main themes and a proper understanding of the backstory, laying out a narrative inquest - or at least an intriguing and portentous muddle - in which, with a few exceptions, you can draw your own conclusions.
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