COR CONCEITS

Bastion’s original conceit was, as audio director Darren Korb once put it, “what if Cormac McCarthy made a fantasy videogame?” The mournful, whiskeyhoney tones of Bastion’s narrator Rucks certainly seem like they could have been plucked straight from the author’s bleak yet lyrical descriptions of the American landscape. When McCarthy writes, in his 2006 novel The Road – in which the country has been beset by a terrible cataclysm, leaving few survivors – of “the ashes of the late world”, or the “barren, silent, godless” wasteland, he could just as easily be describing the post-Calamity wreckage surrounding the Bastion, what Rucks calls “fragments of the old world”. Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s 1985’s frontier novel, even featured a protagonist known simply as “the kid”.