I’m struggling a bit with my feelings about this game. I’ve been sitting on it for a long time. I bought it soon after release but only played a bit. I finally got around to fisnishing it. Like Bastion, it’s a beautiful game with gorgeous illustrations. If judging by aesthetic and design alone, Transistor is a five star game. And it has an interesting and engaging, if simple, story.

I enjoyed the combat mechanics overall but I found I wavered in my opinion at several points throughout. At first I enjoyed it. Later I found it frustrating. Then I settled into a setup that I started to thoroughly enjoy, only to find that by the end of the game combat was too easy. I expected more by the end but my standard three function combo was all I needed to finish the final boss without put a challenge. I know the new game plus, or recursion mode, allows for more of a challenge, but I don’t think I enjoyed the game enough to play through again. Maybe another time in the future.

Transistor was fun, and pretty and definitely worth playing. I don’t regret my time playing and it certainly reaffirms my option that Supergiant Games is doing interesting and wonderful things. Even so, I also don’t regret that the game is over. I think the time I spent with it was just enough to enjoy myself and to feel ready to move on to the next game.

This game is a beautiful blend of style, strategy, and emotion, set in the atmospheric city of Cloudbank, the MC is called Red, a singer who wields the mysterious, talking sword known as the Transistor. The game’s storytelling is minimalist and poetic, revealing its plot through fragmented narration and environmental details rather than heavy exposition, creating a sense of mystery that pulls you forward.

Visually, it’s stunning, its hand-painted cyberpunk-meets-Art Deco aesthetic gives every scene a dreamlike quality, and the style alone is what made me want to play this. The soundtrack is equally outstanding, pairing haunting vocals with moody electronic beats that perfectly match the game’s tone, especially when it comes to the more emotional scenes, and also the battle sequences, enhancing the atmosphere. Combat mixes real-time action with a unique pause-and-plan mechanic called Turn(), allowing you to strategically chain abilities before watching them execute in rapid succession.

With its flexible system of slotting abilities as active, passive, or upgrades, the game encourages experimentation and customization. For those familiar with tactical-turn-based games, this one will be a breeze, and it is not my case, I'm not very familiar with those and I managed to beat this.Although the campaign is relatively short, its replay value is boosted by a New Game+ mode that retains your abilities while offering tougher challenges.

Some may find the story’s vagueness or the complexity of combat overwhelming, but for those willing to embrace its unique rhythm, Transistor delivers a rich, memorable experience that lingers long after the credits roll. Particularly speaking I'm a fan of these kind of story-telling, leaving much to the player to interpret, instead of not provoking any kind of reflection on what is happening, making playing the game much more engaging since you can interact with the community way more than other more traditional story-telling styles. For me this is one of the best indie games that I've ever played.

While certainly short with a minimalistic narrative, the depth is in the mechanics. I found the early phases of the game to be the most challenging, but after I crafted a powerful build, the game became more trivial. I found this to be satisfying enough that I immediately played through the game with my powerhouse build. The Recurse playthrough was significantly faster and easier for me, even with the more difficult enemies and added mechanics. The most notable addition in Recurse mode was the occasional shield that the spawners would gain. These are little droids that will either buzz around and attack (black variant) or respawn as a larger Processor (the main enemy type) after a short window. This added mechanic did require me to add a new attack into my rotation that was fast but weaker. Thus allowing me to knock off these shields, then hit them with my powerful wombo-combo.

Gameplay is interesting. It's a hybrid between action RPG and turned based. You can play the game in live action, but enemies are hyper aggressive and you have limited defensive options to avoid their assaults. While in "turn-based" mode, enemies cannot attack you, you can plan out actions (with limitations based on your turn gauge and cost of a given skill) which made for a good balance. These "turns" are powerful moments for you to combo with impunity but leave you vulnerable for a time before you can activate it again. At first, while still grappling with these mechanics, I found it to be frustrating. Often times, my defensive options wouldn't be enough to avoid the onslaught of attacks, especially from bosses, but this became less of a problem with better functions (skills) and being able to knock out multiple enemies in a single turn.

It's honestly pretty satisfying building up your skills and combos, but there is a plateau you reach with your power pretty early on during your second playthrough. I feel a bit mixed about this plateau. On one hand, it's a good thing to limit how many functions you can add to your build, forcing you to tinker more, but on the other hand, leveling up eventually becomes pointless. I do like how the game primarily implements difficulty through the use of "limiters" which are optional debuffs you can add to yourself or buffs you can add to enemies. This gives you a lot of freedom to tinker your experience the way you want. Though I will admit I didn't really feel motivated to use these added difficulty options since the reward was only more XP. The main issue being the quick diminishing return from leveling up. Still, I found myself engaged enough to immediately play through the game again and it's short (you can beat it in a few hours if you know what you're doing). I wouldn't have minded some sort of Rogue-lite mode, but at the time SuperGiant was a small developer. We would eventually get this Rogue-lite build focused gameplay in Hades which is an amazing game. Still, I respect them immensely for pivoting from the success of Bastion and doing something completely different. A bold move from a new studio especially since the safe route woulda been to use the assets from Bastion and churn out a refined version of it.

I would have loved a follow-up to this game because I really do like the system once it clicked for me (similar to materia but still unique), still I'm very curious to check out Pyre. I also didn't realize until after I beat Transistor that Greg Kasavin was a creative director for SuperGiant. I mention his name specifically because I remember his video game reviews from Gamespot. I always looked forward to his videos and found his reviews and thoughts to be engaging and thoughtful. I'm happy that he's found success in video game development which is something he clearly was always passionate about.

There isn't a whole lot to say about plot and characters given how minimalistic it all is. That said, I did like the voice acting and character design. Most of the plot you have to read for yourself from the various functions and I do like how the game rewards you for experimenting with Functions by unlocking more lore. You get one piece of lore per function for each slot you place it in. Thus if you use it as an action, if you use it as a modifier or use it as a passive you get a blurb of lore. It's a cool way to reward you with context for experimenting, though I think most people will just simply ignore this. Which is fine. The game is still fun without the context.

I did find that using void+breach then using a buffed cull and unmasked for defense would get me through the whole game. A very potent combo. Using load as your main DPS is also viable, but I found myself liking cull more to get the whole big sword swing vibe. Worth checking out for its novelty, art design and music alone. You can tell these folks were deeply passionate about the game, world and characters.

I kinda wanted to give this 2 stars. But in this system that stands for "mostly didn't like it", and that's not correct for me for this game.

To me this game is less than middling, but it does do a lot of interesting things.

The system for handling skills, the battle system, and the way you take damage are very interesting concepts. The fact that every skill is either a mainskill for your 4 skill slots or can be used as upgrades to other skills or even be used for passive effects really gives a lot of flexibility that i really really appreciate.

That being said, the systems feel not entirely finished. Maybe they couldn't push it further than they did or it just wasn't for this game. Either way, it was very interesting to use.

In Transistor they kept up with the narrator thing from Bastion. It was not as well done as in Bastion, but still good. Each skill also offers a bunch of stuff to read which is cool, but not for me personally. I kinda don't want to stop and read long texts all the time. So the overall world building might be a bit lost on me.

The artstyle and atmosphere is very nice, but maybe not for me in the long run. Even if the game is short, i kinda felt like it overstayed its welcome with me.

All in all, while for me a less than middling game with very interesting bits in it, i still recommend giving it a shot if it looks cool to you, maybe the overall style works better for you than me.

TLDR; Interesting but maybe rough game that seems to be exploring some concepts. beautiful looking world. Give the game a shot.

Transistor - хорошая игра, бесспорно хорошая, и я наслаждался ей преимущественно на всём протяжении, но я не могу назвать её безупречной игрой, которая понравится всем. Визуал - да, многим он приглянётся, ибо игра красиво нарисована, музыка - тысячу раз да, ибо она чудесна, история, какой бы она ни была намеренно завуалированной, хороша, но это всё же игра, и геймплей у неё, к сожалению, понравится не всем.

Поначалу меня цепляла механика боя, тут тебе эдакая возможность остановить время в любой момент, распланировать атаки и выполнить их, наслаждаясь тем, как главная героиня Ред молниеносно истребляет противников, так ещё и набор умений можно изменять - ну сказка, не иначе. Вот только от механики лично я уставал, хотя игра проходится менее чем за 7 часов, поскольку половину времени ты играешь и сражаешься с противниками, а другую половину - бегаешь по кругу, ожидая восстановления своей способности, без которой ты можешь, разве что, перемещаться по уровням.

Геймплей в моём случае был достаточно разным. То игра была слишком простой, то невероятно мудрёной, и это не столько вносит разнообразие и челлендж, сколько замешательство от того, комфортно тебе играть, прогрессируешь ли ты в игре и стоит ли лазать и искать билды.

Полагаю, если бы боевая система в Transistor была исключительно пошаговой без этой передышки в виде бега по кругу, она бы понравилась как мне, так и многим другим гораздо больше, а так - имеем то, что имеем.

Игра точно стоит внимания, но не возлагайте на неё надежд в виде открытия инди-шедевра. Музыка пленит, визуал заинтересует, даже сюжет покажется любопытным, и если геймплей не отобьёт желание играть, то пройти игру можно всего за пару вечеров.