I am so saddened about this one. I couldn't finish it. The primary culprit was the combat system, which I just did not enjoy. I tried to power through it and gave it a few good hours, but it didn't get any better.

The combat system was slow, awkward, and didn't flow very well. The primary stopping-of-time system was a neat idea, but every time you used it you were punished by not being able to attack for a few seconds (which is a long time in a game that wants to be fast paced) and it didn't sit well with me that the defining system in the game punished you for using it. Mixing the abilities to alter what they do was kinda cool, I guess, but they all felt incredibly underpowered so I found myself just spamming the same attack over and over to kill enemies optimally and that just wasn't fun.

It wasn't completely without merit, though. As always with SueprGiant games, Darren Korb delivered a fantastic score with a few tracks I will be saving down. It also had appealing visuals throughout, another thing SuperGiant excels at. The story had some intrigue, but my god the Transistors voice was so dry it was putting me to sleep and he never shut up. Like literally he felt the need to comment on every little thing I was doing. The narrator in Bastion was much better.

Ahh well. I'm still glad I gave it a shot. This doesn't make me lose any respect for SuperGiant and I'm still excited to give Pyre a shot.

With the hype for Hades II, I felt like revisiting this jewel of a game from Supergiant.

I’m a fan of the battle system; the planning mode is a great mechanic!

This time I also appreciated how the game forces you to try new builds by temporarily removing abilities when your health goes to zero.

A short, tight experience wrapped in amazing music by Darren Korb (Paper Boats is a favourite of mine!).

Um mundo atípico em um romance igualmente atípico para um jogo completamente atípico. Original, marcante, envolvente e muito sensível. Desde sua mecânica de turnos em tempo real até sua trama e personagens envolventes, Super Giant e Amir nos entregam mais um contexto apocalíptico. Novamente vemos nossa realidade ser tomada por um tipo de praga, mas diferente de Bastion, esta é uma história de Romance.

E que belo romance. Aqui já vemos a sutileza com que a Super Giant desenvolve seus personagens, um carisma que cresce à medida que você joga e, ao final das 4 horinhas, nos apegamos muito a uma cantora sem voz e seu cavaleiro sem corpo.

O mais incrível neste jogo é sua metalinguagem sutil, que me fez sentir parte da aventura. Ver a realidade do jogo se deteriorando é entender que no fim de tudo, talvez não haja escapatória da realidade que eles estão vivendo. A luta então é encontrar essa alternativa, essa solução, mas o jogo e os personagens entendendo sua realidade, tomam suas decisões finais, o que é um belo desfecho romântico para um casal lindo. Me fez nunca mais querer abrir esse jogo, não quero que passem por tudo de novo.

Transistor é paixão em um mundo apocalíptico, traduzindo-se em um combate envolvente e um mundo incrível, visto por pequenas janelas que nos fazem pensar "o que há além?" Felizmente, o pouco que eu vi do além foi uma imagem final que me deixou, para além da curiosidade, lágrimas nos olhos.

Excelente.

Transistor is a phenomenal experience in every aspect. As per usual, Darren Korb and Ashley Barrett create and sing some of my favorite songs ever. The soundtrack as a whole is stellar, I truly love the futuristic theme, and the vocal tracks are some of the best Supergiant has put out. From Paper Boats to Signals to the Spine, the soundtrack has great range and masterfully sets the tone. As for Narrative, Supergiant once again hits home with a well written and constructed narrative and is bold by having our main character be mute, but still keeps the player clued in with the Transistor as our narrator. As for gameplay, I personally enjoyed it, but I understand it's not for everyone. It served it's purpose, but overall had some aspects that were a bit iffy, but I think it worked well regardless. To close, I love this game dearly. Supergiant games was a large part of my childhood and introduction to PC gaming, and Transistor is no exception. I highly recommend it to any type of gamer.

This game has been sitting in my backlog for almost two years and after finally finishing it, I kind of regret not having played it earlier. Transistor boldly throws you into its story and lets you figure out its world yourself. While it is a fairly short and linear experience, it never feels like the game holds your hand. The art, atmosphere, and soundtrack are evocative and simply stunning at times. Despite Red being a silent protagonist, she feels like a real character. After all, there are two “game mechanics” that simply exists to characterise her and do not add to the game otherwise. While I can see that some may find such details unnecessary, I really enjoyed them. Furthermore, the voice actor of Transistor (Logan Cunningham) does an incredible job at bringing his character to life. His voice is so emotive that I hung on his every word.

The combat system, however, took me a while to getting used to. It’s turn-based, but not really. You as player can enter a planning mode in which you can queue up attacks and/or movement, which Red will execute rapidly after you tell her to. Afterwards, you are vulnerable to the enemies’ attacks for a short time. Especially in the beginning, selecting enemies and figuring out attack ranges felt fiddly and imprecise using a controller. I bet this plays so much better with a mouse and keyboard. Moreover, I wish the skills were a bit better explained. The game very much expects you to figure it out yourself and mix and match them to see what they do. Don’t get me wrong, that approach can be fun, but made me feel like I didn’t get the system at first. This was very much a learning-curve for me.

Also, this may be nit-picky, but the German translation of this game is lacking. Some descriptions of skills are confusingly worded, some subtitles of dialogue are just incorrect, and naming an enemy type “Doofi” (which is called Clucker in English for reference) took me out of the experience a little bit to be honest.

Overall, I enjoyed Transistor very much. At its core, it’s a love story in a sci-fi setting that explores how our choices influence the world around us. I love Supergiant’s way of telling a story through environment and gameplay as well as traditional means. I almost wish it would have been longer, but then, it probably wouldn’t have been as a great experience as it was for me.

The first game I have ever played made by Supergiant Games. At the time I tried it I didn't heard of this studio and the future reputation they will later get thanks mostly to Hades.

And I got really surprised. This is a really great hidden gem, with an incredibl presentation and a cure for details that is common from the works of these developers.

It presents an incredible futuritic world, which is a joy for both the eyes and ears thanks to the featured designs, a soundtrack that you want to always sing along (also covered in multiple instances by our main protagonist Red) and a grimmer story narrated indirectly via news articles, journals and via interactiosn between Red and her incredibly written sword ally.

The gameplay is also really interesting: it takes the combat of Bastion and twists it to create what could be considered a puzzle-like combat system, where you gotta plan out your resources and your ability of time manipulation to strategically overplay the menacing enemies you find on your way. It is really creative and even leads to an incredible amount of customization.

My main nitpick with the title is.... the overall lenght. I get that the studio was rather small at the time, but I feels like the adventure turns out to be too short, with a lack of more interesting set pieces and a story that in my opinion could have been expanded way more.

And speaking honestly, I kinda got mixed feelings towards the ending. WHen I forst got it it left a kind of bitter taste in my mouth, and I was kinda disagreeing with the direction the characters presented went for. It is withot a doubt memorable though, and Paper Boats is an amazing song to close up the already incredible OST of this title.

But that is probably just a bad take of mine: Transistor is an objectiely amazing title. Something that fans of indies and Supergiant's other projects will be able to enjoy without a doubt. A short, but incredible experience that I highly recommend despite my nitpicks.

Another game I vowed to finish this year... But at what cost?

Transistor is SuperGiant's second game after their smash hit Bastion. I was a big fan of Bastion. I even have the soundtrack on CD signed by composer Darren Korb.

Overall, this game is a mixed bag. Everything is here to make this game great. A fantastic soundtrack, a great art style and intriguing combat and while all these parts are great on their own, they never really mesh well together.
There are a few factors that bog down the whole experience:
1. Linearity
The game is basically one giant hallway from beginning until the end. Linearity in video games isn't a bad thing, some of my favorite games are very linear.
However, it becomes a problem because of the next problem which is: repetitiveness
2. Repetitiveness
The game has a great combat system but it isn't enough when all of the encounters are the same and there aren't enough incentives to experiment with your playstyle.
The game consists of battles which you fight in peculiar manner. You can equip up to four "functions" which can deal damage to an enemy, heal or buff you or give you some other type of advantage like dashing. You can combine these functions with other functions for added benefits. Battles play out very fast and frenetic. To give the player some breathing room, you can stop time and plan your next moves which your character, Red, will execute immediately. All of this plays very well and it's cathartic to employ an approach that can decimate your foes. After every battle you will gain experience points, you will level up and more aspects of your kit will open up. You can gain more functions, you can earn more space to equip said functions etcetera. All of this sounds very good on paper because it's a tried and true reward system. Many successful RPG's employ this system to great success. The problem is that you're going to use the same tactic over and over again because the game doesn't do enough to encourage the player to experiment with different abilities. If you want to get the most out of the story, you're forced to use the ones you don't even like. In the interest of not spoiling the game if you want to play it for yourself, let's say that this is an element of the game's story.
The encounters are almost always the same, you will fight the same enemies over and over again and it gets very boring after a while. Even though the combat is great as I've described, it is not enough to save it from the arduous repetition.

And for the story, I honestly believe they dropped the ball very hard with this.
While the premise is intriguing, you are a singer and you have lost your voice. You find a talking sword (frankly the thing never shuts up), the whole city of Cloudbank goes to hell and back and the whole thing is orchestrated by the "Camerata", a sinister cabal of slick looking high ranking officials. There are a lot of different story beats, each interesting on their own, like a system of democracy which you can use to choose which weather you can have or how the city has an ever changing landscape. But again, there's a lack of a cohesive feel and a lot of things are mentioned once and are then never mentioned again. So the story is dependent on a few characters. There's Red, the main character who can't talk but can nonetheless communicate non-verbally with all the different artwork the game provides. There's the talking sword you're carrying, the titular Transistor who can talk and would be much more appreciated if the thing could shut up once in a while. The Transistor has to have a say about everything.
Every. Tiny. Inconsequential. Thing. Sometimes there's no room for a scene just to breathe before the Transistor comes in but another unwanted remark.
A great story comes with a great villain. In this case, there are four and they are not very exciting. They get a great build up, they are being purposely kept in the dark and their character designs are stunning. But ultimately, not much is done with them. They don't get fleshed out properly and one of them doesn't even get any spoken dialogue.

In the end I didn't want to write an overly negative and critical review of Transistor but as discussed previously, the game has certain aspects that bog down the entire experience. I still love the artstyle and the soundtrack is amazing, very imaginative and eclectic, Darren Korb never dissapoints. Somewhere I'm glad I've finally finished it after so many years just to get it out of the backlog. However, I judge a game on a certain merit and that is: "Do I want to play this again in the future" and the answer is 'no'. I replay games frequently to get the most out of them. I do the same with movies, just in case I missed something crucial to the experience. But with Transistor, I think one playthrough is enough.

This game was amazing, I can't believe I put it down 9 years ago and never finished it. I'm simply giving it a 4 based on my experience but I could definitely see this being a higher rating for others. Supergiant Games is always great at not only nailing gameplay but immersion and providing top tier audio tracks to go along with it.
My only knock was that the combat was a little strange for me when I first started playing it and when I came back to it the mechanics were hard to get a handle on. Mileage may vary on that part.

Maybe one day I'll play through it again start to finish without a 9 year gap to experience it as intended but I still had a very positive experience.