Transistor's Fantastic Art Style

If I haven't already said it, Bastion is one of my favorite games of all time. It's game mechanics were awesome for a debut game, but what really made it stand out to me was Darren Korb's beautiful soundtrack, and Jen Zee's even more beautiful artwork. So when they announced Transistor I was super excited, and when it came out yesterday I spent a couple of hours with the game and I absolutely love the art. The game's theme and art style, especially of its setting, Cloudbank, strikes me as being a combination of Art Deco, cyberpunk, and Jen Zee's unique surreal style. Allow me to explain.

The Artstyle of Bastion

One of Jen Zee's character doodles. Strange, but pretty!

Bastion's visual theme is basically the antithesis of the grey realism of many modern games. The idea of a world being rebuilt after being destroyed by some Calamity, and the wondrous settings and creatures you encounter throughout gives the whole game its dreamlike quality. Zee's artwork fit this perfectly. It's colorful, mysterious, and in my opinion, absolutely amazing! Her Deviantart gallery is full of characters from video games and many just out of imagination, but Bastion didn't have a lot of characters in it, due to the whole apocalypse thing, so much of the artwork there was in the background and world design. It's definitely definitely very fantastical, like a fairy tale. The city in Transistor is a bit more gritty (I hate saying gritty because it's always used to hate on Call of Duty) and more dark, so the artwork has drawn influence from different sources.

Transistor's Visual Design: Somewhere between Bioshock and Blade Runner

Screenshot of Cloudbank about an hour into the game. Lovely lighting, and neon signs! I do love the look of neon.

Wait, Bioshock and Blade Runner? What's similar in the art of a 1982 film and a 2007 video game? Both are set in massive cities. Rapture, Bioshock's underwater city built in the alt-history 1940's, is a spot-on example of Art Deco, with it's symmetry, geometric shapes, and luxurious ornamentation. Art Deco comes from the decades after WW1, and is representative of the huge wealth brought about by the industrial revolution. The story of Rapture was that in the underwater city, away from government and moral restrictions, wealth and industry could flourish. It did more than flourish, it ran rampant, and Rapture destroyed itself in civil war before the events of Bioshock. The abandoned city stands as a reminder of that destructive excess.

Blade Runner was set in Los Angeles, around 2020. Los Angeles has changed in that it's become a murky mix of global culture, especially a lot of Asian influence, as well as influences from all over the world. It's no less dangerous and dirty, though. It's not the sort of science fiction where everything's clean and white and shiny, it's cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is usually set in the near-future, where technology has advanced but society hasn't gotten any better. The city in Blade Runner is overpopulated, filthy, and full of crime and biotechnology that's neither completely ethical or legal.

Transistor's Cloudbank, though a lot more colorful than Los Angeles in Blade Runner, has a lot of cyberpunk influence. From what I can tell, Cloudbank was pretty peaceful before the events of the game, but the enemies in Transistor are some sort of digital horde called the Process that are "processing" the city into something lifeless and sterile. The Transistor, the titular blue sword-like weapon, is very digital in nature, and you can change it's uses around by combining functions, like you're programming this mysterious device. Lastly, Cloudbank is connected by a web of terminals that gather and disseminate information to the citizens, making the entire city reliant on this information technology.

Overall I think the design of the city leans closer to the clean lines of Art Deco, but the plot of the game is closer to cyberpunk, in that it involves technology and government going wrong. Both of these influences work great together in a way I don't think anyone has done before Transistor.