Transistor

Transistor is the second game from Supergiant Games, the studio behind Bastion, and trades the first game's high-fantasy frontier for a stylised futurist city called Cloudbank. You play Red, a famous singer whose voice has been taken from her, in possession of an enormous talking sword — the Transistor — that contains the consciousness of someone who matters to her. A shadowy group called the Camerata are behind what's happening, and the game is about working out exactly what that means.

Combat blends real-time action with a planning mode called Turn(). You can fight in fluid third-person action at any moment, but at any point you can pause time, queue a sequence of attacks and movements within an energy budget, and watch them all execute at once before a cooldown forces you back into real-time play. The Transistor itself can be configured with thousands of possible Function combinations — each Function works as an active skill, a passive modifier or a slotted upgrade, and rearranging them between fights is most of how you build for what's ahead.

The presentation is the other half of what the game is doing. Vibrant hand-painted artwork in 1080p, a dynamic Darren Korb score that shifts in response to combat, reactive voiceover from the Transistor that fills out long stretches of the journey, and a story that the studio is content to let you piece together rather than have explained to you. After the credits, a Recursion option introduces procedural battles for players who want to keep exercising their build experiments.