Bastion is celebrating its 15-year anniversary today, July 20, 2026. Below, we reexamine Bastion’s relationship with divinity in light of Supergiant’s later hit, Hades.
“The Ura feared the gods,” Bastion’s narrator says. “We turned them into trinkets, put them on our walls.” In this simple bit of flavor text, there is an implication of religious cultures. The Ura: outsiders, but ones with some shared religious tradition. “We:” a society shared with the narrator, which trivialized that tradition. The details of Bastion’s religions are kept mostly vague. One deity, the bull god Pyth, gets a level dedicated to him, but most are relegated to a sentence or two. This lets Bastion’s religious world exist in texture and implication.
When developer Supergiant Games revisited Bastion’s religious ideas much more explicitly and elaborately in Hades and its sequel, it did so with significantly less depth. Bastion is a game about devotion and belief, whereas such themes are scarce within its spiritual successors. In this way, Bastion most directly captures real devotion, in all its fraught complexity.
It’s difficult to overstate how much of Bastion made it into Hades. The titular location is a central hub which you upgrade over time, with the resources to do so being gained from venturing into a hostile outside world. Bastion also has an armory of unique weapons with their own upgrades, spirits (think Hades’ trinkets) which resurrect after death or boost critical hit chances, and a dodge-and-block, rock-em-sock-em approach to the action-RPG genre. As an action game, Bastion is inferior. Hades is a masterclass of affect. Even without upgrades, Zagreus moves fast and hits hard–it’s a constant stream of dopamine, a power fantasy fully realized.
Both games feature the patronage of gods as a central idea. In Bastion, one of the buildings you can add to its titular space is a shrine. Within the shrine, there is a station for each god in the game. Selecting one increases the game’s difficulty in a way that reflects the chosen god’s domain, but also rewards you with more experience and money. Pyth, the aforementioned bull God of commotion and order, makes enemies move faster. Yudrig, the horse God of impulse and bravery, allows enemies to harm upon touch. This is a direct, and hostile, exchange. If you want the gods to help, you have to lend your enemies power.
In Hades, this mechanic still exists, but is relegated to post-game content and is stripped of any real association with the gods. Instead, the gods’ patronage is a structuring element of the roguelike from the start. The most consistent way to upgrade Zagreus’ powers is to court the affections of the gods. In Hades, these powers are, for the most part, freely given. Sometimes, the gods will ask him to pick between two of them, leading to the God not chosen spitefully empowering Zagreus’ foes. But after the dust is settled, that same God grants Zagreus their power anyway. The gods are also slotted into Hades’ relationship mechanics, wherein players can gift Ambrosia to court the friendship (or romance) of specific characters. With enough time, every single god can be so befriended. Zagreus never has to make hard choices about who, or what, to prioritize.
Zagreus’ relationship to the gods is textually fraught–the possibility of a war between Hades and Mount Olympus looms over the narrative. In practice, however, the relationship is reciprocal, without real threat, and thereby without real sacrifice. In Bastion, every boon the gods grant comes with a cost. They do not offer strength and what they do offer is not freely given. The hostility of these relationships is emphasized in several parts of Bastion. “The gods never liked competing for people’s affections,” Bastion’s narrator intones. Trying to court every god at once turns Bastion into a madhouse; the Kid benefits from being selective. One of the game’s excellent songs warns that, “Gods ain’t gonna help you, son. You’ll be sorry for what you done.”
Of course, one of the major shifts in Hades is one of perspective. Bastion’s Kid is an everyman–a literal working class hero, tossed about by fate and chance into violence. The children of Hades are demigods, powerful beings with dominions and powers of their own. These facts imply a different set of relationships. Of course the gods would be more willing to help one of their own.
Bastion is also more simplistic than its successor. The effects of the gods’ patronage are reduced into percentages gained. It’s as clean as a business deal, without the fuzzy possibility space of cult and ritual. But, ironically, Bastion captures something closer to what religious practice may have really felt like in ancient Greece. Rituals and sacrifices were the order of things, often with the expectation of explicit reward.
Bastion moves still, because it is a real relationship. Most of the Greek myths that have lasted into modernity are about people, however extraordinary, who are drawn into impossible conflict with the gods, forces far beyond their power. Odysseus’s cleverness cannot prevent him from being tossed through the Mediterranean for decades. Achilles’s strength cannot prevent his death. Though Bastion leaves the question of divinity open, it is about the confrontation of people with supremacies beyond human reckoning. The “Calamity” which opens the game was human created, but it is also mysterious, not clearly defined. The game’s final question is whether the Kid will continue into the dark, and the freedom, which the calamity granted, or return back to the world that was. It is, in other words, a question about what he believes the world should be and how it should continue. It is a divine question.
In Bastion, the gods are mysterious and distant, thereby more real. Few, if any of us, will ever experience a real manifestation of God. We are left scrambling through the chaos of the world and must decide, often without real certainty, how to act. Faith offers some answers, but it also demands some kind of action, from mere belief to ritual to total transformation of life. Relationships with the ancient Greek Gods were characterized both by warm worship and dreadful sacrifice, devotion in blood, rather than as a matter of course. Bastion captures both the cost of faith and the hope of a better world it cultivates. In its depiction of sacrifice, Bastion is a far more real story about faith than Hades could ever hope to be.
