I want someone I can talk spoiler-y stuff about Bastion with.

There's two moments in Bastion that have really lodged in my head as game design I'm not gonna forget.

The first was the in-game achievement/reward for killing n "beasts of the wild"... which (I think for most players) was completed upon first meeting and then killing an adversarial human.

It took a goal you'd been working towards and then subverted it to show the racist, imperialist nature of your society -- without any words spoken.

The second was at the very end of the game: finding Zulf injured and trying to carry him out. Gave up the last dungeon superpower and can't fight, and there's dozens of Ura trying to shoot you down. Chugged health pots but only had so many.

This was right after it had been revealed that The Calamity was indeed a weapon of genocide.

Right then, I thought I was gonna die, for realsies and not come back. And, in that moment, I thought that was a fitting outcome.

This is a game where the Good Ending leaves 1 + 3/4th civilizations annihilated.

Which is... interesting. The moment that sold it for me was Zia saying "all of my best memories... happened after the Calamity, not before."

That, plus the heavy implication that rewinding time would just result in it happening again, made that being the Good Ending pretty obvious.

(imo the way newgame+ works, plus some slightly altered narration on a second playthrough, confirms that a rewind doesn't change anything)

The really beautiful part of the ending is the music. Two different songs which each on their own had been tragic ("mother, I'm here" being a *literal funerary song*) combined into something joyous.