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Upcoming role-playing game Bastion boasts a few intriguing features, but its biggest draw is its narrator. An old codger tells the tale of the game’s hero as he goes about his 2-D, old-school adventuring.

What’s striking about Bastion’s vocal performance, which developer Supergiant Games says is composed of more than 3,000 lines of dialog, is that the narrator describes everything that happens in the game. Everything.

It goes something like this: “The kid continues on down the path. He breaks open a few crates and finds some treasure. He grabs it all up. A bunch of enemies slithers out. He punches away at ‘em.”

Obviously it’s written better in the real thing. But you get the idea. I got to play the E3 Expo demo of Bastion at a sneak-preview event last week and found its approach to narration fascinating, not only because it adds to the fun of the classic action-RPG experience but because of the way it tackles the fundamental problem of storytelling in videogames.

Generally speaking, most videogames have two stories. There’s the professionally written narrative that takes place during canned cinematic scenes: Donkey Kong has kidnapped your girlfriend. You are a test subject in a science laboratory run by a snarky robot.

But then there’s the other story, the one constructed by the actions you perform during the game. Because the gamer is in control and because videogames often give players a good amount of freedom, these two stories are usually somewhat misaligned — sometimes preposterously so.

The Penny Arcade webcomic made this precise point in its take on Sega’s sprawling drama Shenmue. “I will avenge my father’s death…. Right after I play with this kitten! And drink this soda! And play with these toys!”

I noted another example of this dichotomy in a series of articles called “Confessions of a Grand Theft Auto Virgin.” There’s nothing in the games’ cinematic scenes about the main character being a serial murderer of prostitutes, and yet the do-what-you-like, open-world gameplay led many gamers to spend their time doing only that.

The important thing about Bastion’s narration isn’t that it’s clever and funny, which it is. What’s so interesting about the “constantly talking old man” device is that it attempts to square the circle and unite the two stories, the one that’s written down and the one that’s told in the moment-to-moment actions of the player.

As I got my bearings and wandered across a bridge on the Warner Bros. game’s first map, I decided to test the limits of the game and walk off the edge.

“Then, the kid fell off the edge and died,” said the narrator, played by actor Logan Cunningham. “Heh heh, just foolin’.”

Playing the game further, I felt a little constricted by the slow walking speed of the main character, and I did the old Legend of Zelda trick of using a rolling dodge move to quickly tumble around the level.

“The kid walked on down the path, somersaultin’ up a storm,” said the old man.

OK, now it was getting freaky. We do things in games that would be silly in the context of the story. If a game has a Jump button, some people jump everywhere rather than walk. (See Penny Arcade again.) To have these behaviors called out and placed into the spoken narrative of the game is an unsettling and surprising thing.

I didn’t get to play much of Bastion, which its creators say will run about eight hours long. (See some screenshots and a trailer in the gallery above.) As befitting a title modeled after classic role-playing games, Bastion will also have a “New Game Plus” mode in which you can play through it again with all the weapons, upgrades, etc., that your character gathered on his first time through.

Supergiant Games also promises a unique and potentially compelling approach to the game’s challenge level. Rather than just forcing players to select a difficulty mode when they start the game, Bastion will feature structures called “shrines” at which players can invoke the wrath and/or benevolence of different gods. Gods can make the game more difficult, in specific ways, in exchange for rewards. So you can crank up the difficulty of the game if you want, and get something cool in exchange for your trouble.

These all sound like swell ideas to me; I’m looking forward to playing it on Xbox Live this summer (the PC version will follow after that).

Images courtesy Supergiant Games