Bioshock

In the little, dark corner of the internet that I inhabit there's been something of a back lash against Bioshock. And now there's been a back lash against the back lash, penned by Keiron Gillen. Find it here.

Ironically, it appears that the binary choice presented within the game is being echoed somewhat by the real world reaction. Save or Harvest? Well, really, that's entirely up to you. I mean, there are a few games which the whole world thinks are brilliant that I personally struggle with. Take the latest Zelda title. I was slightly overwhelmed with it once the painful tutorial/village sequence was over but after a while it became, for me, an insanely protracted exercise in frustration.

Literally millions of people disagree.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has - this very day - posted an article about the Making of Hostile Waters. There's another classic game that I couldn't stand.

Oh, also any stealth game. Ever.

As such, if people dislike Bioshock then, well, fine.

But is it really a deserving victim of so much hate? For me, the setting makes up for any number of shortcomings found elsewhere in the game. Its just so complete, so gripping in and of itself. The design is just awe-inspiring. Every room has its own little tableau of horror. Every corner reveals more of the city.

In games, I want to be transported away from the humdrum. I want to go and explore somewhere exciting. The trouble is, as time wears on, huge fantasy worlds crawling with vicious elves and friendly orcs and huge sci-fi universes where the aliens all look like really fuck-ugly people don't touch me at all. I've seen it. Prettiness isn't the issue. Cram in all the fully destructible terrain you like, the setting has to say something, it has to make me feel something.

For me, Bioshock is not the story of Jack. As Jack, the player is never anything more than cipher (and, post-twist, perhaps the fact that this does not change is a failing of the narrative) through which the story can sing its swan song. This is the story of Rapture and the city itself is the character for which we are made to care. Indeed, you may massacre as many Little Sisters as you wish but you have no choice when it comes to saving the city from destruction.

And it is a story steeped in sadness.

There is nothing worse than ambitious human endeavor failing absolutely. Just ask Peter Molyneaux. And Rapture, at the time of your arrival, has failed, completely and absolutely. Every room, slowly filling with water, every bloody, hunched corpse: this city has gone seriously wrong.

I've read the criticism that, in Bioshock, there is not enough evidence that Rapture ever worked. There are hardly any diaries (if any) dating before the civil war period. I'm not sure I agree. The extreme art deco opulence of some of the locations speaks volumes to me. Though the hard evidence isn't there, its not hard to imagine the few years of complete luxury that preceded the war.

Its there in every room, beauty hideously marred.

Of course we trust Atlas implicitly. He is the last shard of that normality we see behind the blood stains and structural damage. He is the last real person left in this ruined, dying city. He is a ordinary man, seeking to look after his family, in a place that has entirely gone to hell.

But more of him later.

This wrecked city is still populated, of course, but, for me, the Splicers are not simple monsters. They are a fragment of Rapture's schizophrenic personality. They're people who believed in Andrew Ryan's dream and followed it and paid the price. In seeking to heighten their humanity, they destroyed it. Perhaps the idea is not particularly clever, in and of itself, yet its very hard for me to fault the execution, the way in which each Splicer still clings to some remnant of their past life. Their babbled chatter is eerie because of its alarming proximity to sanity. Its effect doubled by the contrast of the inane things they discuss and their psychotic violence.

I killed them in great numbers, of course, but I never really felt triumphant about it. It was just a sad reality of survival.

Whatever you think about the moral conundrum at the heart of the game, I would say that the simple fact of the matter is the relationship between Little Sister and Big Daddy is an absolutely arresting, captivating aspect of the game. Those Big Daddies who have lost their precious charge, alone and bewildered, pounding on the walls... its sad, dammit.

It may be utterly ridiculous that this was the method that worked best, this coupling of huge mutant in diving suit with tiny indestructible child, for collecting Adam... but as an image, its dark and twisted and powerful and brilliant.

Andrew Ryan himself is a godlike presence that stalks you for much of the game. As the king of these people made monstrous, I went through the game assuming he was the biggest monster of them all; a deranged, mutated lunatic, dribbling and babbling and raging in his lonely tower. When I confronted him, I saw the reality was not that simple.

He is a man. A simple failure who wishes to die on his own terms. I killed him and, again, I felt no triumph. It was pitiful.

Let's talk about the twist. Its Brecht all over. It pushes you outside the game and makes you examine it externally. That's why, even though I'd thought Atlas would probably betray me all the way through (games always do that), its immaculate execution still shocked me.

But, internally, within Rapture itself, the twist doesn't effect enough. What it does do, it doesn't do as well as, maybe, it should. I found it particularly bizarre that Atlas was more interesting, more engaging and certainly more believable as Atlas than as Fontaine. His ridiculously gruff New Yoik accent broke the spell Ryan's murder had created and, after that, the magic never returned for me.

In the end, Fontaine was a B-Movie monster and that seemed incongruous, if predictable. Rapture, though, just about survived the denouement with its dignity intact.

Bioshock may not be perfect. It may not be System Shock 2. It may have its short comings but the city's story has lingered with me since I completed the game.

Rapture is still lodged in my mind. My journey through it has stayed with me. The stand-out and mottos are burnt into my memory.

And for that, I can forgive almost anything.

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This is not really a review. Nor should it be seen as a fanboy rant. I know there are plenty of things which don't work in Bioshock but I didn't want to pick their bones. I didn't want to defend its failings.

I just wanted to strip some of that away and examine what I liked about it, how the game spoke to me and - if you buy it - how it might speak to you. I love stories. And I think the story of Rapture is a pretty damn good one. The debate about certainly aspects of Bioshock seems to deliberately side-step the fact that some things it does very, very well.

In terms of coherently reviewing the game, here is the best thing I've seen written on the subject. I really wish I'd written that. Combine it with Zero Punctuation's take and you have a fairly complete critical encapsulation of everything I thought about the actual game.