Thoughts About: BioShock

Bioshock is a piece of art, that could rival the blockbuster movies of Hollywood any day.

The environment is gorgeous. The game takes place in an underwater 1920′s style metropolis known as Rapture. Rapture has seen better days, as the leader has gone insane and what-ever is left of the population has joined him, and is run down and feels down right creepy at times. The developers obviously took their time getting everything just right, and the payoff is your surroundings pulling you into the fantastic story even more.

One particular scene that happens fairly early in the game comes to mind: Upon entering a once elaborate night club, now with barely lit hallways and a few strung out patrons sitting on bar stools crying, you could hear “You are my sunshine” softly playing in the background on an old grainy sounding radio. Aside from communicating an eerie vibe, you can’t help but think to yourself, “What the heck happened here?” Which brings us to the story.

The story is epic. The well crafted plot, rather than being forced on you as most games do via cut scenes, is fed to you in small bytes at a time by listening to people’s audio journals, interacting with the remaining few sane (and even a couple of the not-so-sane) residents, and even a handful of encounters with some of the lost ghosts of the city.

This form of story telling is a refreshing break form the norm as it leaves you to piece the story together for yourself. At its worst, you could technically play through the entire game and not know what is going on or why things are happening. But that’s no fun, and this story actually make you care about what’s going down.

As a final thought about the story and a feather in the writers hat, there is a twist about 75% through the game that would make M. Night Shyamalan jealous. I didn’t see it coming and it actually evoked an emotional response from me. (No spoiler details here. If you really want to know without playing the game, you could look it up on a wiki somewhere.)

The game-play is tight. Though it primarily consists of shooting strung out “splicers” (it was the drug crazy in the city that lead the people to be not so much in their right minds anymore) and equipping your character with special abilities to get around blocked passageways. A door frozen over melts when you shoot a fireball at it, a security camera won’t raise an alarm if you hack it by rewiring it’s circuitry, etc… On the note of hacking, the hacking mini-game was a great time in itself. I’m convinced with a tad more added to it, it could stand on its own as a it’s own puzzle game.

When all was said and done, the game took me a healthy, very enjoyable 20 hours to complete. I could have completed it faster, but I was obsessed with finding all the audio diaries to advance the story along… and I still didn’t find them all.

Bioshock needs a sequel, and a prequel. I want to know what happened to some of the characters you met and left behind in the city, and I would like to see the events leading up to the downfall of the underwater city. (The game starts just a few years after everything in Rapture goes to crap.) If you keep making them like this, I’ll keep buying them.

The final score: 10/10.