Shocking

BioShock is undoubtedly one of my favourite games.

I was sold from the first pitch: a horror-shooter set in a crumbling 1940s era art-deco city filled with genetically modified citizens and stalking behemoths. Underwater. The fact it was a spiritual sequel to System Shock 2, another favourite, was almost by the by at this point. The first demo, found on a barely populated gamepage on the website GameSpot, took this lock-in and turned it into unmitigated, feverish hype the likes of which I hadn’t experienced since the halcyon days of waiting for Command & Conquer Red Alert. It looked perfect.

Of course it’s not perfect, but it captured my imagination in a way that so few games do these days. It’s hard realise specific reasons why this game and the world it presented struck such a nerve but I’ve come up with a few.

Rapturous Melancholy.

The world of Rapture isn’t the sterile horrorscape of System Shock 2, nor the oddly confused mishmash of ideas that is BioShock 2, it’s a world of entropy, of fear and, most importantly, of sadness. BioShock 1 doesn’t have horror at its core but tragedy, a tale of ambition and dreams undone by the fallibility of the human condition. Its themes are obsession and loss and there’s no-one alive who is not in some way attuned to these ideas.

Heroes and Villains

The characters of BioShock exist almost entirely in its sound design, their stories told through audio-logs or radio-transmissions. With the exception of a few minimalist dioramas the player’s connection to these characters comes entirely from the game’s writing, eliminating the degradation of graphical fidelity as technology marches on.

None of these have anything to do with the gameplay really. Which is fine. It’s fine. But it’s not the reason the game shone, and the lack of certain quality of life improvements has not therefore dulled the game’s appeal as much as other games, for example Half Life 2, where the player’s primary mode of expression is through gameplay which is now seen as archaic.

But mostly, I love it because it’s a ripping fucking yarn. A real barnstormer of a story filled with interesting characters, set in an amazingly inventive world and buoyed by a whole host of moral and ethical considerations.

This is the tenth entry in my ongoing series of freewritten doodlings. The rational behind this is here: https://goo.gl/hi9Ub7