Outstanding!
Every human endeavor has those moments when the bar gets raised for every creator that follows it. It's the filmgoer watching Citizen Kane sitting back and saying "I didn't even realize film was capable of that." It's watching Tiger Woods play golf or Frank Sinatra in concert and realizing that, yes, human beings are capable of creating transcendent experiences. It's also what happened to us when we finished playing BioShock, the "spiritual sequel" to the brilliant System Shock 2 that simply outdoes the previous title -- and, really almost every other game to date -- in every way. Playing BioShock is like flying for a moment with Michael Jordan just as he's about to slam the rock home.
Welcome to Rapture
BioShock tells its story through the eyes of a passenger on an ill-fated plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean in 1960. In the opening segment of the game, the plane crashes and the player wakes up floating in the ocean surrounded by burning wreckage. The only land in sight is a mysterious lighthouse that houses a bathysphere.
Upon entering it, the bathysphere launches and the player is treated to a propaganda film narrated by one Andrew Ryan. Ryan outlines the tenets of his Objectivist-style philosophy that caused him to reject the surface world in favor of an undersea nirvana where "The artist need not fear the censor, the scientist need not be bound by morality and the strong would not be held back by the weak." Unfortunately, after a stunning voyage through the exterior of Ryan's underwater city, the bathysphere lands and the player finds that things have gone horribly wrong in his utopia.
It's this storyline and the player's experience of it that mark BioShock's greatest strength. Initially, it seems like the cliched "kill the big bad guy" plot that's supported almost every FPS ever created. But the storyline runs much deeper in its observations of Objectivism and its implications: laissez faire capitalism, Romantic Realism in the arts, the elevation of the self, the denigration of the weak and the deification of selfishness. Even "Andrew Ryan" is a riff on author Ayn Rand, the founder of Objectivism and whose "Atlas Shrugged" is referenced throughout the game, if not directly, than at least in theme.
As the player progresses through the game, reversal follows upon reversal in a twisty maze of plot points until what started as a mere political allegory becomes a searing exploration of the true nature of evil that's guaranteed to keep players guessing until the end. It's no coincidence that the game's creators begged people who have finished the game to not reveal spoilers. The game acquires massive replay value simply from the desire to go through it again and track all those moments that take on new significance with the knowledge gleaned from finishing it.
Art Deco and Metal Fatigue
The true brilliance of the game's story lies in how it's delivered, particularly the sound design. While there are a few non-interactive cutscenes, by and large the player will piece together the history of Rapture through audio diaries left behind by the city's inhabitants. The voice acting in these recordings is exceptional, and since there's no break in the action, the diaries act as a sort of running soundtrack underscoring the game's brilliant art design. There were so many times when what was heard made the actions on-screen take on more significance.
The sad, insane mutated "splicers" who constitute the player's main enemy add to the story by babbling to themselves when they're not fighting. While not necessary to complete the game, listening to the well-acted voice clips presents a lot of insight into the philosophical underpinnings that caused Rapture's creation and made its fall inevitable. Our favorite was one upper-class splicer voice that sounded like Katherine Hepburn who continually complains about the poor quality of a steak she had been served a long time ago and how she micromanaged her daughter's wedding. Other comments like "I wore it for you, Father," and "We followed your commandments but turned away from the light," (often spoken just before the Splicer leaps for the player's throat) continually underscore the current horror that is the crumbling city.
