Video Game, approximately 20 hours game time, USA, 2007

Written By: Ken Levine, Susan O’Connor & Emily Ridgway

Directed By: Ken Levine

Dramatis Personae:

(Note: info on the voice cast is terribly spotty, so I had to rely on some research and some educated guesswork to place name to face. I’m happy to be corrected by someone who knows better. Drop me a line!)

Armin Shimerman is Andrew Ryan, business magnate, self-styled Objectivist, and founder of Rapture.

Karl Hanover is Atlas, proletariat revolutionary and the player’s guide throughout most of the game.

Jane Beller is Bridgette Tenenbaum, geneticist, former child prodigy, and former Nazi collaborator. Oddly enough, one of the NICER people in Rapture.

Greg Baldwin is Frank Fontaine, Rapture businessman, smuggler, and chief rival to Andrew Ryan; presumed dead at the time the game begins…or perhaps I’ve said too much already.

T Ryder Smith is Sander Cohen, Rapture’s leading musician, poet, artist, and complete nutjob.

James Yaegashi is Yi Suchong, biochemist, opportunist, and amoral bastard.

Susanne Blakeslee is Julie Langford, Rapture’s own Mother Nature: botanist tasked with creating and maintaining Rapture’s artificial greenery…and by extension, its oxygen supply.

Peter Francis James is J. S. Steinman, Rapture’s foremost plastic surgeon…though by the time we meet him he’s moved on to more invasive techniques.

Richie Coster is Bill McDonough, Andrew Ryan’s chief engineer, responsible for building the bulk of Rapture.

Anne Bobby is Diane McClintock, society girl turned revolutionary.

Juliet Landau is the voice of The Little Sisters, genetically and psychologically altered little girls who prove to be major MacGuffins in the game.

Steven Stanton is the voice of The Big Daddies, diving suit-wearing monsters that protect the Little Sisters as they go about their creepy business.

Adam Sietz is Jack, the player character, survivor of a plane crash who finds himself fighting for his life in Rapture. Apart from one line at the beginning of the game and a few grunts and groans, he doesn’t say much.

Commentary:

This is a bit of a departure from the norm here at The Pit: reviewing a video game. I’m not really much of a gamer, but when I recently broke down and bought myself a Playstation 3, I just had to pick up a copy of this game to play on it. Bioshock is one of the most critically-acclaimed games ever made, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about (and this game has sucked up so much of my free time of late that I really feel I must say a few words). I’m happy to report that much of the hype is well-deserved. Bioshock is that rare, but increasingly common, video game that manages to combine immersive gameplay with an engrossing story – a story that’s frankly better than most feature films – and creates a nearly-perfect experience for both a game player and a fan of horror and science fiction.

Our story begins in 1960, where a young man named Jack is crossing the Atlantic in a small passenger plane. He opens a parcel and takes out what appears to be a gift from his parents…then everything goes black.

The next thing Jack knows, the plane has crashed and he is floating in the ocean. The only land to be found is a tiny islet upon which sits a lone lighthouse, so he makes for it. The lighthouse strangely seems to be uninhabited, but it’s what’s inside the lighthouse that’s even stranger: what appears to be a personal submarine, and a giant art-deco display emblazoned with the words: “No Gods Or Kings. Only Man.” With nowhere else to go, Jack goes into the sub and pulls the lever. As he descends, an automated filmstrip plays on a screen within the chamber. It is delivered by a man named Andrew Ryan, and it is about his creation: Rapture, to which Jack is now descending. A domed city at the bottom of the ocean, Rapture was created by Ryan and several like-minded individuals immediately after the Second World War. The purpose of Rapture, according to Ryan, was to create a totally free society, where individuals could pursue their own scientific, artistic, and commercial endeavors without the interference of government or religious authority.

The bombastic idealism of Ryan’s filmstrip proves to be a stark contrast to the reality that awaits Jack when his sub touches down at the Rapture airlock: he watches the person come to rescue him get disemboweled by some kind of mutated freak (a “Splicer,” as we later find out), who then proceeds to attack the sub. The Splicer is eventually driven off by some remote-controlled defensive measures, operated by a man calling himself Atlas. Atlas makes contact with Jack over a short-wave radio, and guides him out of the sub and to safer ground. “Safer,” not “safe,” being the operative word here: Rapture is a shamble, strewn with debris, broken equipment…and dead bodies. Some of them LONG dead, to the point of mummification. The only living creatures Jack encounters are the violently insane Splicers that attack him on sight. Atlas blames the state of affairs on “plasmids,” genetic modifications developed in Rapture. Plasmids can give a person superhuman powers, but overuse can turn one into a subhuman Splicer, damaged in body and mind. Atlas lays out a plan to Jack: his family is waiting for him in a submarine in a section of Rapture called Neptune’s Bounty. But he’s cut off from there. If Jack can clear a path, then there’s room for him on that sub too. Arming himself with found weapons and an electro-bolt plasmid, Jack agrees.

As Jack progresses through this first level of the game, he encounters one of the Little Sisters, girls who gather and generate “Adam,” the genetic material responsible for creating plasmids. He also encounters a Big Daddy, a massive creature that protects the Little Sister. “Protect” is an understatement; Jack watches a Big Daddy single-handedly take apart a Splicer without so much as a stubbed toe. Atlas advises keeping a distance from the pair of them, and it’s hard not to agree. Jack also discovers that, despite the chaos that seems to reign in Rapture, its creator, Andrew Ryan, is still alive, capable of monitoring the situation and broadcasting a message: he believes Jack is a spy from some surface government, come to expose the secret city of Rapture. Ryan will not allow that to happen, and will stop Jack by whatever means necessary.

Narrowly escaping Ryan’s deathtrap, and guided once more by Atlas, Jack continues into the bowels of Rapture. By listening to the “Audio Diaries” scattered around Rapture, Jack learns by degrees the history of the city, piecing together the reasons behind the decline and fall of what Andrew Ryan had meant to be an ideal society. It apparently began with the discovery of Adam by the scientist Bridgette Tenenbaum. Together with Yi Suchong, Tenenbaum developed a way to mass-produce Adam by way of human incubators – the Little Sisters – and from there the first plasmids, viable and controllable genetic alterations. The shrewd businessman Frank Fontaine took it from there, funding their research and turning plasmids from a scientific miracle into a luxury commodity. Influenced by Andrew Ryan’s quasi-Objectivist philosophies about self-improvement and self-fulfillment, Rapture society proved to have a built-in consumer base for voluntary DNA splicing, one that made Fontaine very rich and very powerful. This, coupled with his side project running illegal goods from the surface, put him at odds with Ryan, and ultimately led to a confrontation that left Fontaine dead and Ryan in full control of the plasmid industry. Ryan’s subsequent corruption and paranoia led to civil unrest, and ultimately a full-fledged civil war in Rapture – a war that continues to rage, albeit now locked in a stalemate.

Jack also encounters along the way many prominent citizens of Rapture: Steinman the mad surgeon; Sander Cohen, the nightclub singer turned baroque serial killer; and Bridgette Tenenbaum herself, who is plagued with guilt by her role in turning innocent little girls into monsters, and now asks Jack to help her save them. The deeper Jack goes, the more he also learns about Atlas himself, and what role he actually played – and is still playing – in the civil war. Atlas clearly isn’t telling Jack the whole story, and whether or not he – or for that matter, ANYONE still alive in Rapture – should be trusted soon becomes an issue.

In terms of game mechanics, first-person shooters are among the simplest. You go around a level, you shoot bad guys, you get the key to open the door to the next level. That being said, the simpler the framework, the more can be hung upon it. A good story writer or a good art designer can take a basic skeleton and flesh it out to a very memorable gaming experience. And Bioshock fits the bill there. It’s greatest strengths are its compelling storyline and breath-taking art direction. Clearly a massive amount of thought went into both, and the result is a world that seems very real, or at least is more than just a maze and a key.

First, art design. Rapture is a wonder of Art Deco lunacy, with buildings and structures that would not look out of place in inter-bellum New York City. The fact that it’s all at the bottom of the sea is just the icing on the cake. You can wander around a ruined building and think you’re on the surface, then look out a window and you will see seaweed flowing in the currents and schools of fish swimming. It’s wonderfully disorienting. Each design is lovingly rendered as if it came from a forgotten world, where artistic and technological progress came to a halt around 1948. Music plays on gramophones and jukeboxes, complete with audio scratches (the Audio Diaries also fade in and out of quality as they play, as if recorded on battered reel-to-reels). What advanced machinery that can be found is of the analog variety, clunky amalgams of pipes and gears and wires. It’s also a great touch that so many of the weapons and machines to be found are clearly improvised, cobbled together from odd junk. It’s a nice understated bit of visual storytelling; as the war raged and Rapture spiraled into chaos, people were obviously picking up whatever they could. Grenades that are clearly old soup cans. Machine gun turrets made from office chairs. Robot drones that look like piles of scavenged submarine parts. Even the monstrous Big Daddies are clearly recycled diving suits (and recycled…other things, as the Audio Diaries gruesomely hint at). What’s more, advertisements are simply EVERYWHERE. Posters on the walls (rendered in that risible 1950’s cartoony style). Random commercials over the PA system. Vending machines all over the place, selling everything from cigarettes to ammo. It’s another subtle but omnipresent story point: Rapture was founded as a capitalist’s paradise, so here, EVERYTHING is for sale. From public toilets to oxygen…to human life.

Which leads in the second greatest strength: story. Bioshock’s backstory is rich and fascinating, possessing of an intellectual and philosophical depth not seen often in most movies, let alone video games. Let alone first-person shooters. First-person shooters have the unfortunate – albeit, not entirely undeserved – reputation for being the game genre of choice for bloody-minded morons, so you would think such a game would be the last place to find some major thematic depth. Yet here it is, in Bioshock. Written not only with an eye for detail but an eye for social commentary, the game script presents us with an entirely believable post-apocalyptic scenario, a smart and compelling story of the fall of a civilization. The ruins of Rapture are not just set dressing for a player’s monster-hunting adventure; there’s a serious attempt to show how and why Rapture fell, the story unfolding through the found Audio Diaries and the narration of various characters like Atlas and Tenenbaum. Rapture’s fall seems very real, and rather inevitable: a world without business regulations led to unscrupulous practices, which led to an oppressed and embittered working class, which in turn led to a populist revolt. Add plasmids to the mix, and the conclusion seems forgone. It all seems like a much darker, much creepier storyline than your average first-person shooter, because it seems much more REAL. You’re not fighting zombies or aliens or demons from another dimension here; you’re fighting PEOPLE. Splicers, bodies mutated and minds warped, but still, recognizably human beings. Human beings who turned THEMSELVES into monsters, for very HUMAN reasons: fear, vanity, lust for power. Killing them off is almost an act of mercy; the skin-crawling way Splicers mutter to themselves before attacking just makes it all too clear how far gone they are.

Oh yes, acting is a big part of what makes Bioshock great. There is some virtuoso voice talent at work here, from the mad rambling of the Splicers to the acting of the principal characters. It helps that there is a variety of, not just voices, but accents, on display here. It adds to the sense of reality, to put forth that there are people down in Rapture from all over the surface world, immigrants lured by the promise of a better life. They range in quality – from Atlas’s authentic Irish brogue to Frank Fontaine’s over-the-top Bronx sneer – and there is a tendency for the actors to ham it up, but I consider that one of the strengths of the thing. Anyone who willingly came to Rapture would already have a bit of the arrogant bastard in them, and a decade or so of living under the sea in the company of each would only intensify things. Plus which, nearly everyone the player meets in Rapture has been driven insane, either by haphazard splicing or by the simple horrors of war, so going over the top would be quite appropriate. The depths of madness to which some of these characters have plunged once more contributes to the overall darkness of game. The plastic surgeon Steinman, who has found his talents to be of little consequence when genetic alterations are widely commercially available, and so has taken his art in…less conventional directions (“Imagine if I could do with a scalpel what Picasso did with a brush,” he says in one of his Diaries; pretty much sums it up). Sander Cohen, the self-proclaimed “artiste,” who might well have been a fine entertainer before he started killing people who didn’t appreciate his work, then coating them in plaster and posing them all over Fort Frolic. The inhuman clinical detachment of Tenenbaum and Suchong, as they turn children into Adam farms and do God knows what to create Big Daddies (granted, Tenanbaum eventually develops a conscience, but Suchong reaches almost sociopathic levels before getting his comeuppance). It makes Andrew Ryan’s simple paranoid megalomania seem tame by comparison.

If there are flaws to Bioshock, they are of the mechanical variety. For all its amazing look and feel, it is, ultimately, a GAME, and is therefore bound by its mechanics. Game play is certainly great, but there aren’t a whole lot of surprises to be found. The standard stable of first-person shooter weapons are here – the pistol, the shotgun, the grenade launcher – as well as a couple of unusual ones. You have the Chemical Thrower, which doesn’t do a lot direct damage to your enemies but can immobilize them for a deathblow; the Crossbow, a powerful sniper weapon that takes a bit of time to master, but is oh so lovely once you do; and the Research Camera, which doesn’t damage your enemies directly, but will enable you to do more damage with your other weapons. The idea being that you’re “researching” the bad guys, taking pictures of them for study; they more you take, the more damage you can do. There’s also the Wrench, serving as the standard “weapon you don’t have to reload” found in every first-person shooter, which surprisingly does not become useless as you progress throughout the game. In fact, with strength-enabling plasmids and weapon upgrade stations available, none of the Bioshock weapons ever become irrelevant. Sure, I find you can make it through the game just fine with only the shotgun and the wrench, but every weapon has a situation where it’s the best tool for the job, and that makes for some welcome variety in gameplay.

There are also some varied missions and mini-games within the game itself, so that gameplay doesn’t become too repetitive. Not all of the missions are of the “get the key” variety. Some involve taking pictures with the Research Camera. Others involve escort and protection of Little Sisters. There’s even a hacking mini-game, a puzzle game based on Pipe Dream, which, if solved, can give you control over the Rapture security system. Lucky for me; I may not be a great gamer, but I’m really good at Pipe Dream. Hacking everything in site, man.

The major mechanical flaw in Bioshock is, ironically, that its story and design strengths can sometimes play against the gameplay. There are certain conventions of the video game genre that Bioshock adheres to, which don’t quite fit in with the logic of the plot. A few things just seem to fall apart when you think about them for too long. For example, the presence of plasmids. They serve a gameplay purpose, of course, adding some variety in abilities and attacks. Bioshock being something of a cross pollination of first-person shooter and role-playing game, the plasmids are the equivalent of magic spells and attribute upgrades, and the Adam used to purchase them the equivalent of experience points. But thinking of it in terms of plot, it starts to feel a bit silly. According to the story, plasmids are available for sale to anyone who can afford them, and active combat plasmids include things like instant-freeze attacks, summoning swarms of killer insects, and enraging enemies to attack each other. Could there possibly be a market for things like these? Even in an economy as screwed up as Rapture’s? Never mind the question of whether a scientist from the 1940s, no matter how brilliant, would even know what DNA IS, let alone be able to manipulate it in such specific, counterintuitive ways. The Little Sisters, too, seem to be a bit out of place. We know what purpose they serve in game – you collect Adam from them – and what their origins were in the backstory, but that origin story is a little shaky. We’re told that Adam needs to be incubated in a living host, and that the hosts need to be children; we’re never told WHY they need to be children, let alone just little girls (judging from her Audio Diary, it seems that not even Tenenbaum herself knows the answer to this). Once again, it makes sense from a gameplay point of view: they need to be little girls, because years of horror movies and other horror-themed video games have conditioned us to find big-eyed, dark-haired little girls in pretty dresses to be creepy beyond all measure. Sure, you could make the argument that it serves as yet another indicator of just how screwed up from an ethical standpoint Rapture society is, and I guess that’s a valid argument to a point. But so much else works so logically in Bioshock, that the few flaws seem to stand out even more starkly.

Perhaps I’m being churlish. I mean, it IS just a GAME. But it’s a damned good game, and one that absorbed my attention for the last three or four weeks, so it had an effect on me. And I’m clearly not alone in finding it so compelling. When I do play video games, I’m drawn to those that have intelligent storylines and interesting mechanics, which is why I was drawn to Bioshock. But now that I’ve finished the game, I’m not sure what to do now.

Guess I’ll have to get back to reviewing movies…

Things To Look For:

- One of the more intellectual touches to Bioshock is its heavy influence from Objectivist philosophy. It takes its central premise from Atlas Shrugged, that of an embittered industrialist washing his hands of modern society and founding his own with a group of similarly dissatisfied people in a hidden location, and gives it a more science-fiction bent. But Rapture was pretty much a total failure as a functioning society, and it is left to the player to judge why. Whether the flaw is in Objectivism as a philosophy, or in Andrew Ryan’s interpretation of it. One is tempted to believe the latter, as Andrew Ryan is a far cry from a Randian Hero: rather than dynamic and uncompromising, Ryan comes across as petty and hypocritical. Which is what leads to his downfall, of course. We learn from his Diaries that Ryan is fine with a commercial market completely free of government controls, so long as he’s turning a profit in that market. The moment a serious commercial rival appears – Frank Fontaine – and his role as the leading force in Rapture is threatened, Ryan changes his tune. And yet the former has merit as well; like many “isms” in political philosophy, Objectivism puts forth many ideas that sound great on paper, but not so much in actual practice. We see in Rapture a possible outcome of a society devoted completely to principles of capitalism, operating without mechanisms to curb unfair business practices or to ensure humane working conditions. Such things go against Objectivist principles of absolute personal freedom to do as one will to attain personal gratification. And when you consider Andrew Ryan’s opening spiel on Rapture, where he describes it as “a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small,” well…that sets off all kinds of alarms, doesn’t it? What kind of people would be drawn to such a society? Self-centered elitists like Sander Cohen. Remorseless opportunists like Yi Suchong. Crackpot scientists like Julie Langford and Bridgette Tenenbaum. Not exactly the “best and brightest” Ayn Rand would have hoped to see. Even those people who genuinely believe in Rapture, seeing it as an opportunity to better their lives, find themselves in for a rude awakening when they realize the people in charge have no desire to share power, and no obligation to any laws to do so. It’s perhaps fitting that Frank Fontaine has the clearest understanding of the inherent flaw in Rapture society: “They come to Rapture thinking they're going to be captains of industry. But they all forget one thing...somebody's gotta scrub the toilets.” Little wonder there was an opportunity for someone like Atlas to arise, to lead a populist revolt. And little wonder that there was an opportunity for a smart and ambitious con man like Fontaine to amass some major influence.

- Music is another omnipresent, understated touch in Bioshock. At various points in the game, some classic pop standards from the 1930s and 1940s play, either over the malfunctioning PA system or some of the scattered jukeboxes. Songs by Django Reinhardt, Noel Coward, and Billie Holliday provide the backdrop for your journey into this undersea man-made Hell. It really adds to the atmosphere of the game: not only does it add another layer of realism to the world of Rapture, but it also provides some grand old ironic juxtaposition. So many of these songs are so jaunty and upbeat; to hear one playing as you’re scavenging among crumbling buildings and dead bodies can really mess with your head.

- Another nice little touch in the world of Rapture: cigarettes. Cigarettes are extremely common throughout the game, both as useable items and as advertisements (and quite a few characters are seen smoking too, including Jack himself). Once again, a layer of realism: it wasn’t all that long ago that it was unusual for a person NOT to smoke, and in a place like Rapture there would be plenty of cigarettes to go around. It’s also pretty clever what cigarettes do in the game: you gain Eve (magic energy) when you smoke a cigarette, but you lose health points. Somehow appropriate….

- There are multiple endings to the game, depending on how you treat the Little Sisters. You have the option to either “harvest” the Little Sister, taking all of her Adam and killing her in the process, or “rescue,” reversing her genetic and behavioral modification but getting a smaller amount of Adam (and receiving other rewards down the line). Depending on how many you rescue and how many you harvest, you will either get a heartwarming happy ending, or one of two disturbing unhappy endings. Well, call me a softy if you like, but I prefer the happy ending. In fact, this game gets so dark at times that I NEEDED the happy ending. Otherwise it was just more gloom and doom at the bottom of the sea, and well, that may be enough for some gamers, but I need to be able to sleep at night.

Written words (c) 2009-2010 Tim o'Brien. Not to be used without permission. Other content, including images, is intended as a Fair Use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. sec. 107.

Date Posted: July 26^th, 2009

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