The Big Bioshock Repost
With rumours and leaks about the fourth Bioshock game swirling, I was going to repost the long Bioshock ramble I wrote for my old blog back in 2015. Then I read through it and realized that I both don’t agree with some of it anymore (especially on the heels of a recent replay of Bioshock Infinite) and have more to say than I originally put down.
So here’s a remastered, expanded and partially re-written review of all three Bioshock games.
Remember Bioshock? It’s back, in blog form.
(Full spoilers ahead)
Bioshock
The first time I heard about Bioshock was in a videogame magazine, which I used to read before I realized you could get videogame news on the internet for free. My two immediate reactions were 1) This game seems really fascinating and artistically interesting and 2) wow, Bioshock is a stupid name. Most people agreed on that first point.
The game that eventually came out following that announcement made a pretty big impression on both me and gamers at large, and is now looked back on as one of the crowning jewels of the PS3/360 era, if not the entire history of the medium. A fourth game is due to be announced some time next year, without the involvement of series creator Ken Levine, so now’s as good a time as any to look back that started it all and ask the question: does it deserve the hype?
The product of a long and meandering gestation process that at various points involved nazis and sentient chipmunks, Bioshock serves as a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, a sci-fi shooter with strong horror elements and a focus on resource management. The two aren’t directly linked apart from some vague gameplay elements and the general thematic concept of being trapped in an enclosed location with formerly human occupants who have been corrupted by technology into dangerous enemies.
The conceit of Bioshock is that in the late 40s an ultra-rich capitalist and escapee from the Soviet Union named Andrew Ryan (if that name and backstory sound vaguely familiar, wait a sec, we’ll get to it) built the underwater city of Rapture, a secret commune where “the great would not be constrained by the small”: a haven of industry, science and art unfettered by the petty morality of religion or the strong-arm government presented in different forms by both the USA and the USSR. The best and the brightest from around the world were recruited to come to Rapture and live in libertarian freedom under the sea, away from the threat of nuclear annihilation looming over the world above.
The player is cast as a mostly-silent dude named Jack, who’s flying over the Atlantic in 1960 when his plane goes down. Instead of drowning, Jack stumbles onto a lighthouse, and below that a bathosphere providing access to Rapture. But upon arriving it turns out something has gone horribly wrong in the city: the city is falling apart, marred by signs of civil war, and most of the survivors have been transformed into violent mutants named Splicers. We quickly learn that Andrew Ryan’s dream was destroyed by two things, the first being the flaw in his plan that you’ve probably already noticed: it’s all well and good to claim you’re building a perfect meritocracy where the great and the talented will get to shine, but someone still needs to clean the toilets. What Rapture ended up becoming was a horribly unequal society where masses of the poor toiled under an established elite, i.e. the bad parts of the societal models Ryan was trying to avoid but with none of the advantages, made even worse because no one can leave the city. This led to rebellion and civil war in less than a decade, with the shit really hitting the fan on New Year’s Eve, 1959. By the time Jack shows up the situation inside Rapture is basically post-apocalyptic.
The other big factor in Rapture’s downfall was ADAM, a kind of super-potent stem cell found inside a species of sea slug that can be used to your genetic code is being rewritten rewrite the human genetic code. And since Bioshock runs on X-Men logic, gene mutations let people teleport, conjure fire with their mind and shoot BEEEEEES bees out of their hands. In a normal society this discovery might have led to incredible medical advances for the public good, but in the ultra-capitalist lassez-faire-on-steroids environment of Rapture it was quickly snapped up and shoved out onto the market as a series of gene serums called plasmids that grant people custom-made superpowers. In fact it was put on sale so quickly that no one discovered ADAM’s devastating side-effect until it was far too late: “splicing” with the stuff too frequently (for example, if you’re in the middle of a civil war where superpowers would come in handy) leads to hideous physical mutation and violent insanity; push things too far and you become a “Splicer”, mutated almost beyond recognition and too deranged to function as a normal person anymore, consumed with a desire to acquire more and more ADAM. If the war didn’t completely finish Rapture off then the roving gangs of Splicers murdering people certainly did.
And now Jack is thrust into all of this, quickly becoming an unwitting pawn for the remaining power factions in Rapture. Andrew Ryan still rules over his crumbling domain by using pheromones to control the Splicers; he’s opposed by Atlas, a mysterious figure from the resistance days who offers Jack a way out of Rapture if he takes Ryan down. But how to get through a decaying city filled with murderous Splicers? Plasmids, of course!
So in case it wasn’t obvious enough: yes, we’re dealing with Objectivist themes here. Rapture is Galt’s Gulch taken to its greatest extreme, Andrew Ryan is almost a portmanteau of Ayn Rand, the posters bearing the question “Who Is Atlas?” are clearly references to the phrase “Who Is John Galt?” from Atlas Shrugged, Ryan’s pre-war rival is named Frank Fontaine in an apparent nod to Rand’s other novel The Fountainhead. But is this just a skin-deep affectation, or a meaningful exploration of Objectivist themes? That’s the question I want to answer in this part of the post, and then I’ll go on to look at the game’s sequels and how they handle their own thematic content.
Rapture is the part of Bioshock that everyone remembers. The art deco city under the ocean has become one of the most iconic images in gaming history, and critics have often described the setting as the game’s true protagonist. Environmental storytelling is where the game shines, and where it most competently examines its own themes. Side-stories play out in the form of audio diaries, letting the player experience not just the downfall of Rapture but the downfall of its citizens, as once-decent people are corrupted and twisted by the environment they’ve been placed in. These stories tend to follow the same basic outline: someone comes to Rapture with a heart full of idealism, gets embroiled in either the political turmoil of the city, ADAM or both and ends up either dead or doing something horrible.
An early enemy is a plastic surgeon who used ADAM to transform his patient’s bodies far beyond what conventional medicine or medical ethics would allow. His early diaries seem almost utopian: why not change your face? Your sex? Your entire body? They belong to you. They’re yours to change. It’s a laudable idea, but unfortunately ADAM’s side effects quickly started to rear their heads as patients were disfigured or horribly mutated. The entire scenario is a pretty clear and stark look at what a modern world without regulation would contain: not unfettered hero-doctors boldly pushing the limits of medical science, but naive rubes feeding their patients dangerous and untested treatments at the behest of wealthy drug manufacturers.
I probably don’t need to tell you that this isn’t an abstract thought experiment. Even here in the godless socialist wasteland of the European Union, the profit-driven business of pharmaceutical manufacturers is always at odds with the public good (look at the fight over covid vaccine patents for an example). The well-documented origin of the opioid crisis is another salient example, wherein a handful of already-wealthy pharma executives wrought terrible, probably irreversible damage in part by exploiting weak oversight and a cosy relationship between regulators and the industries they’re supposed to be regulating. The entire plot arc is a compact, chilling summary of one of the biggest dangers of Ayn-Randian unregulated capitalism.
Unfortunately, this sequence is also the most thematically coherent moment of Bioshock. The game is littered with little vignettes that comprise fairly biting critiques of Objectivist ideas (Ryan decides to start charging people to use Rapture’s public parks, for example), but they’re buried among compromises that Bioshock’s status as an action game have obviously forced on the designers. The prime example of this is the Little Sisters.
During Rapture’s fall, it became desirable for the city’s authorities to gather ADAM from the many corpses that the civil war was generating. The solution to this problem: Little Sisters, young girls mutated into ADAM-harvesting drones and protected by mutated men in diving suits named Big Daddies. Early in the game ADAM’s repentant discoverer implores Jack to rescue the Sisters by killing their Big Daddy guardians and using a special plasmid to turn them human again. Or, you could kill them and take their ADAM. Hey, Rapture is a dangerous place and you need that stuff to keep acquiring powers. What are you going to do, just altruistically sacrifice yourself for the Sisters?
When it’s phrased like that, the situation seems like a baked-in invitation for the player to either accept or reject the tenets of Objectivism, which enshrines selfishness as the highest value. In practice, not so much. You can almost see the dilemma Bioshock’s designers put themselves in: the player can’t entirely forego collecting ADAM, because the game would be nigh-impossible without it, and also players would miss out on those sick superpowers (big-budget games tend to have a strong aversion towards including elements that the player can fail to utilize, for fairly obvious reasons). So to solve that problem, saving the Sisters somehow still gives you ADAM… just not as much ADAM, and if you save enough Sisters you get a gift of ADAM later in the game as thanks, actually netting you more than if you had just taken it all upfront. I get the feeling this was meant to be an illustration of the power of the social contract and a refutation of Rand’s philosophy of selfishness; in practice, it ends up feeling like an examination of delayed versus immediate gratification.
For the Little Sister mechanic to really mean what its creators intended, saving them would need to involve a real sacrifice from the player, performed with no expectation of reward. The payoff would occur right at the end of the game, perhaps involving the Little Sisters taking out the last boss for the player (this does happen in the good ending, but it’s a cutscene after the boss has already been fought).
But the game couldn’t work like that, because that wouldn’t be fun. I’ve always seen Bioshock as an illustration of the way games can be ill-suited to examining complex themes, because the entertainment of the player has to be the prime focus at all times. The only way to avoid this is to uncouple the themes from the gameplay entirely and examine them solely through storytelling elements…but then why make a game at all? Why not make a book or a movie?
I’ll leave my ultimate conclusion on the game to the end, because it mirrors what I think of the franchise as a whole.
Bioshock 2
Bioshock was a commercial and critical success, so of course a sequel was fast-tracked into development soon after it came out. But this time Ken Levine and Irrational weren’t involved, because they were hard at work on another project, a far more ambitious game that would serve as the “true” Bioshock sequel. Instead development was handled by 2K Marin and 2K Australia.
It’s been eight years since the events of Bioshock, and Rapture has been moldering away under the ocean, the surviving splicers still roaming its waterlogged halls. Andrew Ryan’s death and Jack’s ultimate victory at the end of the first game meant no more ruler of Rapture and no more Little Sisters…for a while. By 1968 someone has stepped in to fill the power vacuum in the city: Sophia Lamb, a psychologist and member of the Rapture elite who ended up on the wrong side of an ideological war when she publicly rebelled against Ryan’s Objectivist principles. Lamb preaches unification and collectivism, and in the post-Ryan world she’s turned her ideas into a quasi-religion that allows her to control both the Splicers and the few remaining non-mutated people, who act as her lieutenants.
She also has a terrifying secret weapon: the Big Sisters, fully grown Little Sisters who returned to Rapture and underwent the same procedures as their former guardians to become immensely powerful enforcers, possessed of both incredible strength and agility and massive ADAM-induced abilities.
What could counter this potent combination? A Big Daddy, of course. You play Subject Delta, one of the very first Big Daddies. Back before the events of the first game Delta was assigned to guard a very particular Little Sister: Eleanor Lamb, Sophia Lamb’s daughter. Unfortunately the elder Lamb was quite unhappy about this and took her daughter back, shooting Delta in the head in the process. Cut to eight years later and Delta abruptly wakes from death, through means explained later in the game, to find that Lamb has taken over Rapture and started the Big Daddy/Little Sister ecosystem up again by kidnapping girls from the surface. A now-adult Eleanor has an important role to play in her mother’s plans, but she wants nothing to do with them and beseeches Delta, via the psychic link they still share from her Little Sister days, to come and rescue her.
Bioshock 2 is often maligned or simply left out of the conversation when the Bioshock franchise comes up (or at least it was–since writing the original version of this post it seems to have undergone a re-evaluation from the fanbase, mostly in response to a backlash towards Bioshock Infinite), which is a shame because I think it has a lot of good qualities. Rapture here feels much more like an actual city rather than a series of drab tunnels and corridors, and the story has quite a bit more emotional punch to it thanks to the relationship between Eleanor and Delta.
At the same time, I’ll always lament the fact that the story we actually got isn’t quite as interesting as the one that was initially promised. It seems there was a bit of trouble behind the scenes and the plot went through some pretty major revisions: originally, there was only going to be one Big Sister (I’m guessing this was going to turn out to be Eleanor) who would serve as the game’s initial villain, operating for unknown reasons. Making the Big Sisters simply more powerful enemies who show up occasionally both robs the franchise of a potentially cool character and means that the game is front-loaded with a lot of clumsy exposition to get Lamb into the spotlight and explain what’s going on as early as possible.
But anyway, onto the themes!
…Yeah there isn’t actually that much to talk about here. Sofia Lamb is sort of an anti-Ryan in that she’s like Ayn Rand if Ayn Rand was all about selflessness and the greater good instead of Objectivism. Maybe it’s because the game isn’t skewering a real, specific person and their real philosophy, or maybe it’s because altruism isn’t as fun to subvert, but Lamb’s regime simply isn’t as interesting as Ryan’s.
In the first Bioshock, Ryan’s utopia is brought down by fatal flaws in his own beliefs (the fact that Rapture was doomed to descend into a classist nightmare and his free-market ideals preventing him from doing anything about ADAM even as it became abundantly clear that the stuff was out of control), but Lamb’s plan is actually proceeding exactly as intended until the player comes along and throws a spanner in the works due to personal motivations. Her ideology is patently bad for all sorts of obvious reasons (her commitment to the “greater good” leads her to entirely discount the suffering of individuals, for starters) but it actually works just fine, letting her control the Splicers and come very close to turning Eleanor, who already has massive ADAM powers, into a kind of Utopian super-being containing a collective consciousness crafted from the minds of everyone in Rapture.
In the first game you’re coming into an ideologically-driven system that failed due to problems inherent in the system itself; in the second game, the system is ticking along exactly as planned and you are the reason it fails.
Before we move away from Bioshock 2 I wanted to quickly mention its DLC campaign Minerva’s Den. It’s notable for being one of the earlier examples of really good, worthwhile DLC that matches or exceeds the base game, and also for being where the creators of Official Doing In The Wizard Best Game Ever Gone Home met. If you’re into the Bioshocks, do check it out.
Bioshock Infinite
While another team worked on Bioshock 2, Levine and co were busy with something bigger and altogether more ambitious. Bioshock Infinite is a spiritual successor to the first game, not taking place in the same world (until it does), that works with the same basic alt-history-fallen-utopia template and attempts to tackle some truly audacious themes.
It fails, but kudos for trying I guess.
The setting this time around is a version of the early 19th century that’s identical to ours in every way but one: in this world the US government created a giant floating city called Columbia, intended to serve as a demonstration of America’s power and sophistication. Prior to the beginning of the game Columbia defied government orders by destroying Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion and then went rogue; its location is now unknown.
Booker DeWitt is a washed up former soldier and Pinkerton detective who’s done some very bad things in the past. He’s deep in debt to some dangerous people, who offer him a clean slate if he carries out a job for them: go to Columbia and rescue/kidnap Elizabeth, a mysterious young woman who’s being held in a tower in the middle of the city. Once he gets there it turns out that Columbia has turned into a theocratic, racist and classist police state where American patriotism and Manifest Destiny fervor are a de facto religion led by Elizabeth’s father, Zachary Comstock. He’s not going to let her go without a fight, since her ability to open holes into other realities is just the thing he needs to complete his master plan of “purifying” the world he left behind. Luckily, Elizabeth wants nothing to do with her dad’s schemes and is eager to get out of Columbia, but can she trust Booker?
Well no, obviously, because he’s kind of an asshole. Then he becomes less of an asshole, but he’s still kind of an asshole.
So, Bioshock Infinite.
Where to start with this one?
There’s a whole lot to unpack here- whatever else you say about the game, you can’t fault it for lack of ambition- so I’m going to zero in on one key theme that the game spends the most time on when it’s not wanking off with meta-commenatary on the nature of spiritual sequels: oppression and rebellion.
Let’s start with Columbia. It’s an awful place. One of the first things Booker sees is a mixed-race couple about to be stoned to death. African Americans are imported into the city to live in conditions that are basically no different from antebellum slavery. The rich of Columbia live on the backs of the oppressed working class: black people, Irish, jews, Mexicans, the groups who at the time were immigrating into the US in large numbers cast down as a horde of degenerates fit only to serve the wealthy and powerful. Native Americans are vilified. Columbia invades and destroys other countries without deference to international law in the name of securing American interests…
Have you spotted the flaw yet?
One of the problems with Columbia as a setting is that it’s supposed to be a stand-in for the sins of both Booker and the US as a whole, but since it’s smashing several hundred years of history into one time frame it ends up becoming incoherent. The early parts of the game present a society very clearly stratified by race–black people are little better than slaves, white people are the ruling class. Yes, there is a scene where we see significant hostility toward Irish immigrants, but let’s consider a question the game never asks: in a society with such all-pervasive racism, how do you think those oppressed Irish would view the oppressed African Americans? Would they be likely to work together, or would the Irish still consider themselves superior?
The other problem with this section of the game is how ham-fisted it is, guiding the player through what feels like a figurative museum (and sometimes a literal in-game museum) of American racism and prejudice: Over on your left is Racism Against Black people! To your right, you’ll find the Sexism Corner! Now it’s time for a quick detour through the Anti-Irish Corridor before we arrive at the Hall Of Native American Atrocities!
The game also can’t seem to make up its mind on whether it wants to be a critique of early 20th century America or a critique of the America of today, at times devoting considerable attention to things that aren’t really an issue anymore while glossing over still-extant problems. For example, a lot of focus is put on anti-Irish prejudice, which was prevalent at the time but isn’t exactly holding any Irish people down in any major way in today’s world, while anti-semitism (if anything more of an issue since the game came out) gets glossed over save for a few environmental details. (I’m not implying anything malicious about this; Ken Levine is himself Jewish, after all). The game’s particular brand of sexism also feels severely outdated, which would be expected of a story solely focused on criticising America in 1912 but offers us nothing in the modern era.
This is in stark contrast to the first game, whose satire of mid-century capitalism applies just as well to 21st-century capitalism. That’s probably in part due to the fact that capitalism, like liquids and cats, conforms to the shape of whatever container it’s placed in, but it also speaks to the lack of a strong central thesis in Bioshock Infinite. This is no doubt largely due to the fact that Infinite doesn’t have a singular counterpoint to bounce ideas off of: the original Bioshock was first and foremost a rebuttal of Atlas Shrugged specifically, which kept its ideas from wandering too far off track.
Later in the game you arrive at a slum where the working class toil under a larger than life caricature of an early 19th century industrialist. And here we do see Irish and black (and other immigrant groups) working, living and fighting together. All of a sudden the story has shifted from a focus on race to a focus on class, such that this part of Columbia doesn’t feel as if it belongs in the same world as the one we visited previously.
Now, obviously racism and classism aren’t wholly separate, in fact they’re closely intertwined. The problem is that the two kinds of oppression aren’t intertwined in Bioshock Infinite, they’re separate issues that somehow exist side by side without ever overlapping, neatly cordoned off by geography. The game can’t decide what sort of oppression it wants to portray, and thus it’s perhaps not surprising that its portrayal of the response to that oppression- the rebellion- is so comprehensively bungled.
The rebel faction in Columbia are called the Vox Populi, a quasi-socialist working class uprising led by a woman of colour named Daisy Fitzroy. Daisy is as close as the game ever comes to nuance and actually has an interesting backstory: she managed to get a position as a servant to the Comstock family and was initially treated well by them, coming to believe that if she just kept her head down and worked within the system instead of fighting against it she might earn a place in Columbia’s society as something approaching an equal. Alas, it was not to be, because Comstock murdered his wife over plot shenanigans and framed Daisy for the crime, knowing that the narrative of “ungrateful black servant kills her soft-hearted mistress” would instantly turn all suspicion away from him. But he also accidentally created the very monster he was invoking by doing this, as Daisy hid in the depths of Columbia’s slums and saw both the appalling suffering there and the smoldering flames of rebellion. In the middle of the game she uses the commotion caused by Booker and Elizabeth’s actions to begin the uprising, taking aim first at Bertram Fink, owner of Columbia’s many factories and workhouses.
Then she tries to murder Fink’s young son for no reason, so Elizabeth stabs her to death with a pair of scissors.
Game of The Year!
This is not only poor writing, in that Daisy goes from a hard-hearted and ruthless but still rational revolutionary to a violent child-murderer in the space of a few hours, it’s also a sneak peek of what comes next, as the now-leaderless Vox go on a violent rampage, murdering civilians indiscriminately and burning Clumbia to the ground (the clouds?) despite the obviously self-destructive nature of this course of action.
What exactly we’re supposed to make of this is hard to parse given the fact that the Vox aren’t given the same ideological examination as the Founders of Columbia. Their use of red as their trademark colour and their talk of The People is obviously meant to put one in mind of the far left, but we never actually hear any of them espouse any sort of leftist political ideology, or indeed any ideology at all besides opposition to the ruling class of Columbia. The Founders’ propaganda calls them anarchists, but whether they actually are or not isn’t clear. (Nor is it clear that the game’s writers realize that “anarchist” doesn’t just mean “people who like to burn shit for the lulz” but that’s a separate issue).
I feel like the portrayal of the Vox Populi is a clumsy attempt at being even-handed: just as Columbia’s ideology is taken to an absurd extreme, so too are the Vox an absurd caricature of the worst excesses of a leftist uprising, with nods towards various real atrocities committed by Communist regimes just as Columbia calls back to slavery and the Wounded Knee massacre.
The problem with this is that if you dial back Columbia into less-extreme territory, you still get repugnant nonsense all the way down, whereas if you de-absurdify the Vox you’ll quickly end up at, like, labour unions and workers agitating for better pay. Even if you think that political ideologies like socialism, communism and anarchism are evil instead of being totally rad, bundling this entire branch of human endeavour into a violent caricature involves sweeping away a lot of stuff that I think pretty much everyone except the most hardcore conservative ghouls wouldn’t want to live without.
But the more troubling issue here is the equivalence of moral worth, or rather unworth. Are the Vox Populi really just as bad as the Columbia authorities? The game seems to forget that while the actions of the Vox cause enormous death and suffering, the very existence of Columbia’s hierarchical system also causes enormous death and suffering. If the uprising hadn’t taken place, the net total of human suffering in Columbia wouldn’t be zero, which seems to be the position that the game is implicitly taking, if unconsciously.
If the Vox Populi’s violent uprising isn’t morally acceptable, then what does Bioshock Infinite believe is the proper response to oppression and tyranny? This isn’t an environment where Daisy can hold a non-violent sit-in or send out leaflets encouraging people to #vote, so what was she to do instead? I guess “don’t try to shoot a child in the head for no reason” would be the game’s response, were it capable of responding, but suggesting that an armed insurrection should only impact the bad guys at the top while leaving all the innocent bystanders untouched is too naive to take seriously.
We’re left with two ways of parsing all this: either an adolescent, misanthropic fable about how the world is a fuck and humans are bastards who’ll always go bad no matter what they do, or a cautionary tale about how resistance movements might say they want to enact change and build a better world, but they’re actually violent thugs who just want to burn society to the ground without replacing it with anything else. I honestly think the game is setting out to deliver the first message, which would be bad enough on its own, but it really, really ends up landing on the second one regardless of what its original intentions were.
Bioshock Infinite had two story-driven DLC packs taking place in Rapture (it’s revealed late in the base game that Columbia and Rapture are parallel universe versions of each other) which seem to exist solely to make the first game’s backstory needlessly complicated, but they also have the gall to try and retcon some of the above-described bullshit by implying that Daisy Fitzroy was deliberately goading Elizabeth into murdering her as part of some higher purpose. It’s exactly as bad as it sounds, and it indicates very clearly that the game’s creators knew full well that they had fucked up this aspect of the story.
Before I end this I want to point out something interesting that’s been bugging me for ages: we’re told at the end of Infinite that certain universal constants exist across dimensions, and that the Rapture/Columbia stand-in always contains “a man and a woman” who are integral to that dimension’s story. The first Bioshock has you playing as the man, but it isn’t immediately clear who the Elizabeth equivalent is supposed to be.
Bioshock 2 on the other hand features Eleanor, who is uncannily similar to Elizabeth. Both characters possess strong supernatural abilities, have black hair, have names beginning with ‘E’, are imprisoned by their parents, are referred to as “lambs” in a quasi-religious sense and are rescued by father figures (Eleanor thinks of Delta as her father, Booker turns out to literally be Elizabeth’s father). This seems like way too much of a coincidence- surely the Bioshock 2 dev team were aware of what Infinite was going to be about and wrote their portrayal of Eleanor accordingly?- but Levine has apparently insisted there’s no deliberate connection between the two games.
I don’t really have a larger point with this, it just makes me wonder if 2K Marin were spying on Irrational or something.
Conclusion
So does the Bioshock franchise deserve the hype? I’m always loathe to use the phrase “over-rated” since all it really means is that I didn’t like a thing as much as other people liked a thing, so instead I’ll say that I find the conversations around the games hyperbolic. I do think they deserve credit for pushing the medium forward, but not in the ways they were perhaps aiming for.
All of the Bioshocks deserve full credit for their amazing art style. Videogames have a long history of riding the visual coat-tails of movies (look at how many games are clearly lifting from Aliens, for example), whereas Bioshock presented iconic images that had never been seen before in any medium. Environmental storytelling had been used long before, but all three Bioshock games advanced the idea that the player inhabiting an imaginary space can by itself constitute a valuable component of gameplay; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Fullbright, who codified the story-exploration genre, formed after working on a Bioshock expansion.
In my original review I ended by praising the Bioshock games for at least standing tall above their peers in terms of cinematic presentation and ambition, but I don’t think that’s true any longer. “Cinematic” big-budget games are now the norm, and Infinite in particular has aged very poorly in terms of its story presentation even compared to some games that were released in the same generation, like The Last Of Us.