so the situation is with bioshock is that you’d think there’s absolutely nothing left to write about it. Its fucking bioshock. Its both a modern classic (or, I’m getting old enough that it might just be a classic now, but it was considered a modern classic back when I could still see my dick). It spawned an entire series. It brought a small developer who made critically acclaimed games I genuinely don’t know if anyone played because system shock 2 was before my time, but I also don’t remember hearing about it despite my brother being both a teenager and a pc gamer at the time (which means he didn’t actually speak to anyone anyway, as nerdy 15 year olds are known to do). However, like a lot of good art, you don’t really see the genius of things until you’re knee deep in it.
Bioshock is a game that stands in a unique place in history. Its both an antidote for the tightly designed, committee driven, railroad games of today, where you might as well just call the “press forward and watch a movie” genre, but interestingly, is also an antidote for the drivel and dogshit shooters had found themselves in the mid 2000’s as well. At the time of bioshock’s release the big developers of fps games had completely lost the plot. ID was making shit like doom 3, which both misunderstood what people played ID games for, but also went against everything I consider john carmack’s programming strategy to be, which is a well optimized game that runs flawlessly, as opposed to the game that finally melted my pentium 4, which in all fairness is like blaming a speedbump for your Edsel exploding. 3D realms was making duke nukem forever, which they never finished, and became the laughing stock of the industry. And epic games was just finishing up making good games like unreal and unreal tournament and sliding into the bland, taco bell like mediocrity of the gears of war series, in the sense that I like the experience with friends but only consume it alone when I fucking hate myself and want to feel worse. There were games like halo, a series that I find so uninteresting I forget it exists for years at a time. Halo was great at the time if you wanted to pay a monthly subscription to pine for decent mouse and keyboard controls and have racist 6 year old future trump supporters screech slurs into your ear, but i was more of a quake 1 guy.
Instead, bioshock is this incredibly well thought out world, with great action, and a fantastic systems driven world that gets better the longer you’re in it.
First off, while there were story based first person shooters before, I don’t believe anyone had done so well with the concept. Now there had been companies trying to make story based fps games with free roaming worlds before, daikatana and half life come to mind, for the first time ever in the same sentence. But the focus in the development of bioshock was relentless and it makes a much stronger case for this style of game. Even though games like half life are adored for good reason, it was still old enough to be mostly corridor driven and have terrible jumping puzzles. Bioshock is far enough in the future that it avoids these trappings. The shining light that ties the game together though is the systems driven gameplay. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, systems driven essentially means that all of the main elements of the game world exist on their own subroutines. From the living creatures in the game all walking around living their lives, to things we literally would describe as systems in our own world, like the phone lines, transportation, and nature itself. The goal of this is a game world that reacts as much to itself as it does to you. Not set pieces that get triggered like a trap to get sprung. (this will not be easy to describe and I may lose you, so bare with me) For example, if I was making a game about being an assassin in new york city, a systems driven game wouldn’t just target a target somewhere sitting waiting for me at the end of a level. It would have a chunk of manhattan where the target lived where all of the moving parts of the city, from the people, to the cars, to the hot dog carts, would all have their own little lives they act out irrespective of your character. You wouldn’t just walk to the spot and shoot a glorified target if you survive. You’d be able to scope out their driving patterns and cut the brakes to their car. You’d be able to break into the mailroom of their apartment building and look through the mail that actually circulates through the city and find their room number. You’d be able to wait till they got their actual lunch and poison their burrito. Or you could just go in guns blazing in the middle of the street but you’d have to deal with security cameras, beat cops, and people filming you on their cell phones. The idea behind these games is to go into a living breathing world and exploit and bend these “systems” to your benefit. This leads to problem solving and finding your own actual solutions, and the big defining goal of the genre, immersive gameplay. These systems interact with each other in surprising and fun ways, and that is where the magic happens.
Now. If this all sounds fucking horrible on paper, you’re not alone. I remember hearing “immersive gameplay” and what I expected was a giant unfocused mess where I was flipping over every rock in a meadow trying to find what the hell I was supposed to do next. But the genius of bioshock is designing a tightly compact world with limited and controllable elements that turn what could have been a slog into a giant playground, predictable enough to comprehend within a 20 hour game, but unpredictable enough to surprise you. Its not just about hacking a security system to fire on enemies, its about what happens when you hack a security system to fire on your enemies, or hypnotizing the big scary sub boss monsters, called the big daddys, to fight for you. Its what happens when you bring that big daddy into the room with the hacked security system, accidentally shoot it, and instead of getting in a firefight, you duck behind a wall and listen to the big daddy having a fist fight with a posessed rocket launcher turret. Possibly the most satisfying part of the whole game was when I was mostly finished with a level, and would have to walk back to the exit. While I was doing so, instead of being ambushed by waves of wrench wielding mutants, I’m listening to their while all of the traps I had set up spring in the distance.
Now, two of the examples I just mentioned mentioned waiting behind corners, so let me be very clear. Bioshock is both oppressively terrifying and action packed. The game has a desperate, scrappy approach, where every fight feels like you’re barely scraping by with one lost limb, and the enemies, while not around every corner, are dangerous enough that even one or two can kill the living shit out of you. The main sort of grunt level enemy is called a “splicer”. Basically a mutant, a failed experiment for a city of big dreamers who got way too into body modification and fascism that drove its populous to insane murderous and twisted freaks. In the same way you hear doom enemies growling and groaning from rooms away, the inhabitants of bioshock yell wildly at people who arent there, having bizarre screaming matches that are equal parts murderous and norman rockwell esque, and also never seem to repeat dialogue and are different recordings for each individual speaking monster. Other enemies include the afformentioned big daddys, who are a giant diving suit looking robot…. Thing… that has drills and machine guns for hands that will also throw grenade and tackle you. Security systems in the shape of giant gun turrets that for a while will feel like a punishment for going the wrong way down a hallway but wound up being a lot of fun to mess around with. There’s also splicer adjacent creatures that have special abilities, like being able to crawl around ceilings like spiders, or able to appear and disappear through the magic of some sort of crazy bioengineering.
Bioshock’s main setting is that of rapture. A city underwater. Think a horror version of the gungan dwellings on naboo. A major robber barron type inventor named andrew ryan brought the supposed best and brightest of science and culture here to have a city away from the prying eyes of all nations and the less ambitious to do all of the unethical experiments in their anarcho capitalist hellscape. Apparently inspired by the fountainhead, it was a perfect and strange piece of art to be interacting with during what could be called the (hopefully) short lived Elon Musk puppet administration of 2025.
each level of bioshock is different enough to give its own feel. There’s everything from a touristy marina area with restaurants, an abandoned market area filled with rotting food filled with maggots and flies, and what seems to be a giant industrial refinery. The most famous level, which I was very moved by, is a theater level. The level is filled with horrible plaster encased corpses presented as statues. They are lighted at unsettling angles where their outstretched arms of their ballet like poses will slice the room with their shadows and silhouettes. Theres also voice recordings all over the game where you can get a lot of backstory about certain characters you may find in various states, from bossess to helper characters. However, in the theater they’re mostly the people in the plaster casing. Almost all actors and performers, some of which complaining, some of which doing wild, spooky monologues.
The reason why this level works from a pacing perspective is its roughly in the middle of the game. Rapture starts out intimidating and strange, but it eventually follows its own sort of logic. Its this neo art deco otherworld underwater filled with monsters. At first you feel completely alone and completely in danger. But as you go on, you get comfortable. Its throwing new enemies, but its just “okay, I used to be walking around a bunch of restaurants and bars, now I’m walking around a farmer’s market”. You also start sensing monsters patterns and how to use the guns and elements. However, you step into the theater and its not so much the immediate danger but the implications of what you’re seeing. You have dead bodies not only staring you in the face, but they’ve been twisted and contorted into dancing for you in their deaths. You start hearing their voices while right next to them and see what befalls them. It all becomes so much less abstract, and you stop seeing things only as it pertains to you, but how this horrible city has fallen into such depravity and callousness. As the game goes on you find more and more dead bodies that seem to be suicide victims. People who were so trapped by their surroundings that they took their own lives rather than be torn limb from limb. Things culminate for me towards the end of the game when I found what seemed to be a nuclear family, including children, lying dead on the couch, their apparent last moments spent together eating snacks and watching tv. At first the game shows you the wild violent implications of the concept of rapture, but then in zeroes in on the human cost of the recklessness.
I’m going to now spoil some of the ending. Nothing big, but if you don’t want to know anything this is the time to skip until you see “end of spoilers”. Okay? Alright. Bioshock does not stick the landing. The end of the game is notoriously bad, and I concur. It doesn’t ruin a great game, and its easy enough to forgive, but as someone who’s going to play the other two games on this journey, and knowing that the second game is considered somewhat of a mess, this does not bode well. Essentially the plot goes for a twist ending, but instead of it making the plot more compelling and has you going over what you saw piecing things back together, it halves the stakes of the game and replaces most of the main characters to give the people left motivations that make no sense that could have easily been rolled into the previous cast and actually strengthened the story. Considering how fantastic the gameplay and atmosphere is, its dissapointing that you then have to wonder how much of the genius is accidental or circumstantial.
End of spoilers
however. The main takeaway I have from this is that I finally have a game I can give an unqualified recommendation for. All of the other games in this series I’m doing so far have been good for the time, or neat historical pieces. Bioshock stands on all of their shoulders as a core experience. I’m assuming most people that would ever bother reading this already know its good. But as challenging as it is getting through a game like this, I had to stop many times because I had trouble making myself play it because I was scared of it frankly, there’s really nothing like it. It simplifies a lot of the games that came before it like system shock 2 and deus ex, that are frankly excruciating. The history of this game shows a lot of trends that wound up making gaming worse. Immergent gameplay and systems driven gameplay eventually started mixing with open world action adventure games and turning them into boring 100 hour slogs of tower climbing and base capturing. The random element of the game probably doesn’t explain things like roguelike and procedural generation taking over the indie space, but it does point to it as a next step. Bioshock is what moderation and self restraint of a good but potentially unwieldy idea can look like. It shows how you can have a simplified world, where the whole thing is underwater so you don’t need to worry about how to deal with anything you don’t need, can actually benefit and focus a game down to the best elements. Something that I feel like a good portion of big game developers have forgotten how to do. This game now plays on virtually everything and costs nearly nothing. So tool around with it, and potentially push yourself forward the next time you have a chance. And until next time, remember to sell to the hard camera.
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