One day I'm going to be so famous that Anonymous will try to undermine everything I do, so being a good sport, I'll give them a leg up: I'm actually at a loss on whether or not I'm reviewing Bioshock. As this is the first shooter I've ever completed (at 21, and so accepting my award this year as the 7 time winner of the "whitest kid on the block" competition) so I'm not sure of my ability to contextualize it within the genre as a whole. That, and I have far, far less knowledge of memes from other works to stick in to convince you I know what I'm doing. So I guess if you were generous, you can call this a "stylistic" review (re: "ponsy froo froo art sissy" review) of the game, since it's taken from more of a literary criticism angle than from a gameplay or even story-based angle. Because, get your groan ready, I'm tackling the biggest question that sits around about the game: is it art?
As you can probably guess, this review is going to have more than a few spoilers in it. I'll try my best to keep it vague, and since this is a five-year old game, the internet has long since done a better job than I ever could. But yeah. If you don't like, be wary.
I guess if you squeezed me for a general review of the game, I would say "eehhhhhhh, it's okay". Not my favorite game (as it took me about half a year to finish it with how many times I put it down), but not not terrible. On the pro side,If I were to choose the game's strongest point, I'd definitely go with the sense of place. The general color scheme and lighting choice is similtaneously bright, colorful, and eye-catching, to really dim and claustrophobic. The throwback early-20th century art deco design also gives the atmosphere a sense of both timelessness and familiarity. The whole thing becomes a sort of messed-up urban fairytale landscape, a good environment for the sort of "shock utopia" story that Bioshock tries to tell.
I thought the gameplay overall was "meh", but that's probably just my unrefined non-shooter brain talking. I hope to come back to it once I have a little more experience with the medium. But there are certain parts I liked. I liked the plasmids overall. Each had their own utility and worked well for certain situations, but all could do a lot of damage if you just needed to pull one out quick and shoot a guy (well some had crippling overspecialization-itis. Looking at you "Hypnotize Big Daddy"). Same goes for the weapons. There were some that were just stupid (why do I need a cross-bow when I have a frigging machine gun, and what used do I have for a bazooka when I'm trapped in an enclosed underwater vacuum, dumbass?), but most had their time and place. I was still using my pistol toward endgame, and I'm not ashamed of that. And the character building overall was pretty good, except that I had to hunt down an in game machine if I wanted to switch in and out my own abilities, for both annoyance and counterintuitivity. But hey, nobody's perfect.
On the downside, the thing that pulled me out the most is lack of characterization, both on the part of my characters and the others around me. I think they were going for "alone with a bunch of madmen above you pulling the strings", but I have to agree with ABDN's review. The fact that the splicers were still distinctly human and attacking the main character on a justified "for the lulz" really pulled me out by the time the actual story characters started to appear. And while the "blank slate with an implied story" character can be done really well, this is not an example of it. It feels like the protag was supposed to be someone who YOU CAN INSERT YOURSELF INTO AND FEEL LIKE YOU YES YOU ARE A PART OF THE GAME.
And most of the backstory is told by these stupid lay around hard to hear "audio diaries" instead of actual characters, which isn't so much as giving you a sense of the world so much as it feels like the game talking to itself through a telephone filter when it could be doing so with dialogue or character behavior, or hell, with more of the regular harassment you get from the characters over the PA. In fact, even when actual characters do start showing up, they're few and far between, and most of them fall into either "egocentric prick" or "atoning egocentric prick" (most of the former being male and the later being female, for a pinch of nice, wholesome double-standard). The only character I like on their own merits was Sander Cohen, who was awesome by the way, but he was just over-the-top and irrelevant for the most part. You don't even need to fight the bitch if you don't want to (which I, in good conscience, did and could not).
So all that's left to put under scrutiny is the oft-contested "ethical dilemma" aspect of the game's existence. And before you lift your hand in protest, no, I'm not talking about the Little Sisters. If you have a braincell that can rapidly vibrate against the oxygen in your skull, and you see a five year old girl who's been brainwashed to extract miracle juice from dead bodies, and whenever you take her drill-wielding body guard, are given the options to either "SAVE this sweet, innocent, cherub-faced little treasure from her eternal torment of mind slave labor" or "HARVEST this rosy-cheeked, blithe-spirited little angel for her dead person juice as she screams and dies in agony before your eyes", and then you turn to me and say "weyell garsh Stype, thisun' here be one of them thar 'ethical dilemmas', they been caterwalling about, ain't it?", then you have a vending machine drop box with your face's name written on it. And if you for a second think that Man Ayn Rand and his Objectivist utopia, uninhibited by petty things like taxes and the police or anyone who just says 'hey maybe this is sort of bad', may attract the attention of one or two greedy, self-centered, sociopathic assholes, then the space between the back of the vending machine and the wall extends the same invitation as the drop box.
What I'm talking about is probably the most interesting and the most often overlooked aspect of the game's core philosophical problems: the contextual problem of free choice.
When we're first introduced to the world of Bioshock, the first person we see is Andrew Ryan, who asks us the now infamous question, "Is a man not entitled to the sweat on his brow?" The world of Rapture is built on the basic philosophy that every choice you make should be yours alone, unhindered by government, religion, legal systems, conventional morality, or your neighbor screaming to turn down that rock and roll. And when you see Rapture proper, it's filled with gene-doped psychopaths who have managed to alter their very DNA to blow lightning out of their fingertips and be better at baseball. As you may expect, the other shoe is not far to drop.
Now, this may seem like little more than a heavy-handed sermon on "don't play God" and "everything you do has consequences" and so on and so forth. But then the game takes the whole concept one step further. For most of the game's second act, which is about two thirds or so of the game, you're running around and just doing favors for people, and once you've completed each task within the level, you can move onto the next one. Basic stuff, right? But then the whole thing gets turned on its head when it's revealed that you, the main character, have been genetically manipulated to do all the tasks.
Reading it on paper, it seems like a stupid twist, and one's knee-jerk reaction is to say "come on, that's stupid, it's not like I, the player, was forced to do anything I didn't want to". And then you sit back and realize that the same opinion is, by design, what would come naturally to you if you were programed to act like that. The tendency to do all these things is, in practice, the same choice of what you assume your "free will" is to be. Now go back and look at the gameplay. You can't progress any farther in the game until you complete each task assigned. In order to operate within this game, still thinking you are a totally independent entity within it, you cannot get any farther until you do what the game dictates. You are a slave of the game's command, to represent your character being a slave to his programing's dictate.
Now, I concede that this could be reading into things, but my doubts were shattered when you played a later mission. Still under the reveal that your existence in mind and body is under someone else's control, the game then proceeds to chop off your maximum health points. And you feel it. Maybe it's just because I'm new to shooters, but even though I was playing on medium and had previously never died once during the game, my tiny health bar depleted so fast I didn't have time to grab a healing kit more than once. And then when it did the same thing with my Plasmid abilities, when I really needed to shock a bot so I could hack it and my worthless "Hypnotize Big Daddy" ability popped up instead, I was flailing around like a loony through the whole mission, even just under the sheer stress of sudden loss of control.
Bioshock has, accidentally or not, tripped on one of the basic questions burdening ethical philosophers: can we be held accountable to make the right choice when our own choices are inherently and very heavily influenced by our experiences, our environment, and our physical makeup? Where is the "we" inside ourselves to make that choice to begin with, if so much of our experience are dictated by those influences? And while I have no doubt that the "gene splicing" thing was more of a basic narrative motif adding to the game's flavor rather than originally designed to be an element of the story telling, it's still a really clever choice. With the advent of DNA research discovering genes that give us tendencies toward everything from alcoholism to liking football, the question becomes more and more pressing as to how much of our decisions are completely our decisions, and indeed, how we should go about defining "our" in the first place.
What's more interesting is that the game never really gives an absolute yes or no to either side. Andrew Ryan's downfall had a lot to do with being a dick. But much of it can be attributed to his absolute belief that everything he and others do neither effect nor are affected by the same forces that compel them. Try as he might, he could not free himself of the physical and social consequences of society, despite how much he, and his participants, tried to do so. This lead him to seizing power, censoring alternate opinions, killing dissidents, and generally becoming an totalitarian dictator. And by the end of the story, because you've traveled through the world and come to understand how he did and did not do things (or you would if you could HEAR THE DAMN AUDIO DIARIES), the events leading to his demise have more than a little pinch of irony to them.
On the other side of the coin, the side that believes you can be controlled merely by the manipulation of the forces that guide you, especially when said force has done so, messing with your genes, your environment, and your very mental road map, is shown to not be in the right either. Sure, your health is cut to nothing, but that's not going to stop you from shoving another machine gun round in and taking an army of splicers. And that's not even taking into account the very real allies you make along the way. You get friends who help you eventually break free of your conditioning, but even then, you're still hindered on your quest by something that seems almost trivial in comparison: elaborately locked doors. So even taking all the genetic malfunctioning, there are still things that get in your way from making an absolutely "free" choice. Yet even within the physical confines of the game, you can still overcome and still kick ass.
That's why, while a lot of their execution is misguided, I don't think the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies are a bad choice to really play into this motif. While the choice itself is about as problematic as tying your shoes, the idea of them is that you can still make choices, even when bound by the rules genetic mind screwing or doors which for some reason even though you have a freaking bazooka you can't break through. And if you get the good end to the story (which I admit made me cry BECAUSE I AM THAT MUCH OF A BADASS), well, it's icing on the cake.
So now we're back to the question we asked ourselves at the beginning of the review: Is Bioshock art? Well, no. Not really. The whole "can games be art thing" is going to be addressed in another review, but may I say that I definitely subscribe to the Extra Credits philosophical school of games being a budding artistic medium. It's slow, but we're getting there. And I think that Bioshock is doing things that we need to do if we ever hope to get "there".
If you're going to make a game art, you have to use everything to get your story told, innovations and limitations both. That's probably one of the reasons why the great age of survival horrors has past us: a big part of survival horror is lack, not have, a something that, obviously, the earlier generation had more of, and new how to work it to their advantage. At least in one general thematic the game tries to present, I think they did a good job. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and it certainly could have been tightened, but there's a real glitter of beauty from this game showing what the industry can do.
"But S-Type, you goose of exceptional sillyness," you say. "There be implications that you think that this motif is more accidental than what the game is selling itself as. So why are you still praising it?" Well, accidental or not, it's still an interesting aspect of the game, and one I don't hear talked about as often as it should be. Even if it was more an implication or accidental brilliance, it's still brilliance. Some may counter you counter that we shouldn't have to pull these things out of implications. If we do, the game's not doing its job, right? Well, as players, if we don't, we're not doing ours either.
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