Last week I finished Bioshock Infinite. I’m not a first-person-shooter fan, or even a fan of the Bioshock games. My water phobia knocked me out of the original Bioshock when I entered a tunnel with a leak that slowly filled up with water, and I couldn’t advance without freaking out. I’ve picked up the important parts of Bioshock since then — I know what “A man chooses, a slave obeys” means — and I’d been watching Infinite for a while because I knew that Bioshock was a really good game, and I don’t have a thing about the sky like I do the ocean.
I’m also not a regular player of first-person-shooters, which is to say that I’ve played two FPS games since Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64. For the record, I thought Resistance: Fall of Man was a damn good time, bought the sequel when it came out, and never played it. And so it goes.
When Bioshock Infinite got a ton of perfect scores from reviewers, I decided to try it out. I liked it, but not as much as they did. I don’t think they were wrong, which is a sentiment I have seen crop up around the internet as of late. There are things in Bioshock that really got me, especially the ending, but there are parts that just didn’t go that great for me. Throughout this, I’m going to compare Infinite to Dishonored, which might not be very fair to either of them, but the comparison came to mind early and often for me.
Columbia
I honeymooned in Disneyworld in 2008. There are three folders on my computer full of pictures from my trips to the Magic Kingdom, of dancers in Epcot, of animals wandering the miniature savannah at the Animal Kingdom, or Lego sculptures and bassoonists in Downtown Disney. There are pictures of every country represented in Epcot, of an ambulatory trash can following me around the park, of my wife and I hugging Minnie and Mickey at the end of our time in the park. I used my camera as a kind of anchor, something to prove to myself that I spent a week and a half in this place that never felt quite real, a place that honestly did feel magical and wonderful.
I took a lot of pictures in Columbia.
I’m celebrating my fifth anniversary this fall in Disneyworld. Lately I’ve been looking at satellite photos of Disneyworld on Google Maps, and I’m amazed at how well the parks are laid out. There can be a few feet and a fence separating the park-goer from the employee parking lot, from the rows of trucks that handle the equipment, and you never know. The parks are constructed in such a way that you forget you’re even in an amusement park, and the reality of the park becomes your actual reality. It’s incredible.
I tried to open a lot of fake doors in Columbia.
It felt like a Disney park, which probably means it succeeded. But I think I wanted more. I wanted more of the game to be about this incredible floating city in the sky, and I wanted to interact with it and come to know it more than I did. I don’t feel I came to know Columbia like I did Dunwall in Dishonored. I know that here I’m comparing games that are different genres, that I shouldn’t expect the same level design and verticality in a first-person shooter as I would in a Thief-like game, where they have to build multiple routes through the same area. But I wanted to spend more time in Columbia.
Skulking about the shadows of Dunwall, slipping in and out of multiple buildings, listening to the Heart’s whispers in my ear, hiding in shadows and listening to people talk to each other, I cam eto know Dunwall. Dunwall became a character in that game, and probably the best character in that game. Journals, diaries, bits of story picked up here and there, the world itself changing in accordance with my actions. The curious nature of the world built into the game itself, with the in-universe distrust of the charms, the plague being a constant force hanging over the game, all that came together to really make Dunwall a real place.
Columbia felt close, but everything too big, too garish, too loud, and then too brief. I could walk around the opening of that game for hours, and probably will load up that first level a few more times, just to see Columbia again. It’s an incredible theme park (right down to the roller coaster skyhook rails around the shooting galleries), but I kept pushing it for something it wasn’t going to be.
Violence
The first act of violence in Columbia is Booker DeWitt grabbing a man by the head and shoving his face into a rotating metal hook. It was deliberately chosen to be harsh and brutal to be in stark contrast to this pristine floating utopia. It was horrifying, as it should have been. I looked away.
Later acts of regular violence include burning a man’s flesh off of his body, sending enough voltage through a man’s body to pop his head off of his shoulders where it then detonates, taking over a man’s mind and making him kill his friends and then himself, cutting a man’s head off with a regular swing from your own rotating skyhook, shoving that same hook into a guard’s face while you hold him still as one of the game’s “execution” moves, a murder of crowd tearing a man to ribbons, and slicing a man’s face off, leaving a bloody hole in the middle of his head.
I played Infinite either at extreme range with the machine gun or the sniper rifle, or recklessly with the Charge vigor, filling my screen with as much noise as possible to distract myself from the gore. I understand the thematic reasons for having a violent scene like the first. I have a harder time justifying intense violence in games, just for myself. Had there been a toggle for reduced violence — the game has a 1999 mode for increased challenge, you could come up with another catchy name for a version that keeps faces attached to heads — I would have had a much better time with it.
Dishonored had violence – plenty of it, in fact. But I could play that game through in a nonlethal manner, which I did, so I never saw any of the violence. That’s even better than a blood toggle, as the game world built itself around my choice there to not kill anyone. Not every game can do that. Not every game wants to do that. That’s fine. But it still leads to me favoring Dishonored’s approach to the matter.
This is incredibly personal and subjective, and I’m not calling for all games to be made less violent. But I would like the choice.
Shooting
90% of my interaction with Columbia is shooting people. The other 10% is picking up audio logs and telling Elizabeth to open tears or locks.
I wish this game had been more. That’s probably on me — I can’t rightfully ding a game for succeeding at something that it’s not trying to be. But when the story is working, when you’re unraveling the mysteries behind the tears, when you’re wandering through that magical opening, and when you’re trying to make sense of the insane ending, Bioshock Infinite is up there with the best games I’ve ever played.
Just not as much during all the “game” parts.
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