Let's talk about Bioshock Infinite *long and spoilery baby* (Gaming)

by Jillybean, Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 13:02 (4126 days ago)

I want to talk about Bioshock Infinite.

This game didn’t appeal to me when it was first being advertised. But it did come highly recommended. It’s often mentioned in the same breath as GotY. And, though let’s not mention this one too loudly, Schooly and Cody both seemed to enjoy it. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be good, I still don’t understand that robot game thingy Schooly plays at LANs, but it’s still a recommendation.

It was, in fact, some judicious googling of Troy Baker after watching Last of Us playthroughs that had me deciding to pick Bioshock up a few weeks ago.

Let’s start with the good. The game is beautiful. It has some fabulous acting in it. That first long walk through Columbia, listening to anachronistic Barbershop and watching the ‘wrongness’ of a Bioshock world take shape was all wonderful. I’ve been playing that Tainted Love cover/original over and over. And I really appreciate what they tried to go through with the story. I appreciate the effort.

But let’s start with the story. Now a defence that people kept giving me while I was complaining about this game was that the story was great. I came to Bioshock completely spoiled. Not only completely spoiled, but I played Dishonored last year and watched a lot of Last of Us gameplay this year. (As an aside, I guess we’re fairly confident that gaming is reaching its middle ages as a medium). Remember that first time you see Emily draw a good Corvo? Or find the Fugue Feast book in her bedroom? How about when Joel tells Ellie “I sure as hell ain’t your dad?”

Even knowing the answer, I found a lot of Bioshock Infinite to be wilfully misleading. There was very little protectiveness in Booker, little paternal care. Maybe that’s supposed to be part of it, but it makes the big reveal feel disjointed. When Booker laces up Elizabeth’s corset after her little torture porn scene I was squirming. Even when she was revealed to be Anna in a very long walking sequence at the end, I still didn’t feel the game connecting Anna and Elizabeth. They are only the same person in a academic sense.

I did like layering Troy Baker’s voice over Comstock’s dire pronunciations, I liked the recurring misinterpretation of the baptism theme. I found “there is always a lighthouse, always a man, always a city” to be irritatingly smug, but hey, we’re using quantum physics.

But story wise I found Bioshock Infinite to fall woefully short of Dishonoured. If you want a game where a father chooses to sell his daughter, play a high chaos Dishonoured run. Even the Outsider will be surprised by you.

Bioshock also tries to couch all this in a backdrop of racial tension which I found to be laughable. Cody already linked to a very good article about that. To abandon that storyline halfway through for a half hearted “oh power corrupts” idea is just ridiculous.

There’s an additional mismatch between Booker and Comstock’s treatment of minorities which is not well explained. After all, losing a child and becoming and embittered gambler is not the usual prescribed method of dealing with deep seated prejudices, but this is a relatively small nitpick. Again, see Dishonoured for a wonderful contrast between the haves and have nots.

But lets talk about the fact this is a game. I finished it on hard mode after a week or so of playing, in between Fringe parties and impromptu DIY. I’m not that good of a player. Money is plentiful. Losing money is no big penalty (I doubt even losing 100 eagles at a time will upset me greatly if I do a 1999 playthrough) and so no horde of white or coloured bad guys will stop me from plunging onwards. I also never mastered the skyhooks it must be said, and quite often flung myself around again and again while desperately waiting for the fleeting aerial kill symbol.

When this game was fun it was aping Mass Effect. Lift, Charge, Shotgun was a favoured tactic. I also felt there were no real bosses in the game. Lady Comstock was a bit of a madam, the handy men liked to electrocute my skylines, the patriots were pretty unkillable, but all of these were neatly dispatched by random friendly version Elizabeth could call upon at will and if anything went wrong Elizabeth would throw some health kits or I’d die and be resurrected a little way away. The most frustrating part was the final zeppelin ride which relied simply on swamping you with enemies.

And if any game didn’t need choice, it was this one. And don’t give me bullshit about the futility of choice in a world of quantum physics or point at the coin toss with a smile. It’s nonsense. It has as much bearing as choosing to walk left or right out of the gate. But again, a small nitpick in comparison to endless irritation of hopping off of the world in an attempt to latch onto a skyhook.

Why is Bioshock Infinite so lauded?

But I’m still kind of excited about going back to Rapture in a few weeks.