But the more I tried to wrap my head around it, the less impressive it became. It is still impressive, and still really solidly written but as my the honeymoon period with the game passed, I started to realize a lot of the magic was just smoke, mirror and sleight of hand. The depth I felt when I was blindsided by the ending and at my desk slack-jawed, dazed and confused, simply wasn’t there. Complicated doesn’t always mean deep. Conversely, lack of great depth isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It definitely didn’t make the game any less fun, or any less impressive. But, it didn’t really give me much to write about.

That, and I distinctly remember feeling a little bit disappointment and disillusioned by the direction the story took when Elizabeth started dimension-hopping. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, but it felt wrong. I figured it had something to do with the deus ex machina nature of just altering reality at whim to suit your own needs. And then I promptly forgot about it, because… Well, this damn ending:

Really powerful stuff, this ending.

It had all the right elements to be truly memorable: a huge revelation of a mind-screw plot twist, amazing visuals (all those light houses) and a heap of fan service (OMG guise, we’re in Rapture!). It was overpowering, grand and spectacular. It overshadowed every other aspect of the game. But it was the journey – the bulk of the experience that really made the game worth while. The ending was just a cherry on top, and while awesome I just didn’t have enough to say about it to warrant a whole post.

But seeing how Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea came out recently I figured it might be worth revisiting the game once again and tie up a few loose ends finally writing about the story and storytelling. Especially after TJ pointed me towards a rather interesting negative review of the game:

The success of #Bioshock is bad for #gaming http://t.co/fpWkqmQkdY Thanks @LevelTwoRogue. Comments @LukeMaciak ?

— theperfectnose (@realperfectnose) January 22, 2014

I found it interesting, because there are very few negative reviews of the game are rare. Critics have praised it for many different, often contradictory reasons but most agreed that it was a good game. And by critics I of course mean internet bloggers and independent journalists unaffiliated with industry sponsored gaming publications. Mainstream “video-game journalism” as it exists right now is a joke, but everyone knows that already. It’s pathology is mainly driven by the fact that the only time companies buy advertising space in these publications is when their games are being “critically reviewed” creating a very clear-cut conflict of interest. Well that, and almost criminal lack of diversity in the ranks of mainstream reviewers. When 99.9% of what is being called “video-game journalism” is produced by white dudes in fedoras and dickwolf t-shirts who give Call of Booty 10/10 score every six months when the new version comes out it is kinda hard to get a real picture of what the market looks like.

But even among more diverse crown of non-professional reviewers, we frequently get a massive echo chamber effect. Especially when popular games are concerned. I won’t pretend I’m immune to that kind of hype because I’m not. As evidenced by my review of the game, I was one of the people who couldn’t seem to type enough words to say how wonderful Bioshock Infinite was. This is why I’m always happy to read negative reviews of overly positively received games, because chances are they might be onto something we all overlooked.

In his article, Phil Hartup claims that Bioshock Infinite is not only a bad game, but also bad for the video industry as a whole. I know what you think: this is a blatant link bait. And you are right. It is, but despite being intentionally inflammatory the article makes some points that are worth discussing. Hartup outlines two key areas in which the game has, in his eyes, failed to deliver.

First, and most obviously, it’s a first person shooter and it’s a conspicuously bad one. Everything takes place in a series of arena battles, with the plot occurring in the times between them. This is a really bad sign. It tells us that the story is written and the game, that bit that you’re paying for, the bit that really anything calling itself a game ought to be focused on, that’s just filler. That’s the stuff you do to pad the running time out. That the actual game part of the game has been relegated to the fringes of the experience is evidenced by just how below-par the combat actually is. The mechanics, the arbitrary limitations, the repetition of it all . . . on a mechanical level this is the sort of thing that was done better in Half Life back in 1998.

This is actually a very valid criticism. The FPS genre is actually getting a bit long in the tooth, and has become stale and formulaic. It doesn’t really lend itself to storytelling because it is nearly impossible to advance the plot while the player is busy circle-strafing, rocket jumping and spraying machine gun bullets in all directions. When the players two main modes of interaction with the game world are “shooting” and “pressing buttons” the story, by necessity has to be delivered in the quiet moments in between pitched battles. If the FPS genre in it’s classic run, gun, cut-scene, repeat format was retired today, I wouldn’t even be upset. I’m all for creating new gaming experience and exploring new genres.

Hartup follows up the above with the following:

What video games need now are new ideas, not the same old thing with a different set of backgrounds and a new story. This is what video games promised when they first appeared, when people were not just inventing games but inventing genres of game. Somewhere along the way this seems to have stopped happening.

This is absolutely true. I wouldn’t call it the most astute observation (no offense to Mr. Hartup) because we have seen this in the making for precisely about a decade now. The age of innovation in the video game industry ended around the time triple A game budgets ballooned into billions of dollars, and voice acting and motion capture became commonplace. It is easy to take risks when you are working with a team of six to eight people, and all you stand to lose is a few thousand dollars. But betting everything on a wild card is much, much harder when your team consists of two thousand people from six different companies, and you have to sell eleventy trillion copies of your game just to break even.

What we know about FPS games is that they sell like hotcakes. They are the is the simplest, and probably most accessible type of experience you can find. They are precisely what appeals to the most coveted 18-30 white, male, /r/games subscribing, Penny Arcade reading dude-bro demographic. That’s the one type of game that has been proven to squeeze the maximum money from their wallets. This is precisely the reason why Mass Effect 3, the cover-based shooter sold vastly more copies than Mass Effect 1, the space-opera RPG. So can we blame a company for investing into a format that they know is going to return profit?

Of course, there is a follow up question here:

Why are video game companies catering their product lines solely towards adolescent and young-adult males, when they actually are not their main customers. According to the 2013 ESA study, the average age of a self described “gamer” is 30, and nearly half gamers are women.

Gamer Demographic

Statistically this means that large chunk of the customer base is composed of non-dudebro people of both sexes who are currently in their 30’s and 40’s. Obviously I can’t speak for all 30-somethings (especial the women, being a guy and all) but personally I’m kinda sick of FPS genre. I liked Bioshock Infinite precisely because it chose too mix a little bit of interesting narrative into the story. I played the game on Easy because I wasn’t really into challenging pitch-battles – I just wanted to find out what happens to Booker and Elizabeth and see if Daisy Fitzroy’s uprising is going to succeed. That said I have no interest in the annual re-packaging of the Call of Duty series and similar titles. I’m sure a number of people my age think the same. I would love to see the major publishers take more risks and experiment with new formats, and I definitely have more reliable stream of disposable income than your average 18-year old. So how come these companies are not catering to me?

Well, perhaps one of the reasons is that they still haven’t figured out the magical game formula that would simultaneously appeal to the over-30, crowd. Perhaps there isn’t any. Perhaps they are not even looking for it. I guess it helps to keep in mind that the pathological lack of diversity in the game journalism is more or less mirrored in the game development industry. These guys have their biases, preconceived notions about what games are supposed to be and it will be hard to change that overnight.

The industry being what it is however, I think there is a place for games such as Bioshock Infinite and Mass Effect which mix the tired, old and limited cash-cow genres with actual compelling story elements. For one, these games show that people are at least trying to make games that tell stories in addition to being shooters. They also help to expose the Call of Duty players to more complex, broader and more nuanced narratives and hopefully leave them yearning for more. If we feed these younger generations of gamers a steady diet of smarter, more story-oriented, narrative-driven games then perhaps when they grow up and become game developers themselves they will want to tell their own stories, rather than figure out new ways to do more efficient bump-shading on gun barrels in the latest brown military shooter.

Having said all of that however, I fully agree with Phill Hartup that Bioshock Infinite could have been better. In my own review I praised the game for how well it managed “combat fatigue” – which is just a fancy way of saying “getting sick tired of shooting dudes in the face all the time”. It’s actually very telling that I have a term for this particular phenomenon. The whole point of an FPS game is that it is supposed to be exciting, adrenaline pumping, edge-of-your-seat type of experience. But you can only sustain this kind of vibrant energy for a limited about of time. Good FPS games take that into account and provide convenient breaks between battles that break up the monotony of constant violence. But the very fact that “combat fatigue” exists, and it must be managed to keep player interested is perhaps an evidence that we are building these games wrong. That the FPS genre, while popular is actually a dead end from a design standpoint.

Phill is right when he says that the violence in Bioshock Infinite seems largely divorced from its overarching plot. You could probably cut out majority of the encounters in the game, leaving only the scripted events and cut scenes without actually loosing much in terms of the story. You basically have to grind enemies to get from one story element to another. So perhaps it is not “combat fatigue” that we feel, but just plain old boredom and annoyance.

But Bioshock isn’t the only game that does this. In fact, I can’t think of a linear FPS or cover based shooter that doesn’t do that. Max Payne 3 felt like this. So did Dishonored and Darksiders 2 just to name a few that I played recently. Unless you make your game a sandbox, you are going to have this issue. But sandboxes are riskier and more difficult to balance. So this is an interesting thought to ponder: is the linear FPS a dead end? Because we seem to have reached a limit of what we can do with it artistically. And if we can’t do anything else interesting with it then the sooner we ditch it, the better.

This is however only the first of Hartups two main gripes of the game. The second one goes as follows:

In terms of story and themes, what are we really learning here? That racism is bad? That religious fanaticism is bad? A huge amount has been talked about the Bioshock: Infinite story but the elephant in the room is that if the story is written before you even install the game then it is a bad story. This brings us back to the idea of the game as a game.

This is something I can’t really agree with. Firstly, I think Phil is mixing up two concepts: linear FPS format and linear narrative. The former, as discussed above, is broken because of how it’s mechanics divorce the core game-play from the story dividing your experience into story/exposition rooms and grind corridors that connect them. There is however nothing wrong with linear narrative. This is something video games have been using since the start, so I really don’t see why it would be a problem now. Yes, games can be non-linear but they don’t have to be. In fact, we really, really suck at telling stories in non-linear ways, because by definition our narratives are typically single thread and serial progression. Even pure sandbox games tend to funnel you into linear instance dungeons in which you can only move forward along predefined path so that story can be told through scripted events and cut scenes.

The truth is, most of our stories are completely predictable: the protagonist wins, the antagonist loses, everyone lives happily ever after. And yet we tell them anyway. We have been telling and re-telling “the heroe’s journey” mono-myth for thousands of years now and it is still one of our most popular, most enduring and most beloved arcs. A good storyteller knows that ending is not as important as the journey itself. An occasional plot twist or surprise ending can spice up a story, but you can’t build a narrative around it. I think the career of M. Night Shyamalan is a good object lesson here: no matter how good your plot twists are, they simply won’t matter if your audience is not invested into the story. And if you can get people really invested – if you can make them care about the characters, then plot twists aren’t even necessary.

It’s great when games have multiple endings. Hell, it’s amazing when you can play a game more than once and end up with a very different experience. But a linear story with a predictable ending can still be rewarding and worth while. Especially if it is a story about something important.

Phil goes on to narrowly define what he thinks games should be like:

What makes games special is that you are not supposed to know the outcome. Take a football match for example. If you’re playing football and you don’t know how the match will turn out, but you know you can affect it, that’s fun. That’s really the joy of playing a game.

I think this is an awful definition because football games were not designed to have narratives, whereas some video games do. Bioshock Infinite especially since it has a classic three act structure. But yes, according to that narrow criteria it not a true game but rather an interactive story. And it is bad because it has an easily predictable ending? Which ending is that? Did he mean it in general sense as in: protagonist’s success brings about the downfall of the antagonist? Or did he predict the Booker/Comstock relationship and all of the alternate world clusterfuck just by glancing at the cover?

But let’s rewind this discussion a little bit. I want to talk more about this particular statement:

What are we really learning here? That racism is bad?

Phill throws this statement out there as if was something trivial. As if racism was a solved problem that is not worth talking about anymore. Yes, we all collectively agreed that racism is terrible. This is a good thing. This doesn’t mean the topic is closed. In fact, I don’t really think the above-mentioned 18-30 dudebro demographic to which this game was marketed actually understands what racism even is.

Seriously, go to reddit, open any thread on the front page that has a thousand comments or more, and then Ctrl+F for the n-word and see how many hits you get. Regardless of the topic of the discussion, I can almost guarantee you there will be some vile racist shit there – especially in the gaming subredits. If anyone can benefit from a little bit of perspective on the subject, it’s the stereotypical FPS enthusiasts.

Unfortunately, Bioshock Infinite is not going to be a game that will provide any valuable lessons to these guys, because it completely botched that subject. If you are scratching your head wondering what the hell am I talking about I highly recommend reading Soha El-Sabaawi’s excellent review of the game. It is another negative review. I told you I like these, because they typically bring up things that I might have missed.

This one drops a bomb-shell:

The Vox Populi, led by Daisy, had a cause to which I was committed – fight the oppressors. In Columbia, black bodies were enslaved, passive, villainized and discarded. I could not have been happier to arm them and assist their revolt against the horrific racism rampant through the city. Then, for the sake of a plot twist, I found myself having to fight them instead. As I fought them to progress Booker and Elizabeth’s stories I kept asking out loud in my empty apartment, “Why? Why am I doing this?” With every member of the Vox Populi I murdered, I was erasing their history and oppression one bullet at a time. They aren’t the enemies. They aren’t my enemies.

I believed in Daisy. I believed she had a right to this land as much as the Founders of Columbia, and suddenly I was forced to put her down.

I was crestfallen and ashamed, but mostly I was angry. I could not believe how poorly oppression and racism was handled simply to advance the stories of a white man and woman. Daisy and the Vox had been robbed of their voices to shout for their rights and freedoms.

At the beginning of this review I mentioned that I felt some discomfort and wrongness to the story when Elizabeth and Booker started dimension hopping. Now I realize that this was actually about the exact moment where the two went from being unwilling allies of Vox Populi to their enemies. This was the beginning of the sequence of events that culminated in Daisy’s death. Like Soha I was invested in Daisy’s cause and I looked forward to helping Vox Populi to overthrow Comstock. When the sides suddenly flipped and I was forced to gun down the freedom fighters and kill Daisy I felt robbed of the satisfaction of being on the right side of the conflict, and achieving something meaningful.

But while I sympathized with her cause, I didn’t identify with Daisy. I was more invested in the story of Booker and Elizabeth and I promptly got over, and forgot about this betrayal. It left merely a bad taste in my mouth, which I was only vaguely aware of. Now that I think about it though, I believe this is in fact the biggest problem with the game as a whole.

It’s not that it is a bad FPS, which it isn’t. Not really. Not by any metric. I is far superior to anything else in it’s genre both mechanically and story wise. Whether or not FPS format is a good storytelling medium is a whole other discussion, and I’m pretty sure we all agree that it is not. The game is neither innovative, nor revolutionary – but still an exemplary specimen in it’s own domain.

It’s problem is not that it is predictable because it is not. If you can predict that Booker is Comstock just from glancing at the cover, you might be Sherlock Holmes or one of those precogs from Minority Report or something. The problem was that Elizabeth and Booker selfishly chose a solution to the Comstock problem that did not actually address the grievances of Vox Populi. Their story got a high-brow, heady and satisfying mind-screw resolution. Daisy’s story got unceremoniously dumped by the wayside. She and her followers were un-made.

One could argue that by manipulating the multiverse to prevent Colombia from ever existing in the first place, Elizabeth prevented the racial oppression from ever occurring. But is a workd without Comstock and Columbia really better than one in which the black population is emancipated? In which the will of the people triumphs over an oppressive regime creating a nation that could be held up as a shining beacon for budding civil rights movements all across the world?

Instead we get a dreadfully disingenuous scene in which Daisy threatens to kill an innocent, wide-eyed white child. This scenario is contrived because we really don’t know what pushed Daisy to this. She is a background character and we didn’t take this journey with her. In fact, the Daisy who takes the child hostage is not even the same one we meet earlier in the game because of Elizabeth’s dimensional shenanigans. At that point she nothing more than a plot point whose sole function is to further Elizabeth’s story and give her some a character defining traumatic experience. And that’s all kinds of wrong. Daisy’s story was a big deal after all. Putting an end to discrimination, oppression and violence against thousands of non-white Colombians was much grander and worthy cause to fight for, than liberation of Elizabeth from her ivory tower or Booker/Comstock’s personal redemption, repentance and absolution.

When people of colour don’t write their own stories in games, they end up in hands that will be neither delicate nor fair. The stories end up as botched as BioShock: Infinite where the oppressed turn to extreme violence and act like animals in the guise of creating a morally complex narrative where ethnicity disappears into the wind of white guilt.

I guess Phil was half right when he asked what are we really learning from Bioshock Infinite? I guess it does make a pretty good case that cartoonishly overt, mustache twirling, villainous racism is bad. But it’s not like anyone was ever trying to dispute that. But the game also kinda goes to show that deeply internalized prejudices are still deeply rooted in our society. That even the best intention can’t sometimes save a story from being exploitative and insensitive towards racial issues. Instead of humanizing the plight of the oppressed minorities and empathizing with the freedom fighters Bioshock Infinite manages to completely marginalize their uprising. It makes their fight a plot point and the death of their leader as character development moment for a white protagonist. And that’s bad. That doesn’t teach us anything at all other than that this is a problem. Not only with the game itself but with the industry as a whole. I doubt this was intentional. I don’t think the writers specific goal was to marginalize Daisy and Vox Populi. But that doesn’t make it any less problematic.

It is hard to believe that there was no one involved in making this game to mention this and try to guide the story in a more agreeable direction. Perhaps there was, and they got overruled because this industry is a gigantic echo chamber. White dudes make games specifically for white dudes, which then get reviewed by more white dudes. This is why pointless brown military shooters keep being made. This is why video game women don’t seem capable of wearing normal clothes, and have biologically impossible bodies. This is why there is virtually no canonical human video game protagonists who are not brown haired, white men. This is why Daisy gets shanked with scissors for the sake of Elizabeth’s character development.

Does any of this make Bioshock Infinite a terrible game? No, not really. It’s still enjoyable and worth checking out. It is just tainted by the problems that plague the entire industry. And I think it’s important that we talk about these things, because mainstream “video game journalism” sure as hell won’t. Despite what the internet would lead you to believe, is entirely possible to like a game, while accepting it is flawed, and discussing said flaws and shortcomings.

This post contains spoilers for Bioshock Infinite, including mid and late game details. It does not discuss the main plot or the end twist but it does spoil at least one major important game event which is pivotal to Elizabeth’s development as a character. If you haven’t finished the game, don’t read this.

When I bought Bioshock Infinite I was really skeptical about Elizabeth. The promotional materials raved about her, and other players had nothing but positive things to say about how she was utilized. But I really didn’t expect her to be anything exceptional. Up until now I have seen only one game pull off something like this: Half Life 2.

In my mind, Alyx was always the perfect companion. She never got in the way, she could handle herself in a firefight, she was friendly, likeable and personable. She had a bit of a flirtatious relationship with the protagonist (or as much as you can with someone who does not speak, ever) and in general was joy to have around. Traveling with her was fun because she would brighten up what otherwise would be a slog through waves of enemies with funny quips of little bits of exposition. I really didn’t think you could do a better job at this. Or rather that any attempt to create another compelling female sidekick would end up trying to imitate her too much creating only a pale, inferior knock-off.

The early game play promos featured just that kind of a character. This Elizabeth is essentially a carbon copy of Alyx jammed into a sexy corset. But her mannerisms are shockingly similar. She has the same devil-may-care attitude, the same genre savvy humorous quips and the same aura of strength about her. For one, I’m really glad they re-worked her because this incarnation wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as what we got in the final product:

The Elizabeth we got is drastically different from Alyx in just about every aspect. Where Alyx was strong and tough, Elizabeth is vulnerable (but just as brave and capable – seemingly even more-so considering lack of combat experience). Where Alyx was cynical, savvy and world weary, Elizabeth is innocent, inexperienced and full of wide eyed wander. Alyx masks her insecurities with humorous quips and fake bravado, whereas Elizabeth is usually sincere and direct with her feelings. The designers took pretty much everything that Alyx was, and turned it on it’s head creating a character that is almost a direct opposite of her, but just as compelling.

I guess the key here is that she is not a damsel in distress – or at least not most of the time. She is just as brave as Alyx when she needs to be, and even though she doesn’t carry a gun, she still makes herself quite useful in combat. The lesson from Half Life is that the sidekick can be whatever you want it to be, as long as it never feels like a burden or an escort mission. If there is anything that gamers hate almost unanimously is escort missions, which makes me wonder why we still have so many of these in our games. There is nothing that will ruin your enjoyment faster than babysitting a vulnerable NPC with low health and stupid pathing algorithm and a tendency to get in your line of fire.

Elizabeth is great in this aspect. Whenever you aim in the iron-sights mode, she will actually get out of your way. When you are in a combat situation she usually intelligently takes cover, and never takes damage because she has no HP bar. This frees you up to concentrate on the enemy, instead of worrying about her depleting health. She also doesn’t have the common pathing issues that are endemic to video game companions. Whenever she gets separated from you, or gets stuck on terrain she teleports to you. I have actually witnessed her avatar zipping through the level once or twice from the corner of my screen, but most of the time it feels rather seamless and organic. It is never as unsettling as the infamous creepy Dr. Wattson.

The thing about Elizabeth is that she is the central character in this game. She is not merely a sidekick, but rather an integral part of the story. You could take Alyx out of Half Life 2 and the narrative would still make sense (as much as Half Life 2 story can make sense at least). You can’t take Elizabeth out of Bioshock Infinite though. Without her there would be no story. It was a major gamble to make this companion character so pivotal to the entire plot. If she didn’t work – if she turned out to be an annoyance, or if players did not like having her around it could tank the entire game. Fortunately, they nailed it.

It is actually quit impressive how they slowly build her up even before you meet her. Initially she is just a mission objective, but as soon as you get to Monument Island she becomes the main focus. I talked about the excellent foreshadowing in this game, but this is yet another example. The first thing you see after entering the tower is this:

Warning Signs

The entire tower is filled with strange signs warning you about this dangerous specimen. You haven’t met the girl yet, and you know preciously little about her but it suddenly makes sense why your employers would go to such great lengths to get their hands on her. There is something about this girl that prompted her handlers to imprison her in this tower and put up all these warning signs around. Granted by now you have seen a lot of bat-shit crazy things in Columbia so the signs might just be a way of keeping gullible people out… But the deeper you venture into the quarantined area, the more you realize that all of this is not just for show. There are actually people here who are both fascinated and frightened by this girl and who are carefully watching her development:

Science

Slowly but surely you begin to expect someone like Alma from Fear – someone powerful but unsettling and monstrous. The grainy observation films do not dispel that feeling, even though they reveal she looks quite normal. Still, these shots look way to much like things taken from some horror movie. Grainy film reels from insane asylums or prisons are a very common and unsettling trope… They do a good job of introducing a little doubt about the nature of your mission and reinforce the idea the girl is imprisoned in this maximum security facility for a reason.

Grainy Film Reel

These clips also foreshadow some of her future in-game abilities. You see recordings of her learning about code breaking and lock picking which is something that an imprisoned person would probably want to know more about. Thus it is not a huge surprise when Elizabeth later becomes a game mechanic for unlocking doors that were previously inaccessible.

When you get closer to where she is held, the game funnels you through a number of “observation rooms” where you can snoop in on her. The great part about this sequence is that they don’t just show you her standing in a room staring a ta wall, but rather make her go through interesting scripted sequences that reveal a lot about her hopes, dreams and about her personality:

She really likes Paris

For example you learn she has this fixation on Paris which is actually very interesting from the storytelling perspective. It actually works on many layers. Superficially, the city seems to be just the type of place that a young, naive, innocent girl would dream about. But there is also a lot of symbolism in the fact she is not dreaming about, for example, New York or some other American city. It is probably not a coincidence that she consciously chooses France – the other great revolutionary, universalist democracy as her the place she wants to escape to. It puts her very much in the opposition to Comstock’s Americana, manifest destiny ideals. For Elizabeth US seems too close and too familiar for comfort. Seeing how Columbia’s great prophet is by now clearly the game’s main antagonist, this paints the girl as a potential ally.

Not to mention that you get an early glimpse at the reason why she is imprisoned: her strange powers:

Elizabeths Powers

These powers are not particularly combat oriented, but I’m actually really glad she did not end up the X-man like superhero from the early game-play clip above. No one likes a kill stealer, and making her really powerful telekinetic would completely change the dynamic of combat. Also, it looks like her powers would be heavily scripted making for rather boring, linear combat sequences.

In the final game her contribution to combat is subtle but useful. She can supply you with ammo and sometimes whisk new terrain features into existence, providing you with extra cover or an allied turret. I usually didn’t rely on her powers that much in combat – if available I would have her spawn a turret or a patriot to provide covering fire, but that’s about it. The great part was that the game allowed me to mostly ignore her powers. They didn’t try to force me to use it and left it completely optional. A lesser game would put in a combat area that would be impossible to win without juggling Rifts. It is a trend I see in video games a lot: we made this mechanic, and by God, you are going to use it or die. I don’t like that – I prefer to find my own play style and do things my own way and I’m glad Bioshock Infinite designers had enough clue to allow it.

By the time you actually get to meet Elizabeth in person, you actually get a pretty decent idea what she is all about, and how you are going to handle her. You know she is a prisoner, you know she has been locked up in the tower for most of her life and she yearns to get out. It ought to be pretty easy to make like a knight in a shining armor and whisk her away from there. But despite her situation, she doesn’t seem to take it very kindly when you barge her library. She literally hits you with the book on Quantum Physics over the head. Which, by the way is yet another great bit of foreshadowing:

The Principles of Quantum Mechanics

After a short, and mostly scripted escape sequence from the tower, you actually get to spend quite a bit of non-combat, quality time with your new companion in Battleship Bay. I mentioned this in the last post, that this level is probably one of my favorite locations in the game. However, on my first play-through I was a little bit annoyed with it. When Elizabeth hears music and runs off to check it out I was beginning to suspect that the game just pulled a fast one on me. I rescued the girl, now she will run off, get in trouble and I will have to gun down bunch of people to save her. I was not looking forward to this sort of game play. I was actually overjoyed to find she actually just pulled River Tam and went dancing with the natives:

Dancing

This is a charming, heart warming bit of pure character development. They did not need to include such a scene. In fact, Alyx never really had such a revealing moment. The closest you get to this in HL2 is playing ball with Dog, but that was mostly just a really well built gravity gun tutorial. Elizabeth’s dancing is exposition and character building. It really firmly establishes her as this joyful, innocent, unassuming and happy individual. A perfect foil for Booker’s world weary cynicism and disillusionment. It is further reinforced by how much it freaks her out the first time she sees you kill someone.

Elizabeth freaks out

The game is full of little bits like that. There is another rather charming scene where you get to play a guitar, and watch her do a little song and dance and share an apple with a little boy hiding under the stairs. This part is actually a little bit off the beaten path, and very easy to miss if you are just trying to power through the game and are not exploring every corner.

I was going to eat that apple!

Booker and Elizabeth have a very different relationship than Gordon and Alyx – one that is much more complex and layered. They are circumstantial allies, but they don’t fully trust each other. For Booker she is initially just an objective – a means to an end.

Elizabeth is grateful to Booker for helping her escape from her tower, but she has obvious doubts and second thoughts about him. She does not approve his methods, and is rightfully fearful of the violent efficiency with which he dispatches their pursuers. They are not always honest with each other and they don’t always work together. A lot of this is possible because Booker is not a silent protagonist and therefore the writers can explore their relationship through dialogue (rather than one-sided monologue). The other part of it is because Elizabeth actually becomes a real person for us. She has hopes, dreams, weaknesses, she gets scared, she disagrees with you, she even double crosses you a few times.

In comparison, Alyx seems rather pale. She is mostly just an action chick. A really great one, but still rather shallow. She doesn’t actually have much of a character arc. The girl you meet in Kliner’s lab is very much the same girl you spend the Episodes with. She doesn’t have a bit turning point like Elizabeth does when she kills Daisy Fitzroy to save the boy. The closes to that is death of Eli Vance but that scene happens in the cliff-hanger of Episode 2 and we don’t know what happens next yet. We do however get to see what happens to Elizabeth:

This is such an amazing sequence. It literally gave me the chills. The facial animation and motion capture here is absolutely top notch. The clip I posted above is from X-Box so it’s actually much lower quality than what I had on my computer but it does give you an idea of how well it was done even in the relatively outdated current gen console hardware. That moment when you try to comfort Elizabeth and she just stands there, clutching the scissors, lost, scared and confused… That is such a real moment. It makes her seem like a real person. It really hits you right in the feels when you realize this is the same girl who mere hours ago was having the time of her life dancing with strangers on the beach. And that it is ultimately your fault.

The New Elizabeth

I believe the outfit change and the new haircut is the equivalent of what is known as “growing a beard” trope. It is a symbolic appearance change usually prompted by some traumatic event. It usually indicates the character is done fucking around and ready to take names and kick ass. It also symbolizes loss of innocence. This is the moment when Elizabeth gives up on her dream of escaping to Paris and instead decides to make things right in Columbia. This change is very moving. You’d expect her to fall apart now, so it is awesome to see her cope with the situation the best she is able to. It is a testament to her inner strength. Then again, you realize that the wide eyed Elizabeth who got excited when she saw the new “Duke and Dimwit” story machine died along with Daisy Fitzroy.

It is even more heart breaking when you realize that this particular event was the catalyst that led to creation of this Elizabeth:

The New Elizabeth

I actually don’t want to spoil the ending of the game. I have a few more things to say about Elizabeth but I have already written over two thousand words on this. It is best if I save the end game discussion for another post.

Suffice to say, in my honest opinion Elizabeth is the best video game sidekick in existence right now – if not one of the best NPC’s I have ever seen. Her combat AI is great, rivaling that of Alyx: she stays out of the lane of fire, and provides useful support. Where she outperforms Alyx is the story department. She is just a better written character. Whereas Alyx is mostly just a wise-cracking action chick, Elizabeth has a real character arc. She experiences joy and fear, she is traumatized, does some terrible things, is pursued, captured, tortured, imprisoned, saved a few times and much more. She changes and grows as a person – mostly for the better, at a terrible price. Her early wide eyed innocence is stripped off her, and brutally stomped into the ground. And you not only get to watch that, but it is all mostly your fault.

Bioshock Infinite has exceeded it’s predecessors and at the same time my wildest expectations in every possible and imaginable way. It has been quite a while since a video game had this sort of impact on me. When the final credits started to roll, I felt a visceral catharsis – I have experienced something exceptional. This usually only happens to me after I watch a good movie or read a good book. Few games have actually elicited this soft of response from me. It is an incredibly well put together product and it deserves all the accolades it is getting from video game enthusiasts and reviewers.

I have quite a few things to say about this game, so I figured it is best to break them up into several posts. Today I want to talk mostly about the visuals because they are what gives the game the strikingly original appearance.

The game starts much like original Bioshock – with a trip to a lighthouse. It is a stormy night, and as you might imagine the world is dark and bleak. But even in this somber and subdued introductory sequence there is a lot of color and contrast. Let me show you a little example. Here is a screenshot from a very early scene – maybe two minutes into the game (if not less – depending how long you spend fucking around and exploring the environment):

Colors, Details, etc…

This might probably be one of the least impressive screenshots from the game, but to me this was the instant I knew this will be a great experience. There is a lot of little details that make this scene come together so bear with me for a second. Firstly, you should note the ever popular orange/blue contrast. There is a reason why it is so overused in movie posters and commercials – it looks great. Here it is very subtle contrast between a light emitted from a light-bulb in the distance and moonlight shining through the window. You only really see it when you first walk into the room, but it clearly shows someone took time to set up the lighting just the right way to give you this striking contrast when you take in the surroundings for the first time.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Note the the trail of blood which leads your eyes to the body in the chair. Note the scattered books on the floor and the bullet holes in the glass on the right indicating some sort of struggle taking place in this room. All of these details where painstakingly assembled and placed at the right spots to tell a story.

In a lot of games, scenery is just an afterthought. It is just some industrial backdrop and/or rubble that the artists slap onto wall textures few hours before you rush the game out the door. In Bioshock Infinite it is part of the story – it is the way the game sets the mood and tells you about the world.

Your first glimpse of Columbia is absolutely breath taking:

First Glimpse

Not only does it look great, but it tells you just about everything you need to know about this place. You clearly see it is a floating city in the sky. You get a really good glimpse at the no-classical architecture, the ubiquitous flags on the rooftops giving you a pretty good first impression of what this place is like. To reinforce the idea that you’re “not in Kansas anymore” you see a few dirigibles flying by. Now dirigibles are or course one of the main modes of transportation in the flying city, but they are also the universal symbol of other-wordiness. It is part of our visual vocabulary that screams “you are now in the Twilight zone”. Whenever you want to make a story about different dimensions or alternate histories, the easiest and fastest way to communicate this to the viewers is by putting dirigibles in the sky. And Bioshock Infinite does this almost immediately, illustrating quite clearly that the art director was well versed in the evocative use of visual tropes.

Also note the angel statue in the center of your vision. It is a striking piece that not only provides a lot of hints about the nature of the place, but also is an important landmark. The player subconsciously make a note of it, expecting to see it again from up close. Later becomes an important objective, and even though you don’t know the layout of the city that first glimpse at it still lingers in your memory. This is a brilliant touch because it gives you a reason to want to reach it. You are not going to that statue just because the game told you to, or because it is your mission. You actually want to go there because you want to see this thing from up close. You have some idea of it’s impressive scale and awesomeness so you want to check it out. And on your road the game teases you with glimpses of it, be it on posters or those movie rolls you find throughout the city.

Dat Statue

The closer you get to it, the more tantalizing it becomes, and the more you realize the truly massive scale of this construct. It becomes this looming, magnificent thing that you just need to reach. And after taking so much time and effort to find it, you can’t help but feel sad when it gets severely mangled during the escape sequence (regardless of what was going on within).

I haven’t taken any screenshots inside the church/temple where you pod lands, but that was another incredibly evocative and well designed area. Selling a setting such as Columbia might be rather hard. There are a lot of things that you need to let the player know. A lot of games deal with this via narration or information dumps provided by NPC. Bioshock Infinite just has you walk through a series of candle lit shrines and absorb the information about the Prophet, the religion of this place, the attitudes of it’s citizens and etc.. No one really says anything to you – you mostly gather information visually.

When you finally reach the city there are quite a few places that are just amazingly well put together. Take this one for example:

The Essence of Columbia

This is the first thing you see after you leave the shrine is this impressive vista. Once again note the striking orange-blue contrast in full effect. In this particular snapshot you can see not one, but two dirigibles which are important symbols that reinforce the otherness of the city. The focus of the scene is of course the statue of the prophet, surrounded by gawking citizens showing you that he is a beloved and respected figure in the city. The city square that surrounds the statue is full of stores, and street vendors and the crowd includes couples of lovers or spouses. This is significant, because the introductory sequence had you march through a church full of praying pilgrims in white robes. Seeing this seemingly normal crowd mulling around in the streets lets you know that not all citizens are pious, robe wearing religious extremists.

You also get a good glimpse of the skylines and their function. If you have seen any trailers of the game, you know you will eventually be able to zip around on them. If you haven’t, you probably start to hope they will become available as a mode of transportation for you.

In the distance you see a big city square from a different perspective, giving you a glimpse of the machinery that keeps it afloat. This is great because as soon as people learn they are in a flying city, their first instinct is to want to look below the buildings to see what keeps everything up. The game gives you ample opportunity to do this in the first few areas:

The Underbelly

But it is not all about the breath-taking vistas and floating city squares. Take this scene as another example. It’s actually rather boring if you think about, but there is so much great detail here. Take look how the lighting limits the field of vision and provides the soft focus, giving it that warm glow. Note all the little things on that street that seem to scream “this is a nice place”. And of course it isn’t – you know that, because you wouldn’t be playing this game otherwise. But it still pulls on your heart strings:

The Street

There is a father carrying a child on his back – a very, very evocative symbol of positive values: fatherhood, family values, safety. You also see boys splashing around in the water from a street hydrant, blissful and care free. It all builds certain image of Columbia. One that is going to be slowly torn down throughout the game.

The facade does start to crack pretty fast actually, but at first it mostly seems like an amusing satire. For example, I rather enjoyed this ridiculous little detail: a couple of kids smoking cigarettes in the corner.

Kids Smoking

It’s funny, satirical but it also kinda off-putting. I believe this is the earliest crack in the idyllic facade you encounter and its a subtle one. It is something you can chuckle at, and not as insidious as the blatant, dehumanizing racism you are exposed few minutes later. It does however work well to prepare you for the future revelations about the true nature of this seemingly wonderful city in the sky.

It’s the little details like this that make this game so exceptional. Here is another example: a crime board you can find on the wall within the statue:

Crime Board

It tracks the various infractions committed by the Vox Populi faction (whom I by the way expected to be the good guys, but more on that later) which gives you a pretty good idea of what they are about. You will note that they have not committed any robberies or acts of dacocity (eg. banditism) and are guilty of very few burglaries which paints them as primarily political criminals rather than common villainous thugs as represented by the state propaganda.

Then of course there is the beach level: Battleship Bay. I must confess this is probably one of my all time favorite locations in the game. Why? Well just look at it:

Battleship Bay

Look at the vibrant colors, and the amazing detail of the floating buildings in the distance. Look at the little sand castles, people splashing in the water, dancing and sun-tanning. It is really a charming little location full of really great scripted events that are subtle and yet add so much to the look and feel of this place. For example, at one point when you emerge onto the beach there is a string gust of sea breeze which carries sand and a beach ball across your field of vision as kinds pounce towards the shore in the distance. It is a little thing – completely meaningless in the grander scheme of things, but it really sells you on the whole beach idea. If you have ever been at the shore, you know those gusts, and how they are an inseparable part of the beach going experience.

Beach Bums

A lesser game would populate the beach with enemies and have you fight through them to get to your goal. Bioshock Infinite does not do that – it lets you explore and absorb the atmosphere without forced combat. This is one of the things that always bothered me about the first Bioshock game – it never really gave you a break. From the moment you arrived in Rapture you were accosted from all sides by violent splicers. You always had to be on your guard, and always expected a sudden ambush. This was of course intended – the game wanted you to feel alone, pursued and scared. But whenever a game does that, combat fatigue sets in pretty quickly. A player can only operate in the twitch-kill mode for a limited amount of time. After a while constant combat becomes tiresome and you start to crave a break in the action and some exploration time. Unfortunately once you cleared an area in Bioshock it became a lifeless, sad and depressing place. Bioshock Infinite gives you these vibrant, interesting and lively levels you can explore. They are full of color and interesting details and sound bytes for you to take in. It makes for great interludes between the combat sequences.

The Battleship

This is pretty much the first thing you see when you arrive on the Battleship Bay and right of the bat the game gives you hints about your objective before you even know what it is going to be. The name of the place contains the word Battleship and you can actually see said ship in the distance. When it finally becomes your primary objective you have seen it enough of times in the sky to be really familiar with it, and really eager to reach it. It is like with the statue in the first chapter. They show you the carrot first long before they start to dangle it in front of your face.

This makes the game flow so smoothly and makes the transitions between objectives so damn organic and seamless. In the original Bioshock you mostly did things because you had to. Either because Fontaine asked you to do them, or because they were the only available path of progress. The game felt incredibly linear because of that. Bioshock Infinite is just as linear, but you have a real sense of agency. Why? Because the level design ensures that your goals as a player (check out the huge statue, find where that battleship is docked, etc..) always coincide with the goals of the protagonist. It is a little thing but it counts.

I must also mention that I absolutely love the character design in this game. I’m really glad they didn’t try to go for realism but instead designed rather stylized, more cartoony character models. They fit perfectly in the brilliantly colorful game world:

Character Design

One of the things I hated about the original Bioshock was how empty the Rapture felt. It was populated almost solely by insane and violent splicers, and the few characters who seemed at least borderline sane didn’t really exist in the game world. We mostly interacted with them via radio or in cut scenes. The only non-violent character model we actually got to talk in person was Andrew Ryan, and even that turned into a blood-bath rather quickly.

Bioshock Infinite is filled with NPC’s who just provide background. They mill around in the city, they have conversations on which you can evesdrop and they make the place feel alive. There are quite a few scripted evens in which the in-game crowd will react to some event, like in the screenshot above. I love the fact that the game did not wrestle the camera from me to show me the scene that freaked out all these citizens. I was free to look around at peoples faces, and observe their reactions while I was walking around among them.

And yes, I posted a picture of Elizabeth here but let’s not talk about her yet. The next post in this series is going to be all about her so we can discuss her character in detail.