Bioshock Infinite Autopsy

Spoilers ahoy. Major ones for Infinite, possibly minor ones for the first two.

     There are a lot of things in this game that are good; nearly all of which can be found in its predecessors. There's a bunch of things that are basically not good almost none of which can be found in its predecessors.

     Don't get me wrong this is a good game; more games like this need to be made but it's flawed.

      It starts with a man going into a lighthouse that leads to a city. It's 1912 you're name is Booker Dewitt and over the course of the first act it's revealed that you're a mercenary of sorts, sent by A Man to free this girl, Elizabeth, to clear your gambling debts.

      It's a fairly straightforward story that works really well for the vast majority of the game. Columbia is a theocracy following a profit called Zachary Comstock. The religion is the Founder's religion, based on the founding fathers (of the USA to avoid confusion) it kinda looks like Mormonism and behaves a lot like the deranged Christian right wingers. And, like the present, are also aggressively racist.

      It takes a fair amount of time to get to Elizabeth. Indeed I think I spent about the first hour wandering around the fair and getting a better idea of the world. I think it's about an hour and half before you get have to kill anybody.

     Once you do catch up to Elizabeth, you find she's been locked in a library for most of her life, meaning she's well educated and has picked up a few skills like lock-picking and code-breaking. (I mean if I were to keep someone prisoner I'd only allow them young adult novels and celebrity biographies, but then I'm a much better evil dictator than I think anybody really realises yet. And to be fair there is a reason for wanting her intelligent, so it's not an oversight on her captor's part.)

      Her captor being Zachary Comstock, her father.

    As you progress you get caught up in the sub plot of proceedings. The Vox Populi, the mostly black, all underdog class of Columbia are organising a rebellion against the white supremacists which Booker is bullied into helping.

     Around this time you're also introduced to Elizabeth's superpower go to other universes where things are the same but with a few details changed. For a while she's been pulling things into our universe as part of the gameplay but now we get the option to save the rebel's dead gunsmith by going into this reality with no going back. I was a lot more excited and nervous about this possibility than the game was; abandon my whole reality for the sake of one man. We don't know what else is different there, maybe people keep vultures as pets and feed their first-borns to them for prosperity purposes.

     Unfortunately nothing so interesting happens. Instead it's just the gunsmith is alive. Indeed I'm not sure alternate universe is really the right term here as when you get to the other side of the tear, the guards you killed before are sort of half dead here, disorientated and bleeding from the nose and ears like they have a brain haemorrhage. Elizabeth says this is because they remember being dead. Which initially made less sense than the vulture thing I imagined a minute ago. After jumping through a couple more tears the world has changed so much that Booker is the leader of the rebel forces and in this reality dead. (Which begs the question that if you existed in the past couple of realities why did you never meet yourself? Those kind of scenes are always fun.)  

     (Around about here you get a major plot development.

     You're in a lift and suddenly Elizabeth says, "You can ask about it you know." Right here I was just as bewildered as Booker.

    "Huh?" we both say.

    "My finger." she holds up her right hand and shows us that half of her little finger is missing, the stump covered up by a thimble.

     "Oh I just assumed you were born with it."

     "I was, I found this thimble to cover it up."

     Aside from being one of the few places where I totally agreed with booker and felt exactly his feelings it was one of the few places where anything in the ending is foreshadowed, albeit jarringly. The thing is, I literally had not noticed her finger was missing perhaps this is my fault for being a great person who only sees the inner beauty of people and not their hideous deformities. Or maybe it simply never gave you any reason to look at her hand. At the time this really was a bewildering scene, I thought maybe it was trying to generate sympathy for her because she can't... euhm... do whatever you do without your right pinkie. Scratch your inner ear I guess. It really is the very least you can loose and still be considered maimed.)

     Your nose starts bleeding as you talk about what went differently to lead to this rebellion. At this point I thought I figured out what was happening; the tears re-write history, overlaying the corrections on the reality. If that makes any kind of sense to you then well done, but I'm not sure how else to explain it. Also around here I started to think that Elizabeth was manipulating me into becoming the hero she wanted. Not just someone who would care for her as a person but who cared about emancipating the underclass. This is a much more interesting story that is never returned to if it was intended in the first place.

     Towards the end, though not the actual ending, you get separated from Elizabeth and are, without really knowing it, sent through a tear by yourself. You're still on your way to the asylum where Elizabeth is but it's like sixty years in a future where you never saved her from the asylum and she's been tortured and brainwashed into becoming the same zealot as Comstock and "bathe in flame the mountains of men". Naturally New York is being destroyed when you catch up to Elizabeth who remembers you and seems normal but older. She gives you a message for her younger self and sends you back through a tear to save her from the brainwashing that was clearly very effective. (Is it just me or does that all seem kinda pointless when explained like that? Ironically it's one of the better parts of the game, the 'what could be' aspect. Not to mention the environment is even creepier, it almost looks like something out of Silent Hill.)

     On a zeppelin you kill Comstock. Bash his head in on a bird table. Fun scene.

     And so we get to the ending. It's kind of a mess. And, at fifteen minutes of interactive cutscene, too long.

     The best part of it is that Elizabeth teleports you and the giant metal bird creature from earlier to Rapture. You're inside and the bird thing drowns outside. I say it's the best because I'm utterly in love with Rapture, meaning all I'm doing is responding emotionally to fan service. In reality it's totally pointless, Elizabeth takes you out of Rapture up to the surface to the lighthouse entrance. She magics a key out of nowhere "It's always been there" and I'm curious why she wants to go back into the place we already left.

      She opens the lighthouse door and we walk into, I think, a dream space full of Rapture lighthouses. She says something along the lines of "It always starts with a man a lighthouse and a city" doing its best to tie this game to its predecessors and set up future sequels.  

      We walk along a self building bridge (the like of which you've seen in Bastion, Darksiders and some clever Minecraft constructions) and into a second Rapture lighthouse. Exiting from a Columbia lighthouse you see a version of yourself and Elizabeth doing the same thing -- but you don't get to punch yourself. You then enter a Columbia lighthouse and come out at a baptism. Yours of course.

     Booker tells you that this is just after the battle of Wounded Knee, a native American slaughter that has come up in the game before. You refuse the baptism and go through the door of a shed of some kind. ending up in the respawn apartment, that you've also seen at points throughout the game where Booker has been KOd. It's revealed here that the "give us the girl to wipe away the debt" line we've heard, and been consistently led to believe was the deal to get Elizabeth back, was in fact when Booker sold his infant daughter. Elizabeth is Booker's daughter. If it hadn't made itself clear there it shows Booker running to catch up to Comstock and his daughter as they escape through a portal. As the portal closes Elizabeth (aka Anna, the name Booker gave her) reaches out to her daddy and the portal closes on her pinkie finger on her right hand. So that foreshadowing scene really helped us figure out that Elizabeth was Bookers daughter! And explains why two opposite sex characters in a video game don't want to fuck each other! I shoulda seen it coming.

     Booker and present day Elizabeth decide that Comstock has to super die for this like erased from history. Elizabeth takes you back to where Comstock was born and you arrive at the baptism scene again...

     Yeah, we're talking metaphorical birth here. Or rebirth... Are you there yet?

     Booker is Comstock!!1 It's a super twist shock. Like, shock squared.

     Then a Bunch of different Elizabeths from different parallels jump out and drown you. You, um, heartless monster.

     I hate this ending. It only serves to undermine the rest of the story. I can sort of get on board with Booker being her father; though I think it'd have been nice to have two characters form a non sexual relationship, based on shaky trust and necessity of each other, without having it feel like the only reason it wasn't love is because they share too many chromosomes.

     It kinda feels like the series is suffering Shyamalan Syndrome. After pulling off a great twist it feels like it has to do it again but better and bigger and even harder to see coming. And twice. It didn't work for Shyamalan and it's not worked here.

     I'm really struggling to put the timeline(s) together. How many Bookers are necessary to create the Booker we thought we were, what happens to make Booker Comstock in the first place, is it the stress and trauma of the Native American genocide he was forced to participate in, that leads him to wanting to keep racial purity? That doesn't make a whole ton of sense. It's just messy and too much all at once. About 90% of the main story happens in the last fifteen minutes, most of the game deals with sub plots that only occasionally even hint at anything in the ending.

    Ignoring the ending though it's a way above average game that invites you to think about what you're doing rather than begging you not to.

     Characters now. This is where the game shines. At least until the ending. Throughout the game you get to know Booker and then Elizabeth when you catch up to her. They have an interesting dynamic. Booker initially taking advantage of her naiveté, but not taking into account her intelligence and the betrayal and loss of innocence that follows is a stand out portion of the game that genuinely takes a long time to heal and even then only because they have bigger problems.

    This is how you do first person characterisation; by creating a character. You are experiencing Booker's story, one that you get to influence yeah, but it's his. It's like a first person novel, it's not your story. Most FPS games have the main character silent all the time, even when being spoken too -- are you supposed to roleplay and speak in their place or are they just being rude? Which I find irritating. Or else they have a character say the most ineffectual, least meaningful things in the universe so that it can't possibly clash with your world view.

    It's very rare in games to really care about your AI partner, if it's a female they tend to be the overly aggressive man with tits or blank slate perfection and if they're male they're usually suffering a case of Dead Wife to make sure you care about them, but here she feels like a person, and one that you'd like to keep alive.

     Away from the main two,  the auxiliary characters like rebel leader, Daisy Fitzroy, and capitalist bastard Fink, have interesting things about them and serve the story and setting well.

     The voice recordings are my favourite part though, as with Rapture you get a much better feel for how the place normally is through the accounts of those who live there. It's always exiting to find a new one and have it be from the character you're finding most interesting, even if they are on the very fringe of the plot. It helps build a more complete picture of Columbia and while I only missed the achievement for collecting all of them by about five I still want to find them. (Who knows maybe the vital piece for understanding the ending is in one -- though if that's the case it absolutely shouldn't be.)  

     As with Rapture, Columbia is as much a character as it is a setting, albeit one I like less. As soon as I heard it was going to be a floating city I thought "Ridiculous" that's unfeasible in the extreme, especially for the time period. Rapture and Columbia are as impossible as each other but with Rapture I was sold immediately -- that's so cool! -- so I never took into account the inordinate amount of plumbing necessary, or the pressure, or how fragile a place like that would be. When I did get round to that sort of thinking I found ways of making it work, because I cared about the world. Columbia on the other hand immediately sounded dumb and did nothing to make itself sound more possible. The reason it can float is something called "quantum locking". Which is just a science-y way of saying magic -- especially given that it's set thirty or so years before we split the atom.

     When  "quantum locking" is explained by the scientist she says "if I can suspend an atom, then why not an apple, and if an apple, why not a city?" The words suspend and lock imply frozen and stationary, at least to me, and yet Columbia is clearly floating, the islands bob up and down as if on water. Not to mention the thing flies around the world destroying cities. And it has all these balloons and propellers attached. It kinda felt like it was covering it's bases.

     I'm scared of heights. I often have slightly paranoid visions of falling out of an exploding plane, having minutes to think about my life and mistakes and everything I haven't done before slamming into the ground with terminal velocity. I very often forgot I was above the clouds in Columbia, much of it takes place inside or in the middle of the islands. Even when you're sky-lining your way around, the clouds are pretty close underneath you and look very solid.

    If you do fall off the edge, and I do mean if, (I can count the times it happened to me on two fingers (twice))  you immediately respawn with no penalties. It's very jarring, there should at least be the same penalty as being shot to death (money loss) A friend of mine played this game before me and told me about how he used this to his advantage; he was going to die so threw himself off the edge to respawn in safety, giving himself the upper hand. Clever, but there's a huge design flaw right there, where the dying can be helpful. In fact what's the mechanism for respawning in this manner anyway? When you're murdered you see flashes of Elizabeth injecting you with a miracle cure for incineration. It at least feels like you're connected to the universe. I wanted to see falling and screaming, that'd be much more of a threat than anything else it could do.

     One of the things that the studio pushed in the advertising of Columbia is that it was a "living world". There was an admirable effort at this, particularly at the beginning when you're wandering around the fair ground, people talking to you and going about their business but as soon as the shooting starts -- which is a good hour or so into the game I'd like to add, and I think that's basically a good thing -- everybody evaporates. It becomes a shooting gallery, albeit a really fun one.

     This happens a couple of times throughout the game, you're walking through a place that's living and breathing and then you'll trigger the shooting bit and everybody has already disappeared in a very silent very sudden evacuation. To my mind, in a video game, a living world is something you have the option to destroy, I'm thinking Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, Assassin's Creed even the Dead Rising series. They allow you to interact with their living worlds. Here it looks good but it's missing true interactivity, I can only recall interacting when I was asked to buy a flower (I declined). If I want I should be able to start shooting because somebody looked at me funny.

      (An oddity more than a criticism; why is it stealing when someone can see you but if they're not around it's just collecting?)

     I often did want to start shooting, too. Columbia is just full of pious zealots worshipping their own superiority, it's hellish and irredeemable. Though I must admit very satisfying watching it get torn to shit when the rebellion gets going. This is something that, technically speaking, Infinite does better than the first game. It shows you a world in decline, which few games I can think of do, even if, personally, I prefer arriving after the fact and imagining The Fall. Although when we see Columbia in the flash forward I wanted to spend more time there too. A game that leaves you wanting more of everything is doing something right.

    The main problem I have with Columbia over Rapture is the core idea of the place. Rapture was a good idea that failed catastrophically, Columbia is an idea that's failed over and over again. One that we're all told about from an early age and rightfully reject. Slavery is wrong, racism is bad, America is blind.

     It paint's things as very black and white from the beginning, pun intended. I think it tries to humanise Comstock but it's much too late, it's hard to care about a monster being infertile when he's causing so much pain and misery with impunity. Yes Daisy Fitzroy is wrong to go on the mass killing spree that she does, but we see her as a person first and even when she's threatening to kill a child I see her as the lesser of two evils by far. Peaceful subjugation and misery worship that lasts a hundred years I feel is much worse than a war that lasts a week.

     Perhaps I'm wrong, the game suggests.

     I have to say also that this game could use more gay. Religions hate gay people, why couldn't this game have a gay character on the resistance? Or even in recordings. One thing we can do in hellish places like Columbia, that people with different skin can't, is hide in plain sight. There could have been an interesting story there. One that wasn't necessarily preaching to the choir. Games, with the exception of Borderlands 2, often omit the existence of gay people and that's more or less fine for garbage like Call Of Duty, where the less association the better, but in a game like this it feels missing. Would it really have been that controversial to draw the obvious parallel? I'm sure that Bioshock 1 at least had some coded gay characters, which enriched the world given that Rapture was all about personal freedom.

    The gameplay is incredible. If you're not interested in exploring themes of American Racism for the umpteenth time then play the game for the shooting bits. The plasmids are a lot better this time around, in the first/second game most of them were relatively simple things that we're all familiar with from fantasy games. Here they have more verity and strategic use. One flings your opponents in the air allowing you kill them quickly or to concentrate fire on a bigger threat. Another gives you a bit more damage resistance or allows you to magnetise bullets towards your hand and then throw them back. You still have your basic fireball and lightning bolt -- they all go by different names but I don't remember them.

    You also get gear, which give you slight advantages like more chance of enemies dropping salts or bullets, things like that. One of the most interesting ones gives you a large damage boost when you have very low health, allowing you to get more out of playing dangerously and one I used to great effect when fighting a zombie necromancer... It makes sense in context. Sort of.

     The major change I noticed was that you can only carry two guns at a time now. You still upgrade them and every time you find the gun again it's upgraded to the same level as you've paid for, logically it makes no sense but for gameplay purposes it was absolutely the right thing to do. Because it hasn't fallen into the trend of universal ammo I kept having to switch up weapons, which gave me more variety and exiting moments when I had to run through the battle field to pick up a gun with ammo. Despite being very attached to the slightly overpowered shotgun I still used all the weapons at least once and had a lot more fun because of it.

     The addition of a recharging shield ala Halo/Borderlands/every sci-fi game ever is basically good though if you're savvy with how much fire you allow yourself to take you're functionally invincible. None of the enemies seem to have these, which is a shame as it seems to break really quickly when you electrocute yourself. It'd have been nice to face off against a couple of shielded enemies every now and then, ones that ran from you when their shield broke.

    All of the shooting bits are exciting, involving and rewarding and ing-ing. Indeed given how much of the game you spend not shooting things it does feel like a treat. I think this is called pacing.

     The enemies themselves are pretty good. They're reasonably interested in their self preservation, and attack with a variety of the weapons if not so often with the plasmids. Some are tough but never feel like complete bullet sponges. With the possible exception of the Handymen, the Big Daddy replacements. These feral killing machines take a whole lot to put down, the screen shakes and throws off your aim when they're charging at you and when they hit you it does feel like you've been slapped by a van. They're pretty scary and the fact there's only three of them makes them feel like a real event.

     I had an issue where at one stage the handy man was essentially spawn camping me, that was more down to flawed level design than the enemy being  bad, but it did kinda spoil that fight when I had to resort to reloading.

     Over all I did kinda feel that the game was a little too easy, I played on hard and sailed through the first third to half of the game and when I did die I rarely had to try more than twice. I've heard that, like with the original games, there isn't much difference between playing normal and hard, though I did unlock 1999 mode, which reduces health and ammo and things like that to create a greater challenge. I look forward to giving that a try.  

     I do have a few gripes about the gameplay, or at least certain design choices. One that got worse over time was the lock picks. Early in the game Elizabeth reveals her lock-picking skills that can get you into treasure room areas. You'd find the lock before finding the lock-picks and so finding the picks and returning to the locked room or safe felt like a reward. About halfway through the game it starts putting up locked doors as part of the main story, which meant that the game had to throw extra lock-picks at you to make sure you could progress, meaning I always ended up with plenty extra and by the last third could always open these doors. So it stopped feeling like a reward and something that meagrely happens occasionally. In a few places too there were locks stuck onto a door that looked like there were floating in front of the door or looked like they wouldn't actually lock the door. Which just makes it look like they've taken a short cut, they could have designed different locks for different doors, ya know?

     Also fall damage isn't consistent. You can jump off a roof and break your leg but jumping from a sky hook that's higher up that the roof does nothing. Things like that are just annoying.

     There are even a few areas where the environment hit boxing is very off. Like an invisible wall stopping you from hugging the actual wall, it doesn't happen too often but much more than it should have, I don't remember anything like that happening in the first game.

     There is a handfull of other minor things like that that distracted me but I don't want to get bogged down in nit-picking as overall it's very good.

     The gameplay and characters really win me over in the game. I grew quite fond of Booker despite not really liking him in the beginning. I find that too many aspects of the plot don't work and that the ending only ruins the majority of the game, despite setting up sequels efficiently and, if the series keeps up this trend of giving more advanced sciences to less developed cultures, I'll be looking forward to riding a penny-farthing on the moon throwing cats at people and firing a laser Gatling gun.