I just played... Bioshock Infinite

In this reality, much wasted potential.

                I find pineapples rather interesting. How externally they are coarse and sharp, capable of leaving you with cuts to rival that of your average depressed teenager’s wrists; but the inside is something else, soft, sweet and delicious, with only a tinge of prickly fibre to remind you of its exterior. What does this have to do with Bioshock Infinite? Nothing, I just wanted to talk about pineapples for a moment.
       

                Now, Bioshock Infinite… what a pickle indeed. It’s being heralded by many as the pinnacle of the gaming industry, of storytelling in videogames and what-not. This is, in part, a reality and in part, not. You see the problem with Bioshock Infinite is that all the praise and acclaim it accumulates is, in part, due to the part of it that is not the game, namely the world and the ending (worry not, there will be no spoilers). As a game, it is rather mediocre and a fair bit stale and uninspired, which obviously opens up all new avenues of arguments for me.

                Perhaps the best way to describe it is that it is made of many parts, and these parts are fine… actually I’d say that many of these parts are good, damn good, but as the sum it sort of forms this mouldy, lumpy mass that doesn’t gel well together and seems to constantly be effervescent within itself. This is solved, in part, by a casing, a very pretty casing, that helps make it come across as a smooth and cohesive hole. That is till, you breach the casing and discover the hollow spaces within as well as that odd lumpy mass.

Tooltips are quite existent in this game, and are even there to remind you to fire in short bursts during the final battle.

                Bioshock Infinite suffers from what I am going to dub the ‘Icarus Syndrome’; which is that a game can come across as blissfully complete and marvellous on first impression, but sure as the sun rises this illusion comes a-crashing into a flesh and wax pile upon which you mourn for what could have been. While this syndrome raises the obvious issue of ‘if it’s enjoyable initially, isn’t it worth it’, and such paradoxes are often the things that leave me awake at night pondering the purposes of existence and the purpose of purpose ‘if you can smile at something first, why frown at it later?’, alas the answer to such a question is best left to the tides of time and my epitaph, which likely read ‘I’m a cynical fob, and you’re all going to end up as worm food like me. Nyahaha.’

                Bioshock Infinite takes place on the flying city of Columbia, where Booker DeWitt, the player, must retrieve a girl to pay off some old debts to old landlubbers. While Rapture was built as a city free from ‘ideals’ and ‘structures’, Columbia is a city built solely on a set of zealous ideals and stern societal structures; polar opposites in more than vertical reach. And, first things first, Columbia is beautifully realised and detailed, a wonderfully crafted world… but this takes me to my first issue.

What the RPG elements have boiled down to.

                The Rapture we see in Bioshock is decrepit and ruined, a shadow of its former self. Columbia is vibrant and alive… and that’s where a problem arises, it’s alive. In Bioshock there were no other people for you to observe, no characters set in fixed patterns, it's lonely and lovely. Bioshock Infinite is filled with characters, other people who put on a charade of living there, of existing, like an amusement park attraction, active and moving but ultimately static. It’s obvious that the world was designed for someone continuously moving; take a moment to look around and this illusion breaks very quick, while other inhabitants just stand about constantly repeating one single action or just staring at you after speaking their scripted lines. For me, this completely and thoroughly broke the feel of the world, and it immediately came across as artificial and well, amusement park-like.

Columbia manages to be a fascinating world. 

                Which brings me to another different yet similar issue, the fact that the game suffers from ‘Gameplay and Story Segregation’ (wherein there is an absurd demarcation between how the game’s world works when in story-mode or gameplay-mode) on the level of a JRPG (which themselves can vary in how grating it is). To be precise the gameplay present and the story and world gel together about as well as a tiger and deer would in an odd-couple comedy show.

Arbitrary choices? Check. Is that the point? Don't know. 

                On its own the gunplay is pretty solid if simplistic and straightforward, guns handle well enough and combat is satisfying enough on a pure id-feeding level. Even though it tried to make me feel satisfied as I used lightning and watched the heads of a group of enemies explode, I couldn’t help but feel a bit startled at how dissonant the gameplay and everything else is, to the extent that I felt that the two have to enjoyed separately, but that’s not how the game is designed, at least JRPGs have a giant screen and different music to inform you ‘hey, you’re in the gameplay section now, bringing dead characters back to life is a thing here, mmmkay?’

Elizabeth manages to be fairly interesting, and her arc is likely the main thing to keep you invested. 

                I do find it rather amusing how they made Elizabeth a non-aggravating companion character: by not really making her a companion character. She’s by your side for pretty much the entire game, but she doesn’t really do that much during gameplay, she might put markers on dangerous foes for you or let you summon in some help or resources, and that’s it. She’s mostly there for the story and sometimes participates in the charades of the still world… to the extent that if she begins a scripted activity she will continue to do that activity till you play your scripted part (the only thing the game might do is add an extra line): one example being a part where she starts dancing and will keep twirling, and twirling, and twirling, and twirling, and twirling, and twirling, and twirling, till you walk up to her and press a button… and something similar happens when she is wrestled by another character… the two will keep on grunting and struggling till you press a button. It’s all a charade.

The Skylines make the raw combat thrilling and pretty fluid. Doesn't do anything to ail it of the dissonance.

                One of the things I disliked about Bioshock were the extremely anorexic RPG elements compared to System Shock 2, and it really shouldn’t be any surprise that Infinite pretty much does away with ALL RPG elements. Interestingly, Infinite does the opposite of Bioshock, where you could carry all weapons but only a few plasmids, here you always carry all vigors (plasmids, basically) but only two weapons, which is peculiar and a bit redundant since the game always leaves plenty of weapons littered around with situational replacements always available. On another note is my complaint that vigors just got blend well into the story at all, and feel forced and there for ‘gameplay’s sake’ to put it bluntly; they were an integral part of Bioshock's story, but here they're just a mechanic.  

DeWitt regrets the horrible things he has done. No, really.

                Level design has boiled down to many linear paths, with the occasional and obvious and short-lived branch to get a little reward, or my favourite, the ‘backtrack a bit for a reward’ sections that are allegedly ‘secrets’. Thankfully the locales are varied and interesting enough to remain enjoyable, though it’s a terrible shame you don’t have the freedom to truly explore them.

                ‘Story makes it worth it’ is probably a moniker I could use to describe Bioshock Infinite, and it’s true, in part. I’m going to have to get capitalist for a moment, and talk about money and Infinite… See, I bought the game on sale, so I got it dirt cheap and it felt worthy, to me, of around that price (higher of course, perhaps around 20$). The game has no replay value whatsoever, since the gameplay isn’t exciting or varied enough to justify trudging through a heavily scripted game all over again. Sure, you could justify another play by saying you want to see everything in another context after seeing the ending, but my counter-argument is that the game is so short-lived that everything I had just been through is still fresh in my memory. At 10-12 hours in length, and incredibly easy even on the hardest (available by default) difficulty  the game doesn’t last as long as you might hope, which brings me back to my capitalist introspection and whether my impressions would have been different if I bought it for full price.

*Very, very mild spoilers ahead*

                As for the ending, I would define it as what I now dub a ‘tangential ending’, wherein a story resolves itself by shooting in a different direction altogether. Of course, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, many other great stories have done it before, though they all share that little hint of making you feel ‘cheated’. Sometimes you can’t help but wonder if a story headed into a different, larger scope questioning many fundamental things about humanity and the world just because the writer couldn’t find a fucking way to see the story through normally… I’m looking at you Neon Genesis Evangelion, you’re good but I still feel oddly cheated by you, you scamp.

*Very, very mild spoilers end*

The game is incredibly pretty, and makes even the random combat screenshot look wonderful. 

                All in all, I feel in bit of a pickle summing things up. I suspect the ending is the main reason the game was heralded as such a masterpiece, since it certainly is the kind of ending that would leave you utterly spellbound, at a loss for words. And I’d definitely jump on that bandwagon and say the game is worth playing for the ending, almost exclusively for the ending since it really is quite something despite the fact that it and the plot is full of holes, varying from the size of bullet wounds to megalodon wounds. The story can feel a bit heavy-handed, forced and bit ‘I’m saying strong and relevant things’ in many parts, but it is worth the ride… triply so if you grab the game on sale and get it for dirt-cheap. Let me remind you, that the words you just read could have been considerably more negative or existential if I had bought the game at full price, so you could say that I am taking my opinion with a grain of salt, which obviously doesn’t help my existential issues.

(extra note: I plan on (re)playing and writing on Bioshock as well, since I don’t trust my memories and old opinions… which is why I tried to avoid any critical comparisons between it and Infinite)