BioShock Remastered (PS4, 2016 - originally PS3, 2008)
I'm going to be honest with you. I've been thinking about how to write up BioShock Remastered for a while since I finished it and I have nothing. It's my favourite game ever and even before I finished it the entire thing was so familiar to me no details were standing out that I could make a point of. As far as I can tell I've played this game three times in my life - 2008 when it came out for PS3, 2013 when I went back to it before Infinite came out, and 2015 when I finally went back and finished all the trophies. Just like when I played Heavy Rain earlier this year, it was all so engaging that every detail of it felt so fresh and clear in my mind it felt like I'd been playing it constantly on repeat since 2008.
With that in mind I don't know where to start. It's such a revered and well-known game that I feel like anyone reading this will be aware of the premise even if they've managed to never play it. BioShock is a first person shooter where you play as Jack (I still don't know where this name is revealed - I probably should). Jack's on a plane somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean. It crashes and he survives to discover he's right next to a lighthouse. He enters the lighthouse and discovers it leads to the underwater city of Rapture. Rapture was founded by Andrew Ryan following every idiot on the internet's wet dream - what if I lived in a city with no rules or regulations, where Great Men And Women were free to create anything they wanted and live in complete freedom? What follows is a philosophical, sociological and existential exploration of the player's role in relation to the player character in video games, dressed up with clunky combat mechanics and the depiction of an objectivist society in ruin.
As far as gameplay is concerned, it's pretty straightforward. You have a selection of weapons you collect and can switch between as you progress. There's more than enough ammo for all of them lying around, and if you run out there are plenty of vending machines and inventing stations where you can get more. You can also use a range of Plasmids and Tonics, genetic-altering substances created thanks to Rapture's approach to scientific advancement, to add some variety to the combat. Want to set people or the environment on fire? Electrocute them? Want to make yourself stronger, or invisible to security cameras that send the flying shooting security bots after you? The assorted combat possibilities are practically endless, and you find yourself switching between them periodically just for some variety. Headshotting people with the crossbow is by far the most fun you'll have. The one thing I'd hold against the game here is that it never really feels like a struggle. There's always more than enough ammo, money and health lying around.
There's a decent range of enemies for you to unleash all this firepower on. The most common enemies are Splicers, Rapture's ordinary citizens who through extended Plasmid use ruined their genetic makeup so badly they're completely deformed and psychotic. You go up against a range of Splicers, some with melee weapons, some with guns, some who can teleport and shoot fireballs at you. Actually killing them doesn't vary much as you work your way through the game, but the combination of their abilities and the environments mean you always have to adapt during combat.
The security systems dotted around are comprised of camera, turrets and the flying bots. You can hack these to make them work for you and target enemies, but I don't know how steam-powered turrets made out of random objects can pick out targets. On top of all of this are probably BioShock's most famous characters, the Big Daddies. I'll cover their thematic significance later, but combat against these guys is as tough as BioShock gets. Even on harder difficulties you can still take out Splicers in one or two shots, Big Daddies are sponges who will slam you into a wall and stun you even as you empty a machine gun clip into them. The thing is, for whatever preparation you put into trying to take one of these things down, you always end up frantically scrambling trying to heal yourself and get some space for another shot before you get slammed again. These encounters really make you feel vulnerable, and there's a genuine sense of satisfaction from overcoming them.
There now follows a short history of how Rapture ended up the way it did.
As mentioned, Andrew Ryan founded Rapture shortly after the Second World War to escape state interference and restraint on the surface. The suggestion is that his sanctimonious speech greets everyone who ever arrived in the city, where he complains about America and Russia and the Vatican and anyone else he thought was out to get him. It seemed Rapture was going from strength to strength until someone discovered a sea slug nearby which through experimentation allowed people to alter their DNA. The resulting substance was called Adam and through some smart people working with it Plasmids were created. Suddenly everyone could change themselves to be whatever they wanted and do whatever they wanted. Most of them ended up turning into Splicers.
Around the same time a man named Frank Fontaine was building up a powerbase to overthrow Ryan as the man in charge of Rapture. Starting with smuggling and fish importing he portrayed himself as an ordinary guy who was there for the people left behind by Rapture. The quote that always stands out from the game for me is one of his, where he says that everyone goes to Rapture dreaming of being a captain of industry, forgetting they'll still need someone to clean the toilets. As the inevitable inequalities became more and more pronounced Fontaine starts up a home for the poor and, hey, now he has an army to take on Ryan. Combine this with the plasmids that Fontaine Futuristics were putting out and hey presto, they're going head to head with Ryan Industries in a full-on civil war.
In a game environment filled with striking imagery, the most iconic characters are those Big Daddies. They follow and protect Little Sisters, young girls who are trained to go around sticking syringes into the corpses that line the streets to harvest Adam from them. The main purpose of the Little Sisters is to provide the game's moral choice system (remember 2008 when that was a thing?). After killing the Big Daddy you can either harvest the girl and get lots of Adam, or you can follow the advice of the person responsible for them, Brigid Tenenbaum, and free them. If you free all of them you actually get more Adam, but you aren't to know that if you play the game blind.
BioShock is a game which is never short of things to provoke an emotional response in the player. Tenenbaum's voice competes with others in your radio to flesh out the competing narratives about the history of Rapture and the things that happened pre and post-fall. You might marvel at the sheer scale of the city when you enter a hall or a room, then you see a woman standing over a pram singing a lullaby and crying, only to find that there's a revolver where the baby should be. Although I've said I found all of the game familiar and as such unsurprising, I can still see the people left in Rapture and the decayed society that produced them. Every area and action in the game provides some detail about the environment, and it never stops surprising you.
The art design of Rapture is a big reason for it being so memorable. Although it was pitched as freedom for all sorts of artistic development, it's telling that a city which functioned through the late 40s and most of the 50s is stuck very firmly in the Art Deco period. Still, Art Deco was quite striking as a movement so pretty much every aspect of the environment design is bold and distinctive. The Rapture-specific objects like vending machines and airlock doors fit in well with the style too. Rapture is an setting clearly inspired by a real life historical period, but it's copied and mimicked so thoroughly that it feels like a plausible organic offshoot in this alternate universe. The dated music from the same time that new citizens to Rapture would have brought with them also persists and adds to the city's ambiance. In a game filled with strengths, the environment is arguably the most evocative.
Two memories of this game stand out in my head. I'd love to write about them after having experienced them for the first time. I'd love to experience something like that in a game again, but I doubt I could. The first is the reveal of Rapture itself at the very start of the game. Seeing the city for the first time is a reveal that very little media I can think of has ever compared to. For an old game - and I'll come to the technical aspects shortly - the sheer imagery of the game's first twenty minutes or so is incomparable and still stands out even now.
The second standout moment is the game's twist. I remember reaching that point for the first time and genuinely being stunned. Playing it now and being careful to uncover every detail and search every area, of course I can see all the things that point towards the twist, but when you're young and dumb you're just swept up in the excitement of it all and miss everything. Going back to it older and wiser I can properly appreciate all of the detail and I'm objectively impressed by it. A lot of work went into imparting the history of Rapture and its citizens on the player as you progress and none of it is wasted. Whether it concerns a main character's work on something plot specific or ordinary day to day life, everything you find out adds to the development of the city.
With this in mind, there is an argument that BioShock struggles in its character development. The game leans very heavily on telling rather than showing. Most of the history you uncover is oral, with people conveniently leaving tape recorders around telling you all the important things that happened and that they just happened to be talking about at the time. Every important detail about the city and the things and people in it are all captured. It can be a bit wearing listening to this much dialogue, as well as stressful at the thought of missing one of them and missing out on a bit of crucial information. When you add this to Ryan, Tenenbaum and Fontaine who are all on your radio telling you how great they are, it's a lot to take in at times. I'm not sure how else all this detail could have been presented to the player - and to be clear, none of it is wasted. All of it is interesting - but there are times where it feels like a chore that you have to go along with as well as just playing the game.
I was surprised when I played BioShock Remastered. I expected a more technically sound game than this. The game does feel dated in some areas. While Splicer character design varies throughout the game's locations, you'll find them often repeating the same lines of dialogue as they walk around. I feel like I heard at least five haughty women complain about the priest at their daughter's wedding before I attacked them. This isn't a problem caused by the remastering though, just an observation. The sound is probably the remaster's biggest problem, with some bits of dialogue sticking and the sound of cameras where there are none. Rather than a remastering it feels like a straight port of the original that wasn't even done perfectly, so that's a bit disappointing.
The remaster does feature an interactive look at some assets created in the game's development. I'm a big fan of this rather than a stationary artbook. I love the game so if there's a chance to see some additional artwork I'm all over that. It also helps show you how well-rounded the game's characters are, as Splicers were originally so warped and inhuman they wouldn't have felt relatable at all. There's also over an hour and a half of director's commentary with Ken Levine and Shawn Robertson included in the game, which is also on YouTube:
Rather than this just being viewable or being unlocked after you finish, you need to find film reels in levels to see this stuff in-game. This is stupid, and makes me want to explore less. All in all, the port from PS3 to PS4 is functional. It didn't crash and everything that was supposed to be there was.
After all of the words I've written here I've realised why I struggled to start this write-up for so long. The game is so familiar to me that I have no emotional reaction to any of it anymore. I can appreciate its quality and recognise all of the detail that makes it so great, but none of it shocks or surprises me anymore. The Little Sisters are a fantastic combination of creepy and vulnerable, but I don't feel the protectiveness you're supposed to feel. I recognise that it's there, but that's all. There were a few scenes this time that I wasn't expecting that struck me. Going into an apartment and seeing two adults covered in blood with a gun next to them and three small girls opposite them with some pills scattered around, that was horrible. But these moments were few and far between. This isn't a criticism of the game, it's an admission that I don't feel like I can assess it fairly because I know it so well.
With that in mind, each separate area you explore is extremely well-made and distinctive. In that director's commentary I linked earlier Ken Levine says that they wanted to make a small, detailed world rather than a large one for the sake of it being large. If only more games nowadays followed that advice. Still, this approach definitely works. Functionally and even aesthetically there's not much difference between areas, but they still feel vivid and unique. There's usually a boss to take down in each of them and this allows the game to explore the different ways in which Rapture functioned and subsequently collapsed. My favourite section of the game will always be heading to Fort Frolic, the arts and leisure section run by the insane Sander Cohen and his former proteges who all want to kill him. Despite the scientific possibilities that Adam imparted on the rest of Rapture's society, I don't think they embody Rapture as well as Cohen's lunacy. While there are several well-developed secondary and tertiary characters throughout the game, Cohen is the one I remember most. Ironically I suppose it's because he's the only hands-off one of the bunch. He talks to you and directs you like everyone else does, but you don't have to interact with him directly. This affords him a sinister air that nobody else in the game has, which is what I think makes him so memorable.
The game's original Challenge Rooms DLC is still here too. You have three different scenarios where you have to save a Little Sister. Two of them feature limited combat options. These are nice as they force you to think differently about your weapons. The third is a straightforward blast through anything that moves. The DLC won't take long even if you finish all the timed challenges, but it's something distinct enough from the main game to feel worthwhile and memorable in its own right.
Although I've said the game doesn't provoke an emotional response in me anymore because of how familiar I am with it, I need to talk some more about the twist and what it means for the role of the player in a video game. Part of the reason the Games Are Art argument exists is the level of interactive immersion that games offer that other art forms don't. No matter how good a film or book is, no matter how it makes you feel, you're a passive observer of what's going on. In a game, you aren't. To me the problem with games has always been the objective driven nature of them. In order to experience the whole story of a game you need to fulfil whatever criteria is required to progress from one area to the next. Despite providing you with the illusion of free will and free control over the player character, you're still constrained by whatever it's physically possible to do. The task-driven nature of objective completion will usually restrict, at at least distract from, a genuine emotional immersion into a world and story in the way a film or a book won't.
If you've played the game, you know what's coming. I've only ever played two games that properly examine and subvert this trope - BioShock and Spec Ops: The Line. Both of these games do the same thing. Your character is forced into doing something without their knowledge of how or why, only for the reality of their situation to be exposed later on. This calls into question the very notion of objectives in games as a means of narrative delivery. Would you, the player, do the things Jack does in BioShock if you weren't instructed to? What about the other millions of people who have ever played it? There are two ways of looking at this, either as a positive or a negative. As a negative it's arguable that games can never be comparable to other narrative platforms because their very nature makes the story-telling procedural. Is this negative, or am I just conditioned to assume it is? As a positive, games like BioShock that expose and subvert this do so so skilfully that it feels like a work of such genius that nothing will ever compare to it. Since I can only mention one other game in this vein, I think video game writing and creation has a bit of a way to go before this becomes common. If it ever can.
Of course, by this point you could diverge into any number of commentaries about the games industry and why games like BioShock - even something rudimentary and universal in terms of its gameplay - are so rare. Just wait for the paragraphs I'll write about Infinite's cover design. I suppose video games will need to find their own way to make memorable works of art with emotional and intellectual depth and complexity. But that's another conversation.
Whenever you play things from your youth there's always a possibility that it won't be as good as you remember. If I'm being completely honest there are times where BioShock Remastered felt a bit flat, but I think I'd attribute that to my own familiarity with it rather than the game itself. I could still comfortably name this as my favourite game ever, and would happily recommend it as one of the best ever to anyone who'd listen. I hope that in whatever shape gaming takes over the coming years that people are able to play this and overcome whatever generational differences it might contain. If I were to sum up why I hope this, I'd quote Sander Cohen: "When I am dust, this is what they'll point to."
PS My love for this game made me read Atlas Shrugged when I was 19. You're all lucky I'm as well-adjusted as I am.
