BioShock Infinite Remastered (PS4, 2016 - originally PS3, 2013)
BioShock Infinite is the last game I actively followed the development and release of. For what must have been at least a year and a half I watched every video, read every interview, replied to every Ken Levine tweet. I held the original in such esteem there was pretty much no way I'd be able to hold back for the follow-up from the same people. The videos and the information that came out backed me up. It looked astonishing. Even leaving aside the difference between pre-release videos and actual games I didn't care about tempering my expectations. For once prior to a write-up I've done some research about the development of the game and it's quite refreshing to read, given the state of AAA game development nowadays. There was a lot of work, there were problems, there was a delay, but there were no reports of sexual abuse or forced overtime. Big points for the Irrational lads there.
BioShock Infinite is a first person shooter set in 1912 in which you play as Booker DeWitt, former Pinkerton detective and man who's obviously dragging around a caravan full of demons. He's delivered to a lighthouse off the coast of Maine, with one bit of information: "Bring us the girl, and wipe away the debt." The lighthouse eventually leads to the floating city of Columbia, founded a decade earlier as a mobile World's Fair style example of American exceptionalism. While in the city Booker discovers the girl, what the debt is, and how the city has changed since its founding. In addition to the racial and Christianity-based superiority there's eventually a civil war breaking out, as the poor and racially diverse population of Columbia rises up as a group called the Vox Populi to try and gain control of the city.
Gameplay-wise it's what you'd expect from a BioShock game, but more. The assortment of upgradeable weapons are back, only this time you can only carry two at a time. While this fulfils its intended purpose of forcing the player to adapt their approach to different situations depending on what weapons they're carrying it feels like a contrived method of doing so, especially given how the amount of modern military shooters that entered the market between this and the original BioShock used that same mechanic. It's especially annoying when you play on harder difficulties because you end up running out of ammo for the weapons you like and have upgraded.
Plasmids are back only they're now called Vigors and come in nicely stylised bottles rather than needles. Conversely these end up beneficial on harder difficulties as they can be juggled and combined to great effect, much more effectively in fact than in BioShocks previous. The upgraded versions also feel genuinely powerful and a lot of the times more lethal than weapons. There's an aspect related to the narrative that I'll come to later but from a purely mechanical perspective, I'm a big fan of the Vigors.
Some locations also feature the Sky-hook and Skylines. Initially created as a means of transporting goods around Columbia you, and enemies, can jump on and attach to these big rails that take you around sections of the city you're fighting in, adding an extra dimension (literally) to battles. The biggest criticism I can give of Infinite's combat is the sheer amount of it, since you end up juggling all of the above plus several different types of enemies, including the 'Heavy Hitters' which are more powerful and can dominate the battlefield when they show up.
When I first played BioShock Infinite I didn't actually play it the day I bought it. It was released on a Tuesday and I had classes that day. I wanted to make sure I could take the whole thing in at once so I waited for the Wednesday. Much like the original BioShock, the introduction to the game is something that will never leave me. I last played Infinite in 2015, and playing the remastered version more than five years later I still remember it perfectly. This and BioShock are two games that are never short on spectacle. Through a combination of the sounds, lighting and overall aesthetic the whole game is just inherently unforgettable. Inescapable, even. I guarantee I could not play this game for twenty years and still be able to remember sights, sounds and emotions from it perfectly.
Whether it's a symptom of being accustomed to PS4 performance for the past few years or not I'm not sure, but although Infinite Remastered looks and sounds the same as Infinite but a bit more polished, it's not as striking as it was back then. I went back to Infinite on the PS3 to compare. The loading times are the first thing you notice. Genuinely hilarious. There's a bit of a frame-rate worry every now and then but the first twenty minutes or so still looked great, if largely similar to the PS4 version. The lighting remains a consistent triumph, and it's got the sort of consistent art design which is memorable in its own right. I'm quite happy to play the game again and there weren't any technical issues (aside from one guy stuck running in mid-air during one of the DLC episodes), if anything I'm just even more impressed now at how good the original version was (and still is).
Side-note: the in-game menus in Infinite Remastered are tiny. I'm playing on a 32 inch TV and the menus take up about the middle 20% of the screen and you can barely read what's on them. When I put Infinite on I checked and there was an option for changing the size of the menus. Why wasn't this carried over? It's not just menus either, the health bars and the weapon indicators are tiny too. Even as I'm typing this seems like a completely ridiculous thing to care about but it's just weird that this feature wouldn't have carried over, and that nobody noticed when it hadn't.
This is usually the part where I talk about the story and how the game made me feel. I genuinely don't know where to start. The most logical place probably segues nicely from the gameplay, that being the relationship between Booker and the girl he goes to find, Elizabeth. Elizabeth has been unknowingly held captive in Columbia all her life in what appears to be a massive warped science experiment at the behest of Zachary Comstock, Columbia's founder and ruler, and her father. Once Elizabeth and Booker go on the run you get to learn more about her and why she's in Columbia.
Rather than an escort mission though, Elizabeth plays an active role in combat situations. She can control 'tears,' effectively windows into other realities that she can open and interact with. When in battle this can allow you to bring in new weapons or turrets, and she can throw you ammo and health during fights if you need it too. I was fully on board with the concept from the moment I saw the first trailer for the game featuring her bringing an injured horse back to life and trying to set it free, only for her to open a window to a street in Paris outside a cinema where Return of the Jedi was showing, where Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears was playing, and where a fire engine was hurtling down the road towards them. Whether you saw that trailer before playing or not, it quickly becomes apparent that Elizabeth's powers are why she was in Columbia, why Booker is there to get her, and that things are only going to get weirder.
I had a chuckle while reading up on the development of the game. The idea was for Elizabeth to not be a burden to the player and to be an emotionally involving character. The problem was that the team that were working on her was different from the team that was creating the levels and the enemy AI, so when the two interacted she usually ended up hiding in a corner the whole time, which defeated the purpose. There are times when "she can keep herself out of trouble" feels more like "she can do whatever she likes and the enemy will never see her," but usually you're so busy trying to kill lots of people that it doesn't matter.
Although the Booker/Elizabeth relationship is central to the game and its story there are plenty of other characters we meet along the way who inform the story and Booker's own past. Like BioShock these range from localised boss fights who expand on a particular aspect of either Columbia or Booker specifically to much more prominent and important roles. Across the board there's probably the same depth and quality of characters as BioShock in terms of how they're portrayed and the effect they have on the story, but I do have a problem with Comstock's overall presence. He created Columbia and he sends people after Booker to get Elizabeth - he's obviously the bad guy, and we don't like him. The problem is he's too removed from the action for me to dislike him. Andrew Ryan is a high water mark for villains in general, not just in games. With how absent Comstock is from the action it often feels like a similar attempt at characterisation was made here, but while the ethos and the personality are so similar, there's just something detached about his role in events that I never feel any genuine animosity or resentment towards him. I barely think about him at all. The best villains are ones whose motivations you understand while you resent their actions. Comstock often just feels like he's there because there needs to be a central figure involved.
The characters who come up elsewhere can feel strangely fleeting. Episodic probably isn't the right word but there's a sense of being in an area, being there to interact with a central villain and some enemies, then moving on to the next one. Part of it is exploring Columbia and its formation but even then there's times where it feels like a sightseeing tour rather than something properly engaging. I love the setting and the themes explored in the city are as brutal and engaging as the original BioShock, but there's definitely a sense of spectacle over substance in places. I think part of this comes from my expectations of the game based on following the development. I knew the tears would play a part in world-building, where people would see the future in them and be inspired by it. That's why there's people singing songs by the Beach Boys and Creedence Clearwater Revival. It's just that these feel more superficial than significant. Even still, I remember playing it at release and wondering how much it really needed to be an FPS. You could re-write the game to remove combat, make it a walking simulator, and have no effect on the story.
I'm now going to talk about my issues with the plot holes that are inevitable in fiction which deals with time travel and/or alternate realities. As mentioned, Elizabeth can open tears into other worlds. Fine. Part of the way through the game Booker makes a deal with Daisy Fitzroy, leader of the Vox Populi, to get an airship so he can leave Columbia. They have to find a gunsmith and get her some guns for the revolution. They find the gunsmith, except he's dead. Elizabeth then sees a tear into a new world where the dead body of that gunsmith isn't, so they jump in there to go and find him. Let's leave aside the fact that there not being a body in the same place in an alternate dimension doesn't mean that he's still dead anyway - Booker and Elizabeth are no longer in their world. They're in another one. One which already contains a Booker and Elizabeth. One that contains a different Daisy Fitzroy. How does that work? How do they think it will work? How does it work when they go and find the gunsmith's tools only to find them locked up in a prison, and then do the exact same thing again? Elizabeth opens up a tear that doesn't have any tools in that spot, so through they go.
If you're struggling to keep up, Booker and Elizabeth have now travelled to a third reality. Here, not only is the Vox Populi uprising well underway, suggesting they got the guns they needed after all, but the Booker in this reality is dead. When Fitzroy finds out she gets her people to start shooting at you, which offers up two problems. Rather than being part of a civil war - which was a selling point of the game compared to BioShock, since there you're in they city after a war - you just happen to be there while it's going on with no influence over anything, and with no distinction between the people shooting at you. Vox and Columbians have the same enemy types so there's little difference in gameplay. This ends up making what should be a fascinating conflict of various interests, the class struggle, racial tensions, everything else, just something that's going on while you're trying to uncover the story. And it still doesn't make sense, since neither of the central characters seem to notice a problem with shifting through dimensions.
BioShock's central conceit was a subversion of the method of narrative delivery in video games. It questioned the role of the player in relation to the player character, asking how much control the player had and how much free will the character had. It did this in a way few other games have ever done, and it did it successfully. Upon release Infinite existed in a strange place where as a BioShock game made by the same people it would have to live up to that legacy while offering something different. Given how seminal BioShock was and given my own feelings about the game, this wasn't exactly an easy task. When you throw in the notion of time travel and alternate timelines based on choices that an individual makes, you also run the risk of not just jumping the shark, but jumping the shark so forcefully your head becomes lodged in your own backside.
Infinite heads this risk off in two ways. The first is the inclusion of the Lutece twins Rosalind and Robert. Rosalind created the, ahem, Quantum Particles, that allow Columbia to float. The two of them pop up occasionally to finish each others' sentences and ask a series of increasingly vague and smug questions with references to time and interpretations of existence thrown in. A thing doesn't happen, it will happen. A thing won't happen, it has happened. Playing through (and knowing what their role is beforehand) I'm reminded of that one side-quest in Red Dead Redemption where you meet a mysterious man in a top hat who is probably God, where he's just aloof enough and just knowing enough to suggest he knows what's happening to the player character and, crucially, what's going to happen in the future. The Luteces offer enough comic relief when they show up to calm the player's fears about what's going on, and their importance to the story, somehow, makes sense by the end. This is what I'd call Good Writing, just knowing enough to drip-feed you the right amount of information without giving everything away.
The second is more arguable in terms of how effective it is, and actually in how accurate it is, but for all of the inconsistences I've mentioned and many more I haven't, everything gets tied up. You might question how it can end at all, you might question the apparent inescapable need to link the game to the original, you might even question the origin of Booker himself, but it all fits. I'm not sure why I'm reluctant to discuss spoilers for a game that's almost eight years old, but on the off-chance you're still yet to play it you should get to experience it properly. You'll probably still have to play it twice anyway to properly appreciate it. For however convoluted it is, it's also a better ending than the original BioShock. The ending of the story, I should say. Gameplay-wise it's a giant boss fight without a boss that comes before about an hour of cutscenes.
I don't know how well this game has aged. The gameplay is fine and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, despite the criticisms I offered earlier. I remember before its original release someone tweeted Ken Levine asking something along the lines of "How do you feel having created two games that bookend and define a console generation?" to which he replied saying it was like something his mother would say. I do still think Infinite stands as the best game from the end of that generation (The Last of Us is terrible and GTA 5 has turned out to be Satan, after all) but on its own, right now, I'm not sure. I don't think it's familiarity, since I remembered BioShock much more readily and I can still at least point to that as a first, a proper landmark moment. It's not because things have eclipsed it since. Even though I'm still comparatively new to the 7th generation catalogue I know there's nothing as important as Infinite.
I don't really want to find out how many words it's taken me to reach this point but after stepping away from this write-up and coming back to it, I realised something. I remember how exciting Infinite was when it came out, just as I remembered the same when playing BioShock for the first time. I remember the awe at the world-building and the complexity of the narrative when it came out, just like playing BioShock for the first time. I remember finishing it once then finishing it again and actually understanding it, then appreciating it all over again. When I played BioShock Remastered I remembered all of those feelings but still enjoyed it on its own merits. It was showing its age technically, but everything else was still immaculate fourteen years later.
I can't say the same for Infinite Remastered. If anything it's the inverse - still impressive technically, but just sort of... there everywhere else. Near the end on my first playthrough I remembered what the twist was. Or I worked it out, I wasn't sure. I didn't have any reaction. There was the mild sense of surprised delight when you remember something you've been trying to think of for ages. That's all. I've been thinking about the game for a while since I finished it because I knew I was going to try and write it up, but I haven't. All I've done is say what happens in it. I haven't said anything about how it makes me feel. Aside from the intro and some instances of the gameplay, I haven't even really said I was impressed. I don't think it's aged badly, I don't think it's bad by any measure, but tomorrow is going to come after I've posted this and I'm not going to think about it again.
It looks good. It plays well. It has a willing complexity in the characters and the narrative which very few people have ever attempted in other games never mind achieved. If you let your guard down you will fall in love with Elizabeth. It's a worthy and comprehensive follow-up and conclusion to the story in my favourite game ever, and I won't forget the effect it had on me on its original release. Right now, though? I don't have anything else to say.
