Skins the Cat Twice with Story and Themes
What a game. I dove into the clever, thoughtful, and fun Bioshock Infinite headfirst and, once I came up for air, found myself grinning in delight and thinking a little harder than I expected.
I went into this game neutrally, but with optimism. I played and enjoyed the first Bioshock, and I thought that the narrative use of Objectivism was both interesting and pretty well done. The combat was fine and the character of Rapture really brought the experience home.
But unlike most games (including the first Bioshock), I want to sit down and write about Infinite because of its story and its themes.
Before that, though, let's get the worthwhile mechanics out of the way. I like the way that some of the more commonly used gameplay mechanics are layered and refined together to make a coherent experience. For example, shield plus health plus death are handled in a way that keeps you active and encourages risk. The death penalty is mechanically minimal, but the story side of it and the way that it's accomplished via Elizabeth had me fearing it nonetheless.
I was similarly impressed by the way that the game handled Elizabeth's mid-combat item support. While it takes control away from the player, it's done only after you choose it and returns you to the state that you left. Flow-wise this seems like it would cause a bit of cognitive dissonance, and can be gamed to some extent to do things like recharge a shield, but I thought that it worked wonderfully both in service of the gameplay, encouraging risk, and it also helped also the narrative. Even the tonally jarring lockpicking voice clips felt pleasant in the darker portions of the game, and, at least for me, helped built a bond between me as Booker and Elizabeth, especially as it kept me feeling like things seemed a little more light as everything around was going off of the rails.
On top of the gameplay loop, I thought that Elizabeth as escort was tremendously helpful for the narrative. What an interesting character. I felt empathetic for her plight and on tenterhooks for most of the game, dreading what the story would bring her way. I was emotionally hooked on her from the first few moments in the tower, where the in medias res experiment and your glimpses into her recorded life provided an effective foundation for both her character and that of the people keeping her there, and I drank in the details. The immediacy of her presence allows for the game to provide instant narrative feedback to the player that would otherwise be accomplished through a cutscene or internal/external monologue, a few of which do still exist.
This companionship narrative also allows for the stakes to feel different when she's not nearby. I felt a different urgency when she was not with me, and I found myself running after her instead of what was my usual (and surprising) methodical exploration.
Methodical exploration was a common theme for me--unlike many games of the "run around, listen to a voiceover while you connect from A to B on a map" type, I found myself listening intently to the audiologs and slowly exploring the place. But what really got me thinking was the story hooks in the atmosphere. Even more than Ryan in the original Bioshock, Comstock and his aesthetic made me sit up and take notice.
The racial components of the story hit home in a way that they might not if I wasn't living as an expat, across the ocean from the US. I live a comfortable life here with a good job with a US organization. But my life is a far cry from life within the true upper eschelons, where I am more or less permanently excluded given my nationality and the country's absolutely incredible wealth. But the "guest workers" in this country, laboring in some cases in indentured servitude, live in unavoidable poverty with literally no way to transcend their socioeconomic status here.
The story of the upper crust and the downtrodden poor has been recycled time and time again, and it may just be my current circumstance that makes me particularly sensitive this time around, but it is done cleverly and with a good deal of care here. This includes its impending but nonetheless jarring initial racial thrust and continues through the different potential endgames of the struggle between the factions as experienced by the player over the course of the middle portion of the game.
In a similar vein, life as an expat has heightened my experience of Infinite's play on the American mythology. Where I live now, America's history, especially over the last 50 years, is understood and told very differently than it is in the States. I think that with the clever juxtaposition of American patriotic imagery and the trappings of religion, Bioshock Infinite directed my thoughts to reconsider the way that history is used and remembered, an effect that doubles upon itself once a single playthrough is complete and the story can be experienced with the knowledge of the ending.
This is, I think, the most interesting part of this game from a narrative level. The setup of the game is built in such a way that an interested player sees, retrospectively, a good portion of the story paying service to itself and its themes (and having far greater weight) in ways that are not clear until the end unfolds. I'd love to write about a couple of specific moments, but I don't want to throw a spoiler in here. There are obvious reductive comparisons to be made here to previous works of fiction, but I seriously enjoyed this one and found it clever enough not to feel derivative.
I can't recommend Infinite enough, especially if you want to play it while considering the themes that it chooses as a setting. And if you don't find them compelling, the story is still worth playing, and the action (aside from what is in my opinion a clumsy but brief repeat boss fight) has a good flow. Five stars.
