SCHLOCKTOBER '21:This October I have been playing a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full of razor blades.

BioShock is one of those games that’s hard to say anything interesting about. It’s a seminal game that has been analyzed so many times that everyone knows about it even if they haven’t played it. It’s also playable on pretty much every console platform released since 2007 (except handhelds, where it’s only out for Switch) so anyone who wants to play it has. “Would you kindly” is one of those video game phrases that has long since passed into meme Valhalla along with “The cake is a lie” and “All your base are belong to us.”

My own history with the game involves a lot of buying copies on various platforms and never playing them. I don’t want to know how many times I’ve bought BioShock or received it as part of a subscription but it’s probably half a dozen or more, including PlayStation Plus and Humble subscriptions and the like. I probably own a copy of BioShock for my microwave at this point. I didn’t have an Xbox 360 or a PC that could play it in 2007 when it released, and I never went back because I generally do not like scary games (I tried System Shock 2, which BioShock is a spiritual successor to, and found it too disturbing to want to play as a kid.) I picked up some cheap copies on various platforms with the intent of eventually getting around to it and then in 2020 during lockdown I finally did. I made it about 40% through the game before giving up, because I couldn’t find the second Little Sister in one of the levels and I got tired of following around a Big Daddy waiting for him to summon her. This month I decided to pick it back up as part of my attempt to make headway into my backlog of horror themed games and I was able to get the Big Daddy to call the Little Sister, rescue her, and then make my way through the rest of the game.

If you’re somehow reading this blog without knowing what BioShock is, it’s a classic FPS game where you play the survivor of a plane crash who finds himself in an underwater city called Rapture, which was once a Libertarian paradise but has descended into watery anarchy. Warring factions and unethical bio-experimentation have left the city in ruins, filled with corpses and gene-spliced lunatics who are all out for blood. You start the game with just a wrench but quickly find some firearms and some gene spliced powers of your own, which the game calls Plasmids, and set out to take down the leader of the city Andrew Ryan, and escape alongside the only sane man left alive, Atlas.

From there the game takes various twists and turns and tells its story in a variety of ways, chiefly through audio log recordings that tell the story of the war between Ryan the industrialist and Frank Fontaine, a gangster who chafed at the city’s rules and claimed to want to liberate and take care of the city’s poor but who Ryan viewed as a common criminal. The story is rightly viewed as a classic of the early 7^th generation, and though it’s a bit creaky these days with its focus on audio storytelling the voice acting remains excellent and the writing holds up pretty well. There’s also a nice synergy between Rapture’s Art Deco design and the way the story is told like a radio play from the 1930s, full of shady gangsters and hard-nosed dames. Even after all this time and having inspired so many imitators, some of which I have played, it’s still a fun ride. I’ve read a few spoilers over the years and I thought I knew the big reveal but I intentionally tried to stop reading when I was having things spoiled and I managed to avoid actually knowing the details of the game’s plot. It’s impossible for me to say how the twists hit back in 2007 before people even knew there were twists to try and figure out, but in 2021 I was able to appreciate them not so much for the surprise value but for how they echoed the games themes and philosophical underpinnings. Bioshock is the rare action game that actually has something to say, and while the message and philosophy are a bit muddled and surface deep, it still has some moments where its ideas shine through meaningfully. The storytelling still works and in some ways is enhanced by the way the game has aged. Even in the game’s 1960 setting Rapture is a place that lags behind the times in many ways, trying to recapture a lost promise of paradise that was never actually possible, and Bioshock’s old-fashioned storytelling fits these themes well.

The same can arguably be said about the game’s graphics, which feature gorgeous designs but are obviously technically limited compared to what can be done with today’s consoles, which feature over 20 times the RAM of the old workhorse Xbox 360 (astonishing what the 7^th gen machines could pull off given their technical limits.) The remastered edition improves things, of course, such as resolution and frame rate, but these are still chunky, low polygon, models and environments compared to the cutting edge of 9^th gen gaming. Again this enhances the themes of anachronism and decay that are present throughout the game. Are the water effects up to snuff? No. It all looks very 7^th gen. But the game remains beautiful, and the enemy splicers retain their uncanny appearance, their choppy movements and weird looks don’t require perfect realism and still work well with the old tech. Maybe they’re less scary and more…interesting…these days but as someone who never played the game in 2007 I can’t tell. Meanwhile the game’s architecture and environments are still fantastic. Bioshock is a game of environmental storytelling, and the design of the levels is just as important to the history of Rapture as the audio logs and radio calls that flesh out the narrative. Every area you enter is full of design details that tell you something about the place and the people that lived there, from the names and types of shops to corpses found in various positions with items around them to the many logos and graphic designs that cheerfully flog products that seem to have been made within Rapture itself (the logistics of Rapture and how it gets the materials necessary for everything from baked goods to alcohol are never fully explained because, of course, such a self-contained community is completely impossible.)

Playing Bioshock I couldn’t help but think about what we’ve lost in the transition to huge open worlds that most AAA games take place in these days. Bioshock itself consists of a number of self-contained levels, though it does allow backtracking through the city’s transit system to find whatever you may have missed, and each of these levels is packed to the brim with important details. Of course you can have those kinds of details in larger games, provided you have the budget, but even something like Grand Theft Auto V, with its expansive city, is necessarily going to have a lot of areas that are essentially open space, with a bunch of anonymous concrete buildings and repetitive chain stores. This might be realistic (L.A. has a lot of streets that are just unremarkable houses and chain stores) but its also a little boring. Rapture is much more compact and everywhere you go is memorable in one way or another. Even playing the game once I came to know each level and each area within it before moving on. There is no wasted space or wasted time in Bioshock. Everything is part of the hand-crafted experience and everything matters.

If the aesthetics and story of Bioshock have aged very well, the gameplay fares significantly worse. Part of this is just because I played it on console rather than PC. While the PC port was always better looking than its console counterparts, and of course the precision of the mouse has always been better than the dual stick control scheme, but the real problem with Bioshock on console is that there just aren’t enough buttons. Bioshock may have a reputation as a dumbed down System Shock game, but it’s not dumbed down enough for the Xbox controller. You have movement and aiming, jumping, reloading your weapon, using health and “Eve” (energy for your plasmids) injectors, firing your weapon and your equipped plasmid, switching weapons and plasmids, and toggling between ammo types for your equipped weapon. You can also aim down sights, though you don’t really need to. All these actions fit on the controller in one way or another, but it’s a lot to remember and the biggest issue comes with switching weapons and plasmids, where you have a single button to cycle through whatever you’ve got equipped so it takes a very long time to get to a specific item. There’s a reason that Halo limited you to two weapons and Doom 2017 added its time slowing weapon wheel, and Bioshock’s weapon cycling is just too slow. This is made even worse by the fact that one of the weapons is a camera that you use to take photos of enemies and “research” them for bonuses like extra damage against them. You get extra research for capturing enemies in “action” shots so if you want to max it out you need to start encounters by taking multiple photos and then switching to whatever weapon you want to use or that you have ammo for. It’s clunky and annoying and while Bioshock isn’t particularly difficult it definitely makes combat less fun. Allowing you to fast bind weapons and plasmids to the digital pad and then move ammo selection to a pause menu (it’s currently on the D-pad) would have fixed a lot of this. They probably didn’t do it both because of how old the game is (COD4 also came out in 2007 and helped standardize controls for console FPS games) and because they thought that having to fumble with controls would add to the survival horror aspect of the game, since clunky controls are a feature of that genre.

Bioshock isn’t really a survival horror game, though, and in addition to the clunky controls the amount of scrounging you do to get ammo and items is also kind of annoying. Bioshock’s famous Big Daddy enemies patrol the levels protecting the Little Sisters you can kill or save to get upgrade points for your plasmids, and in the first few levels their booming footsteps really are a bit scary since they can be quite difficult to take down with your starting loadout. By the time you reach the back half you have more than enough tools to handle them (or any other threat) and the game becomes more of a straightforward shooter. Ammo and health becomes more plentiful but you still have to manually go find (or purchase or craft) it all so you spend a lot of time just looting and it turns into a bit of a pain. You can only hold a limited amount of anything except crafting components too, so you’re constantly using up your supplies in encounters with Big Daddies or just groups of normal enemies (who become massive ammo sponges later in the game) and then restocking. More than introducing a sense of horror or desperation it just creates tedium.

None of that would be such a big problem if not for the infamous hacking game. This is by far the biggest issue with the console controller. Try and hack anything (and you can hack everything from ammo kiosks to security cameras) and you play a little tile puzzle where you connect two points using pipe tiles to allow fluid to flow through. Fail and you either take damage or set off an alarm and have to face security bots. On PC with a mouse this might have been okay, but with a controller it’s awful, specifically because you frequently (even using plasmid upgrades to make hacking easier) wind up in a situation where if you don’t have the right tile next to the starting point you simply cannot win the hacking game because you find yourself surrounded by alarm or electrocution tiles. There’s always at least one route to the exit, but it’s often choked off by the direction of the first tile, and you won’t know which direction to go until you uncover enough of the puzzle. With a mouse clicking quickly this might be tense but fair. With a controller, moving one space at a time, there’s often not enough time to reveal the alarm tiles and move in the right direction before the fluid has entered that first tile and you’re sunk. This is incredibly frustrating and happens all the time. Even without it the hacking would mess with the game’s pacing way too much, but with this issue it’s just a mess. I ended up save scumming may way through the hacks, but by the end of the game I really hated that minigame and understood why it was such a sore spot when the title was first released.

That’s not to say Bioshock doesn’t play well, it’s just clunky, old, and flawed. The shooting is decently fun, there are lots of neat plasmids to use, and there are even environmental hazards you can use, whether it’s hacking a turret to attack your enemies or electrocuting bad guys by zapping the water they’re in. When you’re in a shootout you always have a good variety of weapons and plasmids to choose from, and lots of tactical options. It’s just that it has aged and for people used to modern games the clunkiness and flaws show through probably more than they did upon release.

I liked Bioshock. It wasn’t a revelation for me but it was a fun game to explore with a good story, great environments, and some genuinely haunting moments. It’s even a little scary when you first arrive in Rapture and get used to the sounds the enemies make scraping their weapons along the floor, or the sight of spider splicers hanging off the ceiling. It doesn’t hold up perfectly but it’s still worth a play through, and if you don’t own a copy you can always get one cheap.

Schlocktober Rating:Not Schlock. As tempting as it is to use the term "Bioschlock" here, I can't. This is just a very good game. It has enough horror elements to qualify as a horror game, but it's mostly a fun shooter that tells a strong story. Enough has been said about this game that you have an opinion of it even if you haven't played it (and you probably have) but if you're wondering whether it still holds up, it does. Mostly. In terms of Halloween Candy, this is a gourmet treat that's a little past its expiration date. Does it taste as good as it did back when it was fresh? No. It's a bit stale now and maybe hard where it should be chewy, but the quality still shines through and it's more than edible.

Great review! I love BioShock. I played it at a particularly difficult time in my life. I have two tattoos, and my first one is the wrist chain the player character has. You're right; a lot can and has been said about this game. Suffice it to say the game is extremely special to me.

Even if you didn't have a particularly special time with the game, I think it stands out (especially for its time) for all of the reasons you mention,

As Dr. Steinman wrote in blood, aesthetics are a moral imperative, and BioShock absolutely nails its aesthetic.

@bladeofcreation: Thanks for the read and the nice words.

I can understand why this game was so special to you and I'm glad it resonated that way. I don't really think it would have for me even in 2007 but I can appreciate the things about it that made it so special to so many.

One thing I didn't mention but should have is just how good the sound design is. Not just the voice acting or the music (which are both good) but just the way the enemies and city sounds and how it enhances both gameplay and atmosphere. It truly is a very well made game. And it's also impressive just how interactive it is. You can use and mess with so many objects and do so many things. The fact that the game world built in 2007 is more interactive than almost all game worlds in 2021 is both impressive and a little depressing.

Several years ago... actually, I think nearly a decade ago, I turned off the Vita chambers and cranked the difficulty all the way up and finished this game. I don't know if I recommend turning the difficulty up, but the Vita chambers make death almost meaningless in Bioshock. If you're not looking for any challenge, leave them on, but I am of the opinion that they should be left off by default. You can still manually save like most other "immersive sim" type games.

I was... 15 or 16 when this came out? Not really old enough to fully grasp the politics and themes but certainly old enough to be fascinated by the world and mechanics and such. I'm pretty sure there are 15 year olds who know what libertarianism and Atlas Shrugged are, I just wasn't one of them. I wound up enjoying the second game more when it came out but I can't remember much of anything about it, other than it being pretty weird that there's no mention of the antagonist of the second game in the first one and that the second game's primary theme is "hyper-communism is just as bad as hyper-libertarianism".

Infinite came out, got a lot of recognition, and then it felt like people rather immediately turned on it. I finished Infinite several times over the years and I really like that game. It brings up a bunch of stuff, but I actually think it's interesting that Infinite spends a lot of its latter half narrowing its scope down to its two main characters rather than exploring everything in the first half. Is that good storytelling? No, it leaves a lot of ideas hanging that it maybe should have explored, and I think people were interested in seeing what Infinite had to say when it really doesn't have much to say at all. It's sort of just a pretentious rollercoaster that I personally enjoyed several times over the years.

I really just meant for this post to be the first paragraph but wound up writing a lot more. Ooops.

Do you plan on playing 2 and Infinite?

@justin258: I didn't even think of turning Vita Chambers on, and frankly I don't even understand why they exist in a game where you can save anywhere. BioShock does absolutely nothing to stop you from save scumming (I approve of save scumming) so why do you need that kind of super gentle respawn mechanic?

I do intend to play Bioshock 2 and Infinite at some point. Maybe I'll play 2 next October or something. I feel like I'll appreciate it more with a little space between the games. I don't want to return to Rapture this soon because I'd like some time to let at least a tiny bit of nostalgia build.

I can understand them as a nod to System Shock although they do try to flimsily justify it in narrative.

System Shock 2 had something similar, although that game was significantly more difficult.

@justin258: Oh yeah, the references to Atlas Shrugged are not subtle in this game. I had finished reading that book just a few months before I played this. I literally kept a notebook page full of all the references I found. The references are everywhere. Even the chain tattoo is a reference.

When it comes to Infinite, I remember playing that game, loving it, and being utterly baffled by the backlash to it. I happened to get to talk to Ken Levine about the game after attending a panel he was on at PAX East. He said it's ultimately a game about forgiveness, and that really solidified the game's narrative for me. It is my favorite in the series.

@bigsocrates: One of the interesting game design choices is that in the earliest version, there wasn't even an option to turn the chambers off. That option wasn't introduced into the game until the PS3 version. I agree that they made the difficulty trivial, so I actually saved frequently and reloaded the game whenever I died. That sort of self-imposed restriction is not how I commonly play games, so it's also an example of how I engaged with the game in a really special way.

It's worth noting that in BioShock 2 and Infinite, you can wield a gun in one hand and a plasmid in the other, which makes the combat much more fun.

I thought the backlash to Infinite was a case of the early previews not matching what was delivered? Mostly visual but also it's kind of the least Bioshock of the three.

I always saw the backlash to Infinity as a kind of conflict with The Last of Us. Or at least that is how I saw it presented at the time. Especially for what people saw as the game of the year. As I understood the position, Bioshock Infinity seemed to waver on it's messaging and it's portrayal of a black person. Whereas The Last of Us seemed more definite, and that it was just the same caliber of game in other categories. I guess I understood. Bioshock Infinity also suffered a backlash over expectations and such, though I thought that pretty subjective by people.

Personally, I was (and am still) areal Bioshock fan. I did buy belatedly The Last of Us, but was too soured to really play it.

@bybeach: Interestingly enough in The Last of Us and the series in general, I can't think of a single important black character that doesn't get killed. And I don't remember any adult nonwhite characters surviving either.

@shindig: There was a little bit of talk of that, but it didn't affect the game's reviews. This game got 90s and 100s from multiple gaming sites. There was a sort of academic critical backlash that started manifesting a short time after the game had been out.

I mean that's probably part of it, but a lot of the discussion I heard - between then and now, anyway - deals with the fact that the game features depictions of racism and classism and workers revolting against those in power... and that's all just a backdrop for the two main characters. Infinite is way more interested in showing you the different ways a single violent man can be totally fucked up and destructive, to himself and to the world around him.

I'd agree that Infinite isn't very Bioshock-y, though. If Bioshock 1 and 2 are immersive sims simplified and made accessible, then Bioshock Infinite is barely even pretending to fall in that same lineage. Gameplay-wise, it's an only-slightly-more-open seventh-gen linear shooter, through and through, and thematically it brings up very Bioshock-y ideas only to just drop them as it goes on to talk about something else entirely. It's hardly even a Bioshock game, honestly.

I also think it's fucking bonkers and I would still highly recommend it to basically anyone who thinks it looks remotely interesting.

I would also like to note that this thread inspired me to start playing the first game again. It's not all that long and I'm up for a good shooter right now. I think it's fine, gameplay wise, but I think that game developers should start strongly considering fewer loot areas with more interesting things to pick up. It's fun to spot a machine gun magazine between the books in a bookshelf or to find some shotgun shells laying in the rafters, especially when you need them. It is not fun to ruffle through the pockets of every crazy motherfucker in the city for some vodka, a pistol bullet, and three dollars.

Also, damn near half of this game consists of playing Pipe Dream. With a mouse and keyboard, it's a trivial distraction rather than an irritating challenge, but it's still not welcome. Can we just make hacking minigames a skill check, or something that only happens once or twice per level? Like, you just push a button and either you have the skills/plasmids/whatever to get the hack done or you don't and that's it.