K-SCORE: 92
Developer: Irrational Games
Publisher: 2K Games
Writer/Director: Ken Levine
Spoiler Level: Major (totally ruining if you read past paragraph two)
“explores the multiverse and the inevitably of it obliterating its own existence”
Bioshock Infinite is an excellent game, although that’s not altogether unsurprising given that I choose which games I play quite carefully. (It’s a big time commitment to play through a video game and I don’t want that time feeling wasted by playing a bad one.)
The gameplay is essentially like the other Bioshock games, and actually I think those games play better much of the time because the guns are tighter, easier to use, and the plasmids (called vigors in Infinite) are more fun in one and two. But Infinite innovates by adding Elizabeth to combat. Her ability to bring allies across spacetime and throw you something you need periodically is very satisfying and in bigger battles adds essential depth to the combat that can’t be found in this game’s predecessors. Many of the fights in the floating world feel more like small wars, larger than life conflicts that match the story and setting supremely well.
Though really the main focus is the interesting setting and challenging yet fascinating narrative. Columbia, the city hovering in the clouds, is a less interesting place than Rapture and populated with fewer great characters, but that’s an extremely high bar (a hilariously inapt idiom) the underwater metropolis sets. And exploring Columbia is fun and provides many spectacular visuals and well-designed places throughout the linear journey.
“a crazy tall order”
The story is even better than Bioshock (One), which has a story so great it easily makes my top five favorite narratives in games I’ve ever played. Booker DeWitt travels to Columbia under the pretense that if he finds the girl, Elizabeth, and brings her to his mysterious employer, he will wipe away a serious gambling debt. Once he gets to Elizabeth, a violent journey as the people of Columbia recognize him to be a false shepherd, he discovers Elizabeth has the ability to open up tears to different realities across the multiverse, violating accepted rules of physics, space, and the linear nature of time.
That’s a crazy tall order to wrap up in a satisfying way. To make it tougher on creator Ken Levine, there are a lot of mini mysteries you want answered. Booker has branded the letters “AD” on his hand. Elizabeth is missing a small part of one of her pinky fingers. The scientist siblings, The Luteces, keep floating about the journey, invulnerable, speculating as to what reality they’re observing. John Comstock, Columbia’s leader, is trying to kill Booker and claims to both be Elizabeth’s father and infertile. And… you know… the city floats in the sky.
[Even more spoilers than usual to follow.] So I was skeptical and growing more so as these elements got added, but the ending provides satisfying explanations I didn’t predict and left other bits open to interpretation that kept me thinking about the story for hours after I’d set down the controller. The game’s playthrough, when you’re dealing with a multiverse theory, is just one of infinite possibilities and thus the title. And even though in other outcomes in the “probability space” Booker dies horribly many many ways, Columbia gets destroyed by The Vox Populi, Columbia destroys the world, etc., there is one, yours, where Booker and Elizabeth actually successfully beat the odds and destroy the siphon (the device that keeps Elizabeth’s powers in check). In that unlikely yet inevitable outcome (because of the infinite multiverse), she suddenly sees that very early in Booker’s life he has committed atrocities at the battle of Wounded Knee and there he either accepted baptism to absolve his sins and become John Comstock or didn’t and took to a life of drinking and gambling, becoming Booker. In the former, Comstock meets a woman named Rosalin Lutece who discovers the tear between worlds that allow atoms to be suspended in spacetime and they build the city of Columbia. In the latter, Booker sells his baby to Robert Lutece (a universe where the Lutece parents had a boy instead of a girl) because he wanted to wipe away his debts. The Lutece twins (the same person in alternate realities that have learned to communicate with one another) have foreseen an outcome involving Comstock’s child taking up the mantle of Columbia’s leader and raining fire down on the world, but with Comstock infertile, they need Anna Dewitt, a daughter from another universe, to come through the tear and become Elizabeth, this supposed visionary. Booker regrets his actions at the last moment and, in a struggle to get Anna back, the baby’s little finger comes off in Booker’s world as the rest of the girl is pulled into Comstock’s. Elizabeth/Anna DeWitt’s (AD)powers derive from simultaneously being part of more than one universe. Once she realizes this, she sees that the only way to stop Columbia’s atrocities and Booker’s past is to return to the earliest moment, Booker’s baptism, and drown him, ending the existence of all universes with either Comstock or Booker, Robert or Rosaline, and Elizabeth/Anna herself.
In other words, Bioshock Infinite explores the multiverse and the inevitably of it obliterating its own existence. See, there are so many horrifying outcomes as Columbia and its characters rip apart the fabric of everyday life, but there had to be at least one (no matter how unlikely) where a savior, part of multiple universes, sees what has happened because she can see so many different realities, and trace such atrocities to the origin point, where a linear timeline first split in two, then four, then four billion, and so on.
I found it interesting, especially the scientists, The Luteces. They are a fascinating pair and make great characters, providing all of insight, intrigue, and entertainment, as they ran experiments on the multiverse and Booker through the journey. I also like the explanation for classic video game “Game Over” moments. Normally you have to reset your suspension of disbelief when you die in a game and do better next time. Some games feature so much protagonist death (LifeForce, Super Meat Boy, Icewind Dale II, I could go on forever) that that suspension of disbelief really wanes. Are these heroes really saving the day? Not so much. But here in Bioshock Infinite, failure is integrated into the possibility space.
That said, with a premise so tremendously complex, I could continually probe at it until I’d found paradoxes and impossibilities. Also, it’s not necessarily the most satisfying story ending to go back in time to a point before the start of the story and kill the protagonist so none of it ever happens. Those issues, however, didn’t stop Bioshock Infinite from being thought-provoking, exciting, powerful and fun. It’s one of the best, if not the best, single player FPS games I’ve ever played.