--Andrew Ryan, BioShock Remastered
"All roads in Rapture lead to Ryan."
--Atlas, BioShock Remastered
The year 2020 may have been a disaster for many people thus far, but Switch owners have seen a significant number of ports to the console in the past few months, ranging from Crysis Remastered to Borderlands: Legendary Collection to BioShock: The Collection. Regarding the last of the three examples, the first game in the BioShock trilogy introduces the underwater city of Rapture, a "haven" founded to escape the influence of external governments, religious influence, and Soviet communism. Rapture was dedicated to freedom from the surface world's moral conventions and to business, science, and the grand experiences of its inhabitants as they genetically modified their bodies at will. The men and women of Rapture, however, live in no utopia. Rapture exemplifies the potential disaster that awaits when individualism is combined with egoism and moral nihilism.
Production Values
Some character models can be blurry and pixelated. After all, BioShock Remastered is a version of a 13 year old game from two console generations ago that has been ported to the first console-handheld hybrid; it was never likely to have graphics as crisp and smooth as Luigi's Mansion 3 or Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3. The game nonetheless manages to run without any slowdown (in my experience), but its most ambitious aspects have nothing to do with the graphics. The blatantly philosophical themes and unique setting are its biggest assets alongside combat and upgrade mechanics. It is the setting and the themes and not the basic plot itself that make the context of the gameplay so spectacular, but the former are so strong that the simplicity of the general story the player directly experiences does not hurt the game very much.
Gameplay
BioShock's mechanics are based around combat, exploration, and mild puzzles involving the manipulation of water (or what seems to be water) as it flows from one point to another. Plenty of optional items make both fighting Rapture's leftover inhabitants and solving puzzles easier--early on, it can be quite easy to use scarce ammunition and die during enemy encounters. Dying returns you to the nearest Vita-Chamber, a respawn station, with a portion of your health restored, similar to the respawn mechanic in Borderlands. Genetic modification tools called plasmids make survival easier, and the first is acquired very close to the beginning of the game.
Plasmids alter the user's genetic code to enable them to perform otherwise impossible actions like firing electricity or fire from their hands. Like tonics (which provide passive bonuses as opposed to a plasmid's player-triggered nature) and firearms, they can be enhanced for more damage throughout the game. The plasmid, tonic, and weapon upgrade systems become far deeper than they may initially seems as a wide variety of offensive and defensive abilities are made available. In order to purchase some of them, one must spend ADAM, which is a somewhat rare substance, adding strategic layers to plasmid purchases.
All categories of items and abilities are particularly useful against enemies like Big Daddies, armored foes that protect small girls called Little Sisters as they search for ADAM. If a Big Daddy that happens to be with a Little Sister is killed, its Little Sister can be harvested for her ADAM and thus the player can access more ADAM-based upgrades like more powerful plasmids and health extensions. However, Little Sisters can also be spared and reverted back into the normal state as a human child. This does not immediately yield as much ADAM, but a woman in Rapture gives special gifts that include additional ADAM when Little Sisters are consistently rescued.
Other features that help set BioShock's gameplay apart from that of other shooters are less central than plasmids. A camera found partway through the game unlocks permanent research bonuses for taking pictures of specific enemy types, which can be very helpful in certain fights. There is also additional content like a "Museum of Orphaned Concepts" that lets you walk around displays of rejected character models and read about the design process, a director's commentary with entries found in many levels, and special challenges that are somewhat comparable to the optional challenges in the God of War games (at least the ones before the PS4 reboot, which I have not played). The first two are fairly uncommon in video games, which makes BioShock all the more unique.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
A man named Jack survives a plane crash over an ocean and swims to a mysterious tower protruding out of the water, which contains a stairway that leads downward to a pod. Jack takes the pod to the underwater city of Rapture and soon learns it was built by a businessman named Andrew Ryan to escape moral scrutiny and dominant ideas about social responsibility. Rapture has fallen into disarray, with deformed scavengers roaming around and Big Daddies escorting Little Sisters to corpses to find ADAM. Amidst all of this, a man named Atlas communicates with Jack and guides him along, helping him move closer to finding Andrew Ryan.
Intellectual Content
Timed puzzles must be solved to hack security bots, cameras, and vending machines, and cleverly hidden pathways must be found to discover certain optional items, but BioShock's intellectual core is its intentional, explicitly philosophical exploration of what a society built on almost unregulated pursuit of self-gratification, genetic manipulation, and free will without moral responsibility looks like. Ultimately, Bioshock does acknowledge that free will can triumph over genetic conditioning, and players are allowed to choose to save the Little Sisters over selfishly killing them for maximum ADAM, but the game never flinches away from how selfishness can infect every aspect of a culture and rot that society.
When the hyper-egoism of Rapture gave way to genetic experimentation within the framework of relatively unrestrained desire, even Dr. Brigid Tenenbaum, a scientist who oversaw the creation of the Little Sisters, recounts a realization she had about physical evolution in an audio log. She acknowledges that genetic manipulation has bettered every aspect of human nature other than moral character, and it is this that contributed to the deterioration of Rapture. Isolation in an underwater city cannot prevent a dystopia if the people living there choose irrationality, moral relativism, egoism, and freedom from everything but subjective desires.
Individualism, capitalism, and libertarianism are not selfish ideologies; egoistic individualism, egoistic capitalism, and egoistic libertarianism are selfish and therefore they can be incredibly destructive to individuals and groups. Rapture is an example of how political systems built on egoism set themselves up for gratuitous infighting, power vacuums, and collapse, yet individualism was not the reason it destroyed itself. Self-interest is not selfishness; a disregard for obligations to other people is. It is not self-interest, capitalism, or scientific progress that damned Rapture, but Ryan's seeming moral nihilism (a logical consequence of his atheism whether that is the reason he retreated away from morality or not) and isolationism.
Conclusion
Despite the immense potential of entertainment to explore philosophical ideas, it is somewhat rare to find a mainstream work of any medium that truly is thorough in how it develops its themes. Video games have an even greater potential for this because of the interactive components, and games like BioShock do not let that go to waste. Entertainment in all of its forms--novels, TV or streaming shows, movies, or video games--is elevated when artists take philosophical concepts seriously and attempt to communicate something about those ideas in their work. BioShock boasts thematic depth, but it also boasts a standout setting, a progression system that carries over to subsequent playthroughs with the new game plus mode, and abilities that fit the themes of genetic manipulation very well.
Content:
1. Violence: Blood is seen when many enemies are shot. Enemies can be killed in less bloody ways, such as by electrification while in water or by fire.
2. Profanity: Although most of the game has little to no profanity, "goddamn, "fuck," and "bastard" are used on occasion.
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