Bioshock Infinite: With Vim And Vigor, But Why?
***First of all, spoiler warnings and all that fun stuff. I’m going to write about Bioshock Infinite assuming you’ve played it and completed it. I won’t be extensively examining the ending or some of the major plot twists, but there’s a good chance I’ll make casual reference to them and just assume you know what I mean because you played it.***
It’s interesting having just recently written about thematic consistency in games and then playing Bioshock Infinite. The first Bioshock is one of those games that I would hold up as an excellent example of thematic consistency, where the environment, characters, combat, exploration, plasmids, and pretty much everything except the hacking minigame all reinforce the same general themes about freedom, choice, and having fun at Ayn Rand’s expense.
Bioshock 2, well, to be honest I stopped playing halfway through because those parts where you have to protect the little sister as she collects adam from corpses are just plain annoying. So let’s not talk about Bioshock 2‘s themes right now.
Anyway, back to Bioshock Infinite. Simply as a game, I love it. I literally played the entire thing in one sitting. One 14-hour long sitting from around 10pm to a little past noon the next day. The pacing is kinetic to the point where I just didn’t see any reasonable stopping points. Almost every goal that I thought would be a good stopping point turned out to just be another unresolved launching point for the next objective, and I loved that. Bioshock did the segmented story, with levels that embody particular characters, very well, and I was happy to see that Irrational wanted to experiment with something new for the structure this time. Well, the experiment payed off, for me at least, with the jumbled timelines/dimensions offering plenty of what-the-hell-is-going-on-ness to keep me curious mixed with a sense of continuity to keep me grounded enough not to feel completely lost.
But while I loved the act of playing Bioshock Infinite, there were also a lot of thematic and world-building loose ends by the time the credits rolled.
