A thalassophobes nightmare….
Due to a complication following surgery, I have found myself unable to walk. Around my many rehab exercises (and there are a lot) I’ve had a bit more time on my hands.
Now I don’t know about anyone else, but when life goes sideways, I crave comfort. Familiarity. Something soaked in good memories. I needed to cosy up to a game that I knew, no surprises, where I can just enjoy the nostalgia and escape. So I decided to revisit Bioshock, playing the Remastered version for a quiet return to rapture.
Bioshock turns 18 this year. I didn’t play it at release, in fact I came to it many years later, but it has still been a long time since I got to wander its dripping corridors and this time I was ready.
But how does it hold up all this time later?
Let me tell you.
Full spoilers ahead! Continue at your own risk…..
It may be falling apart at the seams, but Rapture still knows how to shine. Here’s what stood out, even after all these years in the deep
Let’s kick things off with the graphics and the visuals. Sure, it doesn’t look ultra-crisp like today’s AAA releases but it still looks damn good, better than many games from its era (cough cough Oblivion cough cough Dragon Age Origins…. and before anyone comes for me, I say that with love, because I adore DAO and wouldn’t change it for the world!) Bioshock has aged beautifully, like a perfect cheese or an oaky whiskey. It’s not dated, it’s vintage. At no point when playing did I find myself thinking “oof that looks bad.”
The gameplay still holds up so well! There are so many weapons and plasmids that it never becomes boring. Want to electrocute someone mid-fight? NO PROBLEM! Curious what Napalm does to human skin? GET STUCK IN! Feeling your inner Nicolas Cage and ready to unleash bees? BUZZ AWAY BABY! The game constantly nudges you to switch tactics. Enemies throw grenades? Use Telekinesis to lob them back. Three splicers wading through water? Electro Bolt will do the trick. You find yourself tailoring your approach based on what you are facing which keeps it fun and oftentimes hilarious.
Aside from general splicers there are other challenges I really enjoyed. I still love the minigame to hack vending machines or health stations and being able to hack turrets and cameras to work in my favour. I tried to find all the secret crawlspaces to get extra goodies and discovering recordings left behind by residents of Rapture who are most of the time long dead, recounting their experiences and lives, the decline and decay of the ideal of Rapture and its descent into the barbarism we are experiencing. There is a lot to find if like me you explore every single room and it’s always worth the effort.
I’ll keep this next part brief, because if I deep dive into the plot, we’ll be here all day! This is just a little refresher before we get to know how it felt replaying it.
You play as Jack, a plane crash survivor who finds a mysterious lighthouse in the middle of the ocean which leads to Rapture, a crumbling underwater city built by the elusive Andrew Ryan as a haven for the free, the brilliant, and the powerful. But Rapture has decayed into a nightmare thanks to ADAM, a genetic substance that gave people terrifying powers which seemed designed for violence! The city is now full of violent, mutated Splicers (who aren’t easy on the eye!), roving Big Daddies (that make you feel sad but will smash the shit out of you), and eerie Little Sisters harvesting ADAM from corpses (who if you are like me, you will want to save!)
You’re guided over a radio by a man named Atlas, who seems to be helping you escape… until the game pulls one of the greatest twists in video game history (in my humble opinion!).
“Would you kindly?”. Such a simple sentence that turns out to be a trigger command, revealing that Jack was genetically conditioned to obey every request following those words. Atlas also isn’t who he says he is, in fact he’s Frank Fontaine, a conman who’s been manipulating you the entire time to kill Ryan and take control of Rapture.
As you approach the end of the game, you break free of Fontaine’s control with the help of Dr. Tenenbaum and the rescued Little Sisters (if you chose to save them) but you take some damage from Fontaine for having the audacity to break free! The ending changes depending on how you treated the Little Sisters….if you spared them, they help you escape and return to the surface, where you’re shown raising them as your daughters in a surprisingly soft, hopeful ending.
I still remember my initial reaction to the “Would You Kindly” twist. Jaw on the floor! I think I actually said “what the fuck!” out loud. It breaks the fourth wall in such a subtle way, we are playing the game feeling like we are choosing to complete the objectives, it is OUR decision, and the game pulls the rug out and we realise we’ve been a puppet all this time. It’s one of my favourite gaming moments of all time.
I was worried it wouldn’t land the same way the second time around and yet it did, just in a totally different way. Every time “Atlas” would say “Would you kindly…” I would feel myself getting angry! When he fake-cried over this fake dead wife and kid? FUMING. When he told me to harvest the little sisters pretending it’s a kindness, knowing damn well he set up the orphanages to turn children into the little sisters? RAGE. By the end I was more ready to kill Fontaine than ever.
The characters are just so brilliantly written. Andrew Ryan’s ideal of a world without “parasites” where you can make your own way becomes a literal hell as he starts to lose power and control. It is clear in the game he is willing to destroy everything to prevent anyone else having control of his Rapture. Fontaine/Atlas is even worse! A ruthless conman who is willing to sacrifice anything and anyone to get what he wants, which is also power and control. He has manipulated, used and harmed his own men, the poor, children and us to get what he wants. He makes Andrew Ryan the lesser of the two evils and that is saying something.
Tenenbaum herself was ruthless and cutthroat and prepared to hurt anyone who got in the way of achieving her goals with ADAM and plasmids, however she has been able to self-reflect and see the error of her ways and is trying to make things right. She will encourage you to save the little sisters and offer Rapture something it desperately lacks; redemption.
Aside from the main players we also have to deal with some other spliced-up crazy folks! Both Dr Steinman and Sander Cohen are totally unhinged in their own way; One has gone crazy in the quest for beauty and perfection that when operating on his patients he ends up mutilating and killing him. The other is so desperate for artistic recognition and respect that he forces us to kill his associates and take photos of their corpses for his art show, and has so little remorse or care for the suffering he has caused.
There are also sad stories we hear from audio diaries spread all over Rapture; the parents who discover their daughter is a Little Sister and are so heart-broken they take their own lives. Bill McDonagh, a decent man trying to save Rapture from within, who ultimately pays the price. Seeing his body is such a gut punch.
Even on my second playthrough I was totally invested. That’s how you know it’s good!
And can I just say, the novelty of being in a city at the bottom of the sea still hasn’t worn off. The neon signs, the collapsing walls, the silhouettes of sea creatures swimming past skyscrapers (or seascrapers?). It’s just so cool and it always will be.
Of course, not everything makes it out of the depths unscathed. Time has chipped away at a few details, small things that don’t ruin the experience, but remind you just how long it’s been since we first stepped inside Rapture.
Time hasn’t been cruel to Bioshock but it hasn’t left it untouched either.
When it comes to the combat, as fun as all the weapons and plasmids are, it can get quite repetitive. After a while you have seen all the enemy types which are just a variety of splicers (ones using melee, guns, grenades etc) and Big Daddies. The Big Daddy fights are tricky at first however not far in they weren’t much of a challenge at all, especially with the grenade launcher. There are the occasional sort of “boss” fights as well, such as with Dr Steinman or Sander Cohen but these aren’t particularly difficult either. Once I got to the later stages of the game I was a bit burnt out on it and ready for the next game. However that being said, Bioshock didn’t overstay its welcome and I felt it ended quickly once it started feeling repetitive.
There is an escort mission at the end which has a “sweet” element to it as we are further protecting a Little Sister we had already saved while she harvests ADAM and helps us to find Fontaine. However it is quite clunky and frustrating! I’ve never seen so many splicers go after a Little Sister until I put on a Big Daddy suit, then suddenly every single splicer in Rapture decided to have a go! Escort quests are rarely anyone’s favourite (looking at you Metro…. seriously what the fuck was that?!) and this was no exception. It wasn’t overly difficult but it was the least enjoyable part of the game for me.
Finally, the Fontaine boss battle. Let’s be real, after everything that man put me through, I was expecting fireworks. He’s mad, he’s manipulative, he’s evil. What is he going to hit me with? Well he’s shirtless (and he’s no Ryan Gosling), he’s glowing and he’s full of ADAM and he just tries to thump me a bit. The fight boils down to: hit him with a few big guns (thank you grenade launcher), ignore some turrets and splicers, and jab him with a syringe when incapacitated. It lasted maybe two minutes? His splicers did literally nothing to me and at the end he just kind of… fell over.
For a character who’d spent the whole game bullshitting and manipulating everyone around him, the final confrontation felt anti-climactic. FRANKly, he deserved better. (Yes, I made that pun. No, I won’t apologise.)
However watching the Little Sisters stab him to death with ADAM syringes at the end? Poetic justice. You prick.
Bioshock is not a game you finish and leave behind. Just like Rapture, it lingers. There is something so sad about the dream of Rapture, the beauty of it, how it was full of promise and seeing what became of it. People who lost themselves chasing power, who crumbled under the weight of their own ambition, who were driven to madness and violence by their addictions and desperation. You can see very clearly what this could have been yet never got the chance to be, and it leaves you feeling wistful.
And yet, there’s hope.
If you choose kindness, if you save the Little Sisters and turn away from the voice whispering in our ear to give in to that need for power, the game forgives. It gives you that normality, the opportunity to do better and be better, it gives you hope. It gives you everything that Rapture was supposed to.
I came back to Bioshock for nostalgia and it didn’t disappoint. Some places break your heart, some fade away in your memories, nothing more than a vague recollection you stumble on every now and then. But some, like Rapture, stay with you.
