Locked Door Puzzle

Everyone and their best friends tennis instructor’s pet dog is talking about BioShock right now. Some games journalists are just about ready to declare this the dawning of a new era of interactive entertainment. I do love EuroGamer but Kristan is wandering into the Edge territory of taking himself and gaming far too seriously in his three page love poem. I love this game as much as any sensible person who’s played it and how could you not? It’s got great hi-def graphics, the retro setting and music is cool, the utopia turned dystopia atmosphere is fantastic, and the gameplay is solid and varied enough to avoid becoming dull. Let’s keep our heads though this is still a shooter through and through it’s not the advent of a new genre, it’s not the future it’s ultimately just a beautifully executed shooter and what’s more, and on-topic for that matter, a shooter with a fantastic story told really well.

Straight to Video Sequel

The hilarious Consolevania lads kind of dismissed the story by pointing out the competition for good stories in video games is not exactly fierce. Which is a bit unfair since there’s lot of good stories out there if you dig around enough, but I’ll admit the majority wouldn’t even qualify as meaty enough for a straight to video sequel to a shit horror film. (By the way on that subject if you do like horror you should track down Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, it’s really good. Really!) What’s more is that I think the BioShock story is not just good for a video game, it’s actually a pretty good story on it’s own merits and would be in any medium.

To allow myself a moment of self indulgence I think what makes the story in BioShock special is that it doesn’t feel like a story put together by developers looking to dress up their game, looking to tick all the right boxes, or looking to raise enough controversy to incite sales. BioShock is, put simply, a story worth telling. It’s about ideas and ambitions, and how peoples lives are shaped by these forces. For those reasons BioShock enjoys a special place in my gaming heart alongside Silent Hill 2, Metal Gear Solid 2, Final Fantasy VII and The Longest Journey.

An old dog

Much of how the developers have put the story together will seem quite familiar especially to you Half-Life fans out there. Maintaining the immersion of the first person experience necessitates a set of eccentric story telling conceits. Mostly these are just to stop you from killing other characters in the story or to force you to follow the story down a linear path. Let’s have a quick break down of what these tricks of the trade are:

• Mute main player character
• Important characters talk to you over radio
• Incidental characters talk to you from behind unbreakable glass until it’s time for you to kill them
• Player unable to use their weapon in the rare face to face meetings with other story characters
• Back story explained through audio logs

See, all sounds very familiar doesn’t it? That’s because Half-Life pioneered most of these approaches back in ‘98 and nine years later they’re still looking like some of the best ways to tell a story in an FPS game.

However to break it down into the techniques they’ve used doesn’t really bring across how much intelligence and charm they’ve put into the story telling. The game opens with your character sat on board a plane looking at a photo of his family, the title is shown and behind it we the hears screams and the sound of a crashing aircraft, next you’re immersed in water with debris drifting past you. You surface treading water in the middle of the ocean, the plane is burning around you and a strange monolith nearby your only hope for salvation. Inside the monolith you find a lift that takes you deep under the ocean while a pre-recorded tape explains Andrew Ryan’s vision for a better world for mankind until eventually you emerge outside Rapture itself and see his grand hidden society. By this point BioShock has already provided more mystery and more subtle plot exposition than 2 hours of non-interactive Hideo Kojima written cut-scenes and in fact has presented more interesting ideas than most other games on the market.

A Man Chooses

I grew up a PC point’n'click adventure gamer so to be honest I felt like the game missed a trick by not having dialogue trees. The characters in this game are wonderfully realised, so the fact that you can only ever listen to their world views and never challenge them seems like such a missed opportunity. If you take a look at Deus Ex, Knights of the Old Republic and Fahrenheit you can see that injecting choice in your story can often actually seem very shallow even amongst the most noble attempts. However in those games at least you felt like you had some choice and weren’t just being dragged along on someone else’s adventure.

I must admit though on that point though the game had me. I can’t explain exactly without spoiling a brilliant twist but your lack of choice actually leads to one of the most poignant moments in the game. I’ve not really seen this done as effectively since Adam Cadre’s beautiful mini interactive fiction title 9:05 (which I hope to cover in a later entry) as both games manage to manipulate you the player simply by letting you do what you do best: play games. I’ll cover this in more depth when I get around to writing about by 9:05 but essentially while you’re running around doing what the levels demand of you, you are in fact playing into the game’s hands. You utter fool!

An Era of Storytelling?

To tell you the truth I hope that in 9 years time we’re not still talking about BioShock in the way we still talk about Half-Life. If we are then it probably means that quality story telling in games is still as rare as it’s always been. I want developers to learn from this, I want them to see that BioShock’s been a massive critical and commercial success and understand why. Sadly I suspect what we’ll get instead is a load of FPS games with plasmid like magic powers over the next year or two each as hollow as the last and once again story will be an afterthought, little more than Parmesan cheese on top of your Carbonara.

To wrap up, if you’ve got a 360 or have access to one you should be playing BioShock and let’s face it I’m wasting my breath because you’ve probably already finished it by now anyway. If not though and even if you’re not into stories in games, and yet have still somehow got this far into one of my blog posts, it’s still worth you playing it. They’ve got just about everything right in this game and while it would be impossible for it to really live up to the hype being shoveled on it it’s still a great shooter title.