Bioshock Infinite

I'm surprised nobody else has been talking about this.

Loved it. Loved it loved it loved it. Probably one of the most satisfying game narratives that I've ever played through. Spoiler territory from here.

One of my favourite parts (and I have many favourite parts) was going back to the general areas from the start of the game, after the Vox rebellion. I don't want to say that I didn't expect the greater explosive conflict between the Founders and the Vox, or that the Vox would eventually turn against me. What I was unprepared for was how effectively the game used that conflict in its narrative.

I mean, the game goes out of its way to make the people of Columbia distasteful, especially to most modern sensibilities. Pompous. Casually racist. Classist. Brainwashed. There are countless occasions that the game highlights this, even before you hit Finkton and actually get to see how the downtrodden live. Even Booker, whose actions are less "let's help the People!" and more "I want my damn airship", voices support for the Vox cause after seeing that.

And then they get their guns.

Seeing what they did to the people of Columbia is sickening, filled with such violence and cruelty against them because they were products of a certain society. It reminded me of a scene from The Dark Knight Rises, after Bane tells the people to take back his city and rich folk are attacked because they're rich. Not because they did anything personally, but because they represented an aspect of a culture that the attackers hated. In that moment, going back to the Coney Island-Disneyland fusion of the Columbian streets and seeing heaps of vendors and civilians in piles, unceremoniously butchered without any hints of resistance, I felt bad for them. They may have been racist ****bags, but did they deserve that? They, like most people, would have more than likely backed down when threatened with violence, but instead the Vox commit this sort of genocide against them and you, the player, feel bad. You feel bad not just because they didn't deserve it, but because you hated them and more than one person probably fantasized about doing the same thing (or actually did, seeing as how this is a shooter).

And, I mean, it was done perfectly. There's this scene that was in the 2011 demo (which I thankfully didn't watch until after I'd finished the game) where the game has the option of stopping a Vox show trial of a shopkeeper or somethingn that really draws attention to what they're doing. This was cut from the final game. Some people have bemoaned that, for isn't the demo scene more interactive? I much prefer the end result, though. One, it puts the reaction wholly in the player's hands, doing what the game does very well and encouraging (and rewarding) exploration and observation. But it also takes away your ability to do anything about the atrocity. You, Booker (and Elizabeth), caused this, and yet it's completely out of your hands. You can only witness the aftermath.
Awesome stuff.

In his otherwise very positive review, Yahtzee makes mention of how disappointing he found Comstock, but Comstock isn't the only villain. This whole duality of evil and violence was the moral complexity of the game - and hell,
it was only a side plot, all told.
 
I agree. It was everything I hoped for and hyped it to be. It had the same sense of wonder that the first one did but a different feeling. I need to replay it with the knowledge I have of the ending.
 
I enjoyed it. I thought it was a blast to play through, but it was kind of lacking in emotional weight. The fact that NPC's were essentially DIsneyland animatronics was a bit of a disappointment. As for the political parable, well.... The people of Columbia were such cartoon caricatures that I might as well have been shooting at Yosemite Sam. This and DKR both played up the idea that revolution is essentially bloody and mindless by making the revolutionary party both bloody and mindless with no ideology, much less ideological schism and differentiation. I don't know. I find that makes for a pretty pat narrative that doesn't really say much and doesn't do much for me emotionally. Yes, the elite class in a society are oppressive of those without means and yes, revolution is bloody. But by just playing to those shallow surface values doesn't tell a story that says much of anything. If we actually had an opportunity to meet any of the characters from either side of the coin in any meaningful way, it might have created a more substantial narrative, but we didn't get that. Even the little audio logs you pick up throughout the game are essentially one side being elitist bigots and the other side being oppressed. The narrative of "the oppressor becomes the oppressed" without any deeper reflection just doesn't have that great of an emotional impact on me.

Still, I thought it was a neat game, with a great visual design and fun combat.
 
I am 99.999 percent sure that this will be my game of the year when all is said and done. I loved literally everything about it. I had no issues with the combat like many others seem to have. And it had one of the best endings I have ever seen in a game.
 

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