BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea Cannot Reconcile Its Alternate Selves

BioShock is celebrating its 10-year anniversary at this time, March 26, 2023. Below, we check out how its DLC, Burial at Sea, tried imperfectly to search out synthesis between its numerous worlds.

BioShock’s Rapture is a spot of necessity. The novelty of its underwater setting comes out of a sensible concern: Why would not a participant character simply depart a harmful place? The sport’s thematic considerations got here out of those gamey concerns. Give Big Daddies Little Sisters in order that gamers are incentivized to assault troublesome enemies to get assets. A world with out regulation implies that gamers can purchase ammo from merchandising machines and shoot lightning out of their palms with “plasmids.”

Even the sport’s preoccupation with objectivism comes from these sorts of sensible concerns. In director Ken Levine’s personal phrases, “we wanted a very believable reason why they would be there.” Rapture’s founder Andrew Ryan (a thinly veiled stand-in for author Ayn Rand) can’t think about a spot the place he can construct his ideally suited, objectivist world on land, so it have to be finished within the sea. Though BioShock’s narrative in the end, tepidly, condemns him, it additionally finds some the Aristocracy in his mission, within the purity of his imaginative and prescient. Maybe that is as a result of his objectives have been just like the designers’. They too constructed Rapture out of necessity, a world constructed out of gameplay constraints, that would solely exist digitally.

BioShock Infinite is equally synthetic, however additionally it is far much less clockwork in building. Unlike the prior sport, there isn’t a marriage of comfort between sensible and narrative considerations. For instance, Rapture’s Plasmids return, right here renamed Vigors. While Plasmids get a number of audio logs exploring how and why they got here to be, Vigors get tertiary consideration. They are a part of the carnival which opens the sport, however how and from what they’re made is unexplained. Unlike in BioShock, their presence doesn’t feed again into the narrative. In considered one of fashionable gaming’s most regularly noticed plot holes, protagonists Booker and Elizabeth are tasked with arming a revolution in a world the place you possibly can throw fireballs along with your naked palms should you purchase the appropriate bottle from a merchandising machine.

Pointing out such inconsistencies will be inappropriate, however on this case it exhibits a basic distinction between the 2 video games’ design. BioShock is obsessive about its setting. Rapture is the first means by means of which a lot of the characters are channeled, and the sport’s systemic preoccupations are about house. Some talents focus on hacking cameras or turrets to create secure zones. The sport encourages you to know the place merchandising machines and well being dispensers are. Playing a stage means attending to know the ins and outs of a selected a part of Rapture.

In distinction, Infinite is much extra centered on a propulsive, blockbuster logic. In a sure sense, you progress much less from location to location and extra from set piece to set piece. There is much much less backtracking and fewer capacity to have interaction with the methods of any given location. Infinite has quite a lot of ranges, however the way you interact with and what you do in every stage is principally equivalent. The place-based methods of the unique are virtually completely gone.

BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea makes an attempt to reconcile the franchise’s two worlds, bringing Elizabeth and Booker into Rapture itself. But this Rapture feels fully totally different. In the DLC’s first half, you play as Booker. The sport performs identically to Infinite, with no actual adjustments primarily based on the brand new setting. True, you battle a Big Daddy, however in any other case the weapons, enemies, and pacing are crammed with Infinite’s sensibilities. The authentic’s claustrophobic hallways are traded for Infinite’s vistas. Part of it’s because Burial at Sea takes place simply earlier than and through Rapture’s collapse, when it’s dystopian however not in shambles (very similar to how Infinite sees Columbia within the midst of collapse relatively than after it). But the flat alternate of design exhibits how totally different the 2 worlds have been within the first place.

However, solely Part 1 is an actual reproduction of Infinite. Elizabeth is the participant character in Part 2, and with that shift comes quite a lot of new methods: non-lethal weapons and a larger emphasis on stealth. Those adjustments carry flexibility and selections, which really feel extra akin with the unique sport. Burial At Sea Part 2 frames BioShock Infinite as a personality portrait. Being in Rapture, and by extension Columbia, is totally different for Elizabeth than for Booker. The depiction of each settings in prior video games, and Booker’s bloodthirsty strategy, usually are not wholly goal, however tinged with human perspective. In different phrases, Rapture is like Columbia to Booker as a result of his violent coronary heart treats all locations this manner.

However, even in Part 2, Rapture and Columbia are relentlessly made equal. Elizabeth returns to Columbia to search out that she will be able to work together with it in roughly the identical method she may Rapture. In the primary place, lots of Infinite’s methods and narrative beats are current as a result of they have been within the authentic BioShock. The sport’s meta multiverse fills that reality with profound, metaphysical significance. The DLC doubles down. In the creativeness of Burial at Sea, methods usually are not tied to put or circumstance, however are virtually everlasting. Elizabeth wonders if all persons are trapped in what she calls “a wheel of blood.” The revolutions that hit each cities are drawn in parallel. The method that Elizabeth and Booker remedy issues is sort of solely decided by their very own strategies and their our bodies. The methods which make up Columbia and Rapture are functionally the identical.

The sport makes this level narratively, too, tying up unfastened ends and explaining plot holes with the inter-dimensional connection between Rapture and Columbia. Burial at Sea turns the BioShock games–except 2, which is by no means talked about or alluded to–into one large story. It reframes BioShock’s participant character because the one who can break the cycles which entrap Booker, Elizabeth, and the remainder of the video games’ solid. What Burial at Sea forgets is that not all the things will be reconciled or retconned. Obviously each historic and sensible strains will be traced from BioShock to its sequel. But Infinite’s ambition reaches for the sky even because it plunges into the ocean. BioShock had the braveness to simply be a spot. Imperfectly rendered, typically trite or foolish, however a spot however.

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