In the first Bioshock game,
the players were introduced to Rapture, an underwater failed-Utopia filled with
guns, plasmids, mutated humans, hulking enemies, and more. Its sequel returned
to Rapture but had you play as a 'Big Daddy;' one of the hulking enemies of the
first game. Both games captivated fans with their creative stories, immersive
world, and crazy abilities for killing stuff. With Bioshock
Infinite, many
things have changed. Instead of underwater-Rapture you visit Columbia, the city
in the clouds. Like Rapture, Columbia is an attempt at Utopia, but it has not
failed; at least not yet. Exploring the city will uncover a great deal about it. The game takes place in 1912, and if you ignore the
buildings floating in the sky, the place seems downright quaint, with
barbershop quartets serenading passersby. The setting plays out like every
crazy World's Fair idea of the future, but it's still imbued with the mannerisms
and culture of America at the start of last century. your first weapon
is little more than a melee spinning claw called the SkyHook that lets you dish
out some pain. You soon gain access to your first gun, a pistol, and from
there, the game is mostly a ranged affair. You can only carry two weapons at
any time, and you'll debate over which ones to lug around.
Unfortunately, the gun combat isn't as entertaining as it
could be. More often than not, enemies don't react to being shot, and they're
rarely slowed down by withering fire, nor are they hindered in their ability to
draw a bead on you. This makes your melee attack largely useless because it
doesn't stagger enemies as it should and ends up putting you at point-blank
range of their unimpeded firepower. At other times, enemies react for no good
reason; blow an enemy's head off with a sniper rifle, and nearby enemies may
stumble as if a bomb went off. Guns and Vigors can be upgraded at booths
throughout the game, with the former getting conventional damage, recoil,
magazine size, or other adjustments. Vigors can get fundamentally changed, such
as allowing Possession to work on people and machines, or Murder of Crows
placing a trap any time an enemy dies under its effect. That particular upgrade
is almost absurdly powerful, as a single trap can affect multiple enemies. When
it does, you tap each of them with a few bullets and then laugh manically
because you now have an area covered in traps. Something
shown in the trailers is the Skyhook. This is a handy tool for not only tearing
off faces but also catching Skylines and freight hooks. Unfortunately, as the
game is relatively linear, the Skylines exist just to get from point A to point
B, so you will not be crossing Columbia via hand-held rollercoaster. These
features are useful for more than movement though as you can leap from them
onto enemies.
However, one could write volumes about
how well Elizabeth is presented. While you could consider her to be a massive
escort quest, Elizabeth doesn't get lost, get hurt, or get in the way. At the
same time, she realistically cowers behind things when gunfire is exchanged, or
she takes a closer look at things during the calmer segments. She feels just as
much a part of the game as you do, and it really helps to sell her as a
believable companion instead of a mindless automaton. Outside
of combat, Elizabeth will point out things to be picked up and toss you money
she has 'collected.' (Insert joke about how only in a fictitious-Utopian city
will a woman provide a man with money.) Among the items she points out are lock
picks, which she uses to access areas and safes upon your request. Once you
indicate you want a lock picked, she will simply run over and pick it; no
mini-game involved. When you do find yourself running low on
health, Salt, or ammunition, there is a decent chance Elizabeth will call out
to you that she has something for you. With the press of a button you will
receive a health or Salt
vial, or an entirely new weapon with a filled clip,
ready to fire. This happens in almost real-time during battles, so enemies keep
moving while the item is thrown and caught. However, it did appear the enemies
could not damage you during the perhaps second-long event. I shall not deny the fact that I did fall in love with her :3
 |
| Its hard not fall in love with her :3 |
Another important departure from the previous games is that you no
longer collect health packs to be applied during combat. Instead you have a
regenerating shield that must first be broken before your non-regenerating
health takes any hits. While there are certainly more
equivalencies between the games, it is the differences that are the most
memorable. For one, you are no longer able to save when you want; it is all
auto-saved. It is worth noting though that when you die you do respawn instead
of reload at a checkpoint, so dead enemies stay dead, though living ones regain
some health.
Along the way, the story doesn't flesh
itself out unless you find and listen to all of the voxographs, which are voice
recordings left behind by other characters. There are major plot points that
are contained within these errant devices, so anyone looking to make sense of
the plot would do well to search for them. Miss one, and you may finish the
game without knowing why the plot unfolded the way it did. That's not to say
that all loose ends are resolved at the end of the game, as it's been the topic
of fan debate since the game was released. The game
world of Infinite is quite large, but being a linear game, I never really had
the impulse to return to areas I had already cleared. Fortunately it is
possible to replay specific chapters, which should ease any later exploration.
Also helping with exploration is the navigation system. You do not have a map
but, as in Bioshock
2 (I can't remember if Bioshock had the
same mechanic) you can push a button and have an arrow appear, directing you
where to go. Obviously this is useful for finding the correct path to take to
proceed, but also for finding the alternative paths to explore. Despite
the variety of enemies, the difficulty of the game never seemed that bad. Of
course I was only playing on normal, and I did die maybe once or twice during
the whole game, but it never felt especially easy or horrendously hard.
##SPOILERS
The story has been baffling and confusing
ever since its release. I’m still unsure of a couple of things, but
these aren’t massive plot points that really matter, and either I just missed
something or they are actual minor plot holes that weren’t explained in the
game properly.
So, let us begin. At the beginning.
The prophet Comstock, the ruler of Columbia, predicted that a
“false shepherd” would come to Columbia to try and steal their lamb (Elizabeth)
from them. This false shepherd can be identified by the AD mark on the
back of his hand. This false shepherd is Booker. These letters (AD)
match the letters imprinted on the back of Booker’s, hand. It isn’t until near the end that the plot heats up again. Before we go
into this though, we need to take a look at Elizabeth’s “tearing” power.Elizabeth
received this tearing power after the Lutece’s twins experimented on her (she
did not naturally have this power). The twins had previously made machinery
that could open tears. After these experiments, Elizabeth could do so without
any help.
Tears are basically otherworldly things.
Other dimensions. A open tear can bring in something from another world — or
you can enter an entirely new world
Songbird,
a massive mechanical bird that protects Elizabeth and that can be summoned and
controlled by a whistle-flute thing, always seems to intervene at the last
moment and take Elizabeth from Booker. When Songbird does this near the end,
Booker tries to rescue her. He hears, through mini-tears in the air, Elizabeth
being tortured and brainwashed into becoming the heir to the throne that
Comstock wanted her to be. After
going through a tear into another dimension, Booker discovers an old, frail
Elizabeth looking out over a burning city. The chaos is her doing. She explains
to Booker that this can never happen and gives him a piece of paper to give to
the young Elizabeth. He then goes through another tear into a universe where
Elizabeth is still being tortured and brainwashed. After rescuing her, he gives
her the note. All seems well. After it is
destroyed, Booker drops Songbird’s whistle because it becomes electrified, and
he panics as Songbird rushes toward them, no doubt about to flatten them both.
But Elizabeth opens up a tear into another world, allowing them to escape into
a new world.
The world of Rapture.
if
you decided to stay at home (and play Infinite) rather than go to work, another
dimension would be created for where you didn’t stay home and you did go to
work. A new world is created for everything that could have ever been. We
then learn by going through one of these lighthouses that after killing Native
Americans at Wounded Knee, Booker got baptized to rid him of his sins. But he
refused the baptism at the last moment and went on to live his life. Booker and
Elizabeth move on to another lighthouse — to another thing that happened in
Booker’s life.
We are now in Booker’s apartment, and there is Robert
Lutece standing in the doorway. You hear a baby called Anna in one of the
rooms, and after entering it, you see the very young child Anna in a cot.
Booker frantically denies that the child ever existed, completely confused as
to why this is happening. But to continue he must go through with the scene as
it happened before. He hands his child over to Robert, who then leaves, saying
something along the lines of “Mr. Comstock forgives your sins.” We then go
to a scene where we see Comstock holding Booker’s
daughter as he is about to go
through a tear into another dimension (the dimension of Columbia). But Booker
tries to stop him leaving, begging for his daughter back. Unfortunately,
Comstock gets away — but he isn’t quick enough, and as the tear closes, Anna’s
little finger gets caught in the closing tear is cut clean off.
It is now obvious that Elizabeth, previously called Anna,
is Booker’s daughter.Now this is where it gets a little confusing. Booker
realizes that the Lutece twins, who aren’t actually twins but are versions of
the same person from different dimensions who met each other, came to help him
after Comstock betrayed them. They came to help Booker get his daughter back
from Columbia.They opened a tear and brought him into Columbia’s dimension.
After bringing him through, Booker’s mind created new memories in place of the
old ones. He created a new purpose for himself in this other world, and this
purpose was what he wanted to do all along: find Anna/Elizabeth and get her
back.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t as simple as that.
After being baptised, what did this new, free-of-sin
Booker do? He called himself Zachary Comstock and created a city in the sky
called Columbia. He was born again — but this time an evil man.
When, in the original dimension,
Booker rejected the baptism, another world was created in which he accepted it.
This is the place they are in now. This is the world where he accepted the
baptism.
To kill Comstock when he was born, Booker has to kill
himself when he turned into Comstock. And that is at the place in another
dimension where he accepted the baptism instead of rejecting it.
Lots of Elizabeths appear, and they proceed to drown
Booker, presumably in the baptismal basin. After he dies, we see all of the
Elizabeths disappear.
When
Booker was first faced with choosing the baptism, he declined. He then went on
to have a baby. Obviously, this decision created another dimension in which he
had accepted the baptism, in which case he then became Comstock and went on to
create Columbia. Both Comstock and the original Booker existed within their own
dimensions, doing their own thing. However, after Comstock needed an heir but
couldn’t have a child because he was infertile, he used the Lutece’ twins
tearing machine to take Booker’s own child, Anna. Technically, because Comstock
is Booker but just in another world, Anna is still biologically related to him.
Booker was caught in a never-ending cycle of trying to save his daughter. He
had already been to Columbia over a hundred times before. This is proved when
he is in Columbia and asked by the Lutece twins to flip a coin. He does, and it
is heads. They mark it on a chalk board under “heads” and you see that heads is
marked more than 100 times. No tails have been marked down. This means that
Booker has been there over 100 times same outcome. Back to where we were before. It
didn’t matter what happened; he would always end up where he was. It was
impossible to avoid. Because Booker had a daughter and Comstock needed her and
he made their dimensions cross and he took her, there were no other dimensions
with a different outcome. Every world Booker existed in ended up with him
losing Anna and going to save her. A never-ending loop. However,
it does end, here. After Booker accepted he needed to die to kill Comstock, he
allowed Elizabeth to kill him. By killing himself at the point in time where he
accepted the baptism, he killed off any possibility of a Comstock. Comstock
never existed. Comstock never came and took Booker’s baby, and Columbia was
never built. Anything Comstock had an effect on or had anything to do with was
destroyed and never happened.
This is where a lot of people lose it. They think Booker,
Comstock, Elizabeth, and Columbia all died, but they didn’t. Booker didn’t kill
himself when he was first born; he killed himself when he turned into Comstock.
All that did was kill off any Comstock version of him that there ever was.
After the credits, there is a little, tiny section, where
Booker wakes up in his apartment and hears Anna crying. He goes into her room
and calls out “Anna?!” That is where the game really ends.
This little part backs up what I am saying.
Because only Comstock was killed and stopped from ever
existing, the Booker that declined the Baptism still existed. However because
Booker and Comstock’s worlds crossed, all parts of Booker’s life that included
Comstock or anything from the Comstock dimension itself was removed from his
life. There were no Lutece twins who came to collect his daughter, no Columbia,
no Comstock, and no adult Elizabeth in his, or any other, dimension. Ever. He
then went back to the last time in his life that was free from Comstock-related
madness: Booker in his apartment with Anna as a baby before he met Comstock.
Now people may come back with “But Elizabeth
disappeared from the scene after drowning Booker,” and while this is true, it
makes sense — and is also one of the most depressing parts of the game despite
its happy ending. Elizabeth in that form never existed. The girl you went
through the entire story with? She never existed. Anna is Elizabeth, but
because every outcome of baby Anna’s life was to end up in Columbia with
Comstock in that tower and grow up there, when Comstock died and everything he
had done and had effected died with him, the adult Elizabeth also went. There
was no adult Elizabeth in any other dimension that Comstock wasn’t in. Because
he was in every world she was in, when he died, the adult Elizabeth died too,
leaving only baby Anna. This means that while Anna will be free to live with
Booker, she will never turn into the same person. She will never be able to
open tears, as that was an ability given to her by the Lutece twins in
Columbia. She may never be able to pick locks (why would she need to learn to
do that?), and a lot of her personality that was influenced by being in
Columbia will be different. She will never be Elizabeth. She will always be
Anna, a completely different human than the one we got to know. So, in a way,
Elizabeth did die. That, to me, is a very depressing
thing indeed, as Elizabeth was an incredibly crafted character and the best
female portrayal in any game I’ve ever played.
Here’s another quick thing to note, something
players may mention: Why did they even bother to stop Comstock? Why not just
change what had happened by going back to old memories and parts in time
through those lighthouses? The thing is that they can’t. When you go back to
previously, already, made memories, you can only relive them — you cannot remake them. Booker couldn’t go
back
and choose to run off with Anna, because his decision to sell her was made, and
he must go through with it even if he went
back knowing it was wrong. Even in an alternate reality where he didn’t sell
her, Comstock still came to steal her away.
If you want a summary of what happened minus
the confusing shit: Comstock was Booker in an alternate reality where he didn’t
decline the baptism. Comstock took, either by force or through buying, Booker’s
daughter, Anna (also Elizabeth). Booker went on a cycle of trying to get her
back that never ended and always ended up the same. In the end, he let himself
be killed at the point where he turned into Comstock, and thus everything
“Comstock related” died. He became himself in his last pure, Comstock-less
memory, which was him with baby Anna.
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