The basic pattern of clearing out areas and then picking through the leftovers to uncover money, upgrades and audio diaries has seen less attention, however. This is a game with a whole story, one that isn't going to peak with a party trick and then subside again, so it takes its time.
The artists' squared, blushed and brightened take on 1912 Americana is more Snow White in the sky than Rapture fished from the sea, and feels as bright and fresh as the last game was dark. Mechanical horses clank along cobbled streets, a barbershop quartet sings a familiar song on a floating barge, beautiful propaganda posters hang on every wall. As impossible settings go, Columbia hangs together just as well as Rapture did, even as the gathering clouds in the second half of the game give it an ethereal edge - and I really lost myself in the first few hours, glorying in every structure, custom and morsel of dialogue. The city she lives in is less strange by video game standards, but no less brilliant. Comstock hopes that Elizabeth will succeed him. The fact that you come to take Elizabeth's unlikely existence for granted is one of the strangest and most brilliant things about BioShock Infinite. You're not supposed to fall in love with her either. She never feels like a MacGuffin or a damsel in distress and you never feel like you're protecting her. You miss the way she tosses you items as you explore and fight - a quick swivel in her direction at the touch of a button to be met with the perfect arc and swoosh of her throw - and the conversations you have as she picks locks or rides an elevator with you. She never gets in your way, and while it becomes apparent from time to time that she is being subtly teleported around out of sight to fit the circumstances of your behaviour, you dismiss any sense of her artificiality as quickly as you would deja vu.Īnd if she ever disappears from view for more than a few moments, you miss her. When you set her free, everything is new to her, and because believable companions are still so rare in video games, you share her sense of wonder as she dances with strangers on a beach or brings fruit to a frightened child cowering under a stair. She has been kept in a tower for almost her entire life, reading endless books and trying to understand a strange power she has to open 'tears' in the fabric of reality. Once you meet her, the game is all about her. As Booker DeWitt, a former soldier and strike-breaker with a troubled past, you have been sent to this new Eden to retrieve her and take her to New York. She is the daughter of Zachary Comstock, a self-styled prophet who has transformed veneration of America's Founding Fathers into a supremacist cult, and who conceived the floating city of Columbia as a new Ark to carry his followers away from "the Sodom below" - the United States of America. And like Andrew Ryan - the idealist who built Rapture, the city under the ocean that dominated the first BioShock - she is a constant presence.īefore you meet her, the game is all about her. Your computer-controlled female co-star is convincing enough that she becomes one of the most normal things in BioShock Infinite, a tightly wound first-person shooter where you summon fire and lightning from your fingertips as you fight your way through an impossible city suspended in the clouds. It would be hard not to begin with Elizabeth.
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