![]() ![]() It’s beautiful in that way.Įlizabeth doesn’t really need Booker, however. They are an intertwined melody and harmony that take each other to make a song. She, a sheltered yet worldly and knowledgeable young woman with a strange and inscrutable power, also functions as a utility for Booker and the player. Booker, a former Pinkerton heavy in debt and lost in his way with the world, is a shield and a sword for Elizabeth. Let’s examine the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth, for example. ![]() This juxtaposition is a consistent thread in the game, a running theme that you will not only see revisited but continually infused throughout the design. They have been lost in the forest for so long that all they know is trees while some grounding, a spatial reasoning, still exists in you. I’ll only speak to the first bit of the game, but you do begin to understand that through the schemes of the prophet that many have turned a blind eye to the truth and, as an outsider, you see more than those in the thick of it. The tragedy, of course, comes in where you slowly begin to unravel the wool that he has thrown over the eyes of these skyward citizens. The gold still shines, so Comstock’s prophecies seem less like lies and more like promises. They just have that first layer of grime that, given a good scrubbing and a fresh spray of Febreze, would be just as good as new. Even the decrepit areas like Finkton and Shantytown aren’t all the way worn down. There’s a shine to the architecture and design that informs your inclination to tread lightly through Columbia. The box that it came in is itself still a treat to behold. Columbia, however, is still fresh and new as if its plastic wrap still lay on the floor, yet to be thrown in the trash. It makes the world feel lived-in and worn like a ratty pair of jeans. There is a veneer to Rapture, a layer over the filth that was again covered up by despair. They both herald from the gilded age of jazz and Art Deco but Columbia maintains its ostentatious core, which is an important distinction. It is not about twisting expectations and warping your understanding of the world or ripping your perspective in twine but rather showcasing what it means to be a tragic beauty.Ĭolumbia is, visually speaking, Rapture pre-fucked, to put it mildly. It is about an overflowing sense of beauty washed up on the sandy shores of tragedy (at one point, literally so). And the traditional (if you can call two games a tradition, only one of which was helmed by the iconoclastic Ken Levine) BioShock sensibilities where everything-and I mean everything-is larger than life from the physical standpoint of 30-story statues and grand displays of sin and phobia to the conceptual influences of chopped and screwed bits of history.īioShock Infinite, though, is not about that. Yes, there are twists such as the opening of the game, a wonderfully crafted 15-minute pre-Columbia introduction that takes what you remember from BioShock and just wretches it harder than a wet towel. It all stacks on top of one another until Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland feels about as messed up as a piece of tofu.īioShock Infinite is not about that. The world of Rapture itself takes a sharp left on the way to an underwater utopia. The relationship between Big Daddies and Little Sisters, for example, plays on the expectation of who is leading whom. That’s the easy one, but you also have the details. You have the very literal twist that comes up in the story where what you assume to be some very large thing turns out to be a very small thing (are we still not spoiling BioShock? I’ll give it time since I feel like the copy that comes with BioShock Infinite might be the first time some people have had a chance to play it). Every little thing was geared towards being some warped, twisted version of reality-or at least something close to it. ![]()
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