Super Nerd Sunday Presents: A Return to Rapture!

I’m willing to forgive a lot if a game gives me an interesting place to explore. Great games are made excellent by their settings, and some of the most memorable experiences I have in games come from exploring the reaches of the Rickenbacker and the streets of Venice. The ruined city of Acre, three years after finishing Assassin’s Creed, remains a distinct place with its own personality, its own pulse.

But it’s just as easy to ruin a game with a banal setting. Half-Life, for all its imaginative storytelling, didn’t find its legs for me until it forced us into Xen. Creeping around Black Mesa was fun, but the textures were bland and only occasionally evoked a response. Running across a hydroelectric dam might as well have been running across a highway overpass. And when your game is middling in the first place, as was the case with Mass Effect 2, boring, lifeless settings can force it into the territory of bad. I can only recall one place in Mass Effect 2 that had even the slightest effect on me as a player, a brief missive in the place Jack was raised which was both haunting and evocative of all the feelings that Jack had come of age with. Aside from that even the inside of a derelict Reaper lacked personality. It might as well have been the inside of a Blue Eclipse cargo freighter or a moon base.

The worst can be attempts to revisit previously successful settings. Assassin’s Creed 2’s lone stumble (aside from the ending) came to me when it did just that, giving you a brief glimpse of my beloved Acre. Thief 2, for all its wonderful level design, was almost unbearable when it pushed you back into a familiar Thief setting. I fear for the day when I’m asked to explore the Ishimura again or to run across the walls of Mirror’s Edge’s nameless City.

But when its well executed it can be a wonderful and evocative thing. System Shock 2 brought us back to Citadel Station with style and poise, using it to great effect. It was a buildup with a purpose and great payoff, and it showed why you should reuse settings. So when, as so many have stated, a game like Bioshock, which didn’t really need a sequel, received one from a completely different team, it seemed like it was bound for disaster. Rapture, after all, was the backbone of the first Bioshock, and the entire city had a tremendous feeling of being a real place behind it. Each district had its own personality which, taken as a whole, maintained the motif and feeling of Rapture. To return to Rapture in new hands seemed like a fools errand. Why bother showing us this already well tread earth?

Bioshock 2 answers that question early on with the screech of cracking glass and the rush of water flooding your vision. The first time I was caught in the rush of water I understood why I’d come back to Rapture so many years after the fall of Ryan. It wasn’t to celebrate the accomplishments of the first game or adore the architecture. It was to watch the ocean slowly take it back.

Bioshock 2 is a game with a bit of an older target audience than the first Bioshock. Bioshock the First was primarily a coming of age story. You confronted various father figures, came to terms with a mother figure and various sibling figures and eventually you claimed your place in the world, forever changing it with the force of your actions. But Bioshock 2 is all about being a daddy. It’s about being a daddy who has been forced to miss his child’s journey into adulthood, a father torn from his already ramshackle family and now barred from seeing the one person he loves by seemingly insurmountable forces. And your journey is less about your own personal growth and more about the example you set for your child. Bioshock 2 is less about your future and more about the future you build.

This fatalism and knowledge that all things must end deeply informs Rapture’s new status at the bottom of the ocean. Gone is the triumph of steel and wood and glass, replaced by a tenuous balancing act constantly under siege by nature itself. Even as you restore various sections of Rapture it becomes quite apparent that all of them are rapidly decaying. Unlike say Fort Frolic from the original game places like Siren Alley are clearly on their last legs. Despite the effort which has gone into preserving them and filling them with art and decoration, even population they are clearly on the verge of collapse. Pipes leak, rubble blocks your path. The ravages of war from the first Bioshock have been replaced by the march of time in Bioshock 2, and it shows early on. The rapid descent into madness is replaced by a fixation on the progress of age and the creeping certainty of death surrounding all of the characters. Only the Little Sisters are truly given any hope, and theirs is a delicate thing, subject to our whims and, in the end, time itself.

To say that the ocean encroaches on Rapture in Bioshock 2 is to say too little. To say that time has visibly passed in this place is to put it more accurately. The ocean has, after all, been encroaching in Rapture since you first rose out of it in your bathysphere, the water streaming down your view port until your way was clear, burst pipes and frozen passageways constantly impeding your progress. Bioshock 2 progresses this idea, showing the ecology of the sea reshaping itself with Rapture. From the influence Rapture has on marine life to the presence of barnacles and coral formations within the passages of the city, it becomes clear that Rapture has become intertwined with the sea since Ryan’s death. And as nature marches on all the futile plans levied against it, crafted from steel and stone and glass and muscle, all prove worthless against the coming tide. In the end the only way to achieve anything in Rapture, to affect any kind of notable change, is hope. Hope not only in the future but in a child you have gone long wthout seeing, in a child who believes in you completely.

Bioshock 2 did a number of amazing things people have written about extensively, building a narrative about an oft ignored subject, building on an already noteworthy mythology and doing it justice in the process and making one of gaming’s most powerful denizens seem vulnerable and, at times, a little pathetic. But one thing I’d like to celebrate it for is recapture and reusing a sense of place in a way that few games can manage. Sequels are all too often simply repackaged game play with a new set of maps, and while Bioshock 2’s maps are all new the feel of Rapture still permeates them. Not a one of them would’ve been out of place in the first Bioshock, and you can bet that 2K knows it. What makes the places in Bioshock 2 its own is the sense of decay they bring, the sense of loss and the certainty that one day, not far off, Rapture will be no more. Never before has a game traded so heavily on the reuse of a place, nor has it done it so well.