Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Buried at Sea!

I was a little disappointed by Bioshock: Infinite.  More precisely, I was disappointed by the game portion of Bioshock: Infinite.  Ken Levine's capacity for storytelling remains unmatched, and his mastery of games as a narrative medium was thoroughly upheld in Infinite, but the game itself felt odd, like a mix of the original Halo, with its two weapon limit and narrow regenerating shield over rapidly depleting non-regenerating health, and Bioshock, with its plasmid hurling glory.  Bioshock 2's flawlessly zeroed in take on Bioshock the First's gameplay was redacted, replaced with something decidedly retro and, at the same time futurist.  I found the overarching experience unpleasant, especially given how nervy the place could often become, how uneven progression was and how frenetic gameplay could be as well.  An implied cover system, in turn replaced by a series of high-wire fights, in turn replaced by some weird in-depth creeping, paired with a parsimonious system of distributing resources which left me feeling less like a powerful plasmid slinging god, or even a besieged gunslinger left to battle against a massive corrupt cityscape, and more like a lowly peon left to the will of a capricious system beyond my comprehension.

It made sense in the broader context of the game, sure, but that didn't make the gameplay experience pleasant, or even terribly engaging.  Rather than feeling like I was engaging in a series of brain busting gunplay challenges, I felt like I was being forced to manipulate a slot machine to get the resources I needed to accomplish the goals I was being given so I could lap up the dollops of story that were being set out for me.  It was a strangely addictive chore, and even when I found bits of combat to love, such as the Bull Rush vigor followed by a handful of well placed hand cannon or shotgun blasts, I was still crestfallen when the flow of combat returned to its stuttering, awkward pace.

So when I finally picked up a Bioshock Infinite Season Pass (largely in response to the superlative trailer that Burial at Sea fronted) I wasn't expecting much.  Maybe some more frustrating combat, maybe some more resource oriented weirdness.  Maybe a few fundamentally broken systems I'll be forced to beat my head against.  I'm happy to say I was pleasantly surprised.

Not wholly shocked or anything - Burial at Sea has a few moments of asinine frustration, particularly the battle against the first Jack Frost splicer, which presented a false choice of weapon beforehand that ended up seriously limiting my ability to fight and, for the first and only time in the expansion, proffered up an arena where stealth was a total non-starter for the fight.  But these were few and far between.  Despite limited ammunition and a very, very limited structure of potential weapons, plasmids and power-ups, Burial at Sea managed to give me the ability to make choices and play around with those choices.  It gave me an opportunity to use vigor/plasmid traps more effectively than ever before, let me have fun slashing up splicers, and managed to, perhaps by merit of map design, perhaps by merit of enemy AI, make a game I'd become largely disenchanted with fun to play.

It's worth saying that Burial at Sea's new setting is gorgeously well crafted.  Set in Rapture before The Fall, it takes full advantage of its opportunity to showcase not just how far Rapture has fallen (which it does quite admirably in its central setting) but also to demonstrate the opulence and unrest that established the groundwork for The Fall to come to pass.  It's the first real opportunity you get to see Rapture as it was: a glittering, golden testament to the pursuit of the almighty dollar.  It presents  distinct, new view of Andrew Ryan, not as an ideologue, but as a manager of sorts, someone who collects people and lets them run free.  Cohen, also a familiar face from the original Bioshock, makes an appearance as an even greater monster than he is before The Fall - it's readily apparent that Cohen, despite his ostensibly noble intentions, is actually a nightmarish figure left to his own devices, a true monster before the splicers ever came to pass.  The Cohen I recall from Bioshock was a strange, bifurcated figure who wanted to as much help as hinder, one of a handful of characters who didn't actually require killing, not right away, at least, but this Cohen is a murderous sociopath with no sense of the value for human life.

The end result is a grim portrait of a familiar place, one that makes it clear that the Fall of Rapture wasn't the worst thing to occur there, and indeed isn't the most unsettling image in the Bioshock universe.  It's worth noting that the games final moments actually struck me as cathartic in light of other events.  Watching cadres of Little Sisters running about the streets of Rapture, their faces further disfigured by a combination of aesthetic choices and updated visuals, was a distinctly horrible experience.  Watching them being led about town by a schoolmarm somehow seemed more wrong to me than watching them ride on the shoulders of a massive monster in a diving suit - Burial at Sea is about juxtaposition, about making already uncomfortable things more uncomfortable by forcing you to relate to them in a new context.

What it does with combat, then, is interesting.  It barely changes it at all, adding one new vigor/plasmid, and one new weapon.  Both are superlatively fun to use.  The vigor opens up a new set of environmental puzzles to toy around with (and strategies for smashing up sucker MCs who step hard enough to get froze) while the weapon offers up a charming way to set off a chain reaction of exploding splicers.  The Radar Range was halfway between a Red Rider BB gun and a Deus Ex weapon, and its design hit the spot for Rapture perfectly.  As an ill-conceived invention stuck in the housewares department of an underwater graveyard, it made perfect sense. As a vector for effectively committing war crimes, also, quite sensible: the Radar Range does horrible things to people, with a very limited ammo supply, and is easily the most enjoyable aspect of Burial at Sea that I can recall.

But even before this weapon was introduced, something about the play of water in Rapture, the play of turrets and splicers, seemed different.  I don't know if the stealth kill system was a part of Bioshock: Infinite originally, but it thoroughly changed Burial at Sea for me.  If I missed it in the game proper, I'm a bit upset at myself: without stealth kills, I would've had a lot less fun during Burial at Sea.  They offer up a handy way to initiate combat beyond charging in and hoping for the best, and the fact that they're performed with a children's toy presents an additional layer to the covert, mean spirited action they present.

Sure, some of the narrative is, compared to Bioshock: Infinite's obtuse construct, quite heavy handed, but it's tough to complain, and the complexity isn't compromised, it's just smoothed out.  I didn't spend my Bioshock experience being puzzled here, and it didn't take me days to unpack just what I'd seen.  Rather, I was struck, quite quickly, by how deftly the narrative of worlds had been woven together and I was struck, in a sense, by the notion of something bigger beyond the peculiar particular obtuseness at work in the Bioshock: Infinite universe.

Burial at Sea isn't perfect.  If I'd spent $15 on it, I'd feel ripped off, not for lack of quality, but for lack of quantity.  It's short and sweet, and while it's great fun and I wouldn't want it to be any longer, $15 is a lot to ask people to spend on a game they can explore to exhaustion in about three hours and run through in about 40 minutes.  But as a work of narrative, and a game-construct, it's not just good.  It's great.  It's a marvelously solid piece of gaming artifice, a terrifically polished narrative artifact that, despite its brevity, ignited my passion for Bioshock: Infinite anew.  I'm thinking about trying to rattle about in Clash in the Clouds now, or perhaps running through Bioshock: Infinite's story proper again.  I'm definitely going to give Burial at Sea a second run through once I have more time to myself.

Burial at Sea is what, in a sense, Bioshock: Infinite should've always been.  It's a game about telling a story, not a game about presenting a series of mechanics.  It's a game where all the various moving parts make sense, and fit together nicely.  It's a game where plasmids seem quite standard and, in the course of play, their evolution in the world makes sense.  Burial at Sea is, in a sense, the game that Bioshock: Infinite should've been, compressed to a diamond of sorts.