The final installment of Bioshock
Infinite: Burial At Sea dropped last week and, obedient Levine fanboy that
I am, I hopped in started drinking its Koolaid up post-haste. It's difficult, nigh impossible, to speak on Burial at Sea without wandering into the
dreaded territory of thpoilers, so I'll begin with two blanket statements: Burial at Sea - Episode 2 picks up,
literally, where Burial at Sea - Episode
1 concluded, and Burial at Sea - Episode
2 is perhaps the single best piece of game associated with the Bioshock Infinite game-line. If you've enjoyed any part of Bioshock Infinite, or if you're a Bioshock fan, there will be something
for you in Burial at Sea - Episode 2. It distills the best elements of each Bioshock game into one neat little
package, and brings in a decent helping of stealth play, largely absent from
the Bioshock series up to this point,
realizing its sneaking in a manner reminiscent of the tense, covert violence of
System Shock 2.
That said, I'm going to discuss Burial at Sea - Episode 2 in detail now, and that means I'm going
to spoil it, at least in some measure.
Burial at Sea -
Episode 2 demonstrates why Ken Levine is regarded as one of the best
developers working today. It's sharp,
funny, and plays with structure and play with all the cleverness and
originality you'd usually expect from a Bioshock
title. It's a well crafted artifact, one
that adeptly weaves together the threads of Bioshock
Infinite's story into a narrative that connects Bioshock Infinite to the storyline of the original Bioshock, and explains the puzzling and
apparently extraneous decision to include the trappings of Rapture in the
opening and ending of Bioshock Infinite. It's smart, it's funny, it's touching, and it
provides a deeper insight into the Rapture that Burial at Sea - Episode 1 hinted at, while expanding the stealth-lite
play of Episode 1 into a fully fledged stealth system that lets players use
stealth to do more than just choose how they initiate fights. It's also noteworthy for featuring mostly new
plasmids. Hypnosis is still in play, but
that's the only vanilla Bioshock Infinite
plasmid that makes an appearance. Old
Man Winter, from Burial at Sea - Episode
1, is back, and features prominently in the plot, but the sparse inventory
of four plasmids is really dominated by Peeping Tom, a stealth-oriented plasmid
that encourages you to watch enemy movement patterns and then strike suddenly
before returning to the shadows, and Ironsides, a conflict-oriented plasmid
that rewards you for standing still and taking bullets during stand-up
fights. There's something essentialist
about the whole setup that works quite well, and something about the fact that
you're literally finding these plasmids in Rapture's basement that makes the
whole affair feel quite...right. For
fuck's sake, you discover Peeping Tom in a porno shop. It makes sense that, in war torn Rapture to
come, these bargain basement plasmids wouldn't factor into the bigger fight.
As an artifact of game design, Episode 2 feels stripped down and smart, not at all concerned with
the bombast and feature-creep that made Bioshock
Infinite's gameplay elements feel redundant and same-y. The encounters have the right feel, like
little puzzles that you're asked to sort out in short order. The world has a nice balance of exploration
and exposition, and the challenge scales well.
When things start to fall apart towards the end of the game, it's a
well-earned bit of descent into chaos, and the interstitials feel right. Each discovery, each element contributing to
the explanation of the structure of the game, is well considered. Even the heavy-handed lobotomy foreshadowing
is well utilized. If this is a game
about abandoning all possible doors to open one, and really it is, then it's
perfectly sound to hint at the dangers that you narrowly avoid (or might
experience if you turned the wrong way at the wrong moment).
But none of this addresses a very real issue that no one
seems overly concerned with: this game didn't need to exist. It's a bit shitty to say that, since it's a
great game, and I'm glad it exists, but, in a very real sense, Burial at Sea - Episode 2 seems
primarily concerned with imposing a metanarrative on to the first Bioshock game that was, by and large, only
made necessary by the shortcomings of Bioshock
Infinite as an entry into the franchise.
Burial at Sea has made the
intent of Bioshock Infinite as a
whole far more apparent, which is great, but it doesn't address the fundamental,
overriding concern that Bioshock Infinite
is a blend of Bioshock and Halo into a camel of meh-worthy
proportions bookended by a spectacularly crafted story. Burial
at Sea, taken as a whole, is a hearty nod to the holes in the narrative of Bioshock Infinite, as it attempted to
impose itself on the original Bioshock,
in the spaces left by Levine in the first game's story and world
development. Those spaces, distinct from
"story holes," were simply aspects of a world we didn't get to see,
material explored in Bioshock 2 to a
large extent and, when not explored there, largely unnecessary in terms of our
game-world experience. Did we need to
learn that Atlas had been banished to the bottom of the sea at some point after
the "nationalization" of Fontaine Futuristics? Probably not.
Did we need to see the details of the development process that lead to
Little Sisters learning to bond with Big Daddies? Fuck no!
Did we need to learn more about the experience that Fink and Suchong had
communicating between the Tears, and how it was fundamental to the development
of plasmids? Of course not, that wasn't
even a footnote in the original Bioshock,
but since we had it it would've been nice to hear an explanation of why Tears,
ubiquitous in Bioshock Infinite, only
occasionally occurred in Rapture, were apparently only noticed by one person
there, and were, even moreso, only ever really utilized to communicate with
Columbia by one person, ever, in the history of infinity as engaged with
through the Lutece's mishaps.
The melange of plot points contained within Burial at Sea creates a terrific story,
but it's a story acting in service of connecting the world of Columbia to the
world of Rapture, something that the original Bioshock Infinite was barely concerned with doing for what, in
retrospect, was kind of good reason: it didn't necessarily need to do so. Without plasmids or vigors or whatever, Bioshock Infinite might have actually
been a better game. But because of these
elements, shoehorned in as they were, Bioshock
Infinite felt off somehow, like it wanted to be one kind of game and was,
instead, something different, something compromised, something off. The narrative joining that Bioshock Infinite presented was an
attempt to account for this amalgamated vibe, an attempt to generate a harmony
of unrelated aspects. Burial at Sea - Episode 2 makes a
reasonable frame that attempts to account for this strange harmony and, in
doing so, it presents a beautiful story of sacrifice, a story about, quite
literally, giving up your own life to make the best of all possible worlds,
even if that means you don't get to live in it.
But the impetus for this creation is inescapable for me: Bioshock remains a stand-alone game, a
wonderful creation of narrative, and Burial
at Sea, in attempting to accommodate Bioshock's
story, stumbles even as it succeeds. Bioshock never needed Burial at Sea,
just as Bioshock Infinite should not
have needed Bioshock. And yet, here they are, side by side, and we
are forced to look at them together and ask "why?"
Burial at Sea -
Episode 2 has no answer as to "why," but it gives us a great deal
of "how," enough that it can be forgiven, and then some. It's a beautiful work of art, and when it
finally reaches its conclusion it didn't, as the original Bioshock did, drive me to tears, but it did alright, made me feel a
little choked up. Bracketed by an end-credits
video of Courtnee Draper singing the classic standard "You Belong to Me,"
the game ends with an overarching sense of reverence for both Bioshock, as a series, and Irrational
Studios who, unfortunately, closed their doors just before Burial at Sea - Episode 2 was released (though not with the same sort
of finality that Looking Glass Studios, Levine's former employer, did). Perhaps that is the real tragedy of Burial at Sea; not Elizabeth's final
sacrifice, or the many sacrifices surrounding it, but the twinging knowledge
that Burial at Sea is less a game and
more an attempt to tie up loose ends, a sort of wonderful, winding farewell-note
of an experience that terminates not in an expansive or triumphant sense, but
with the knowledge that it is setting up the world for the next great work to
tumble out of Levine's aching skull.
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