BioShock Review

Rapture is the argument. A ruined objectivist city under the Atlantic, told through art deco signage, audio diaries left on bathroom sinks, and a leaking ocean doing the work of a narrator, and it coheres because the fiction and the level design came from the same hand. The plasmid and weapon split gives every encounter two vocabularies, and electrifying a puddle before stepping back to watch it work was genuinely novel in 2007.

Then there is the line about free will delivered midway through, which takes the most invisible convention in the medium and turns it into the plot's central knife. What is weaker is the shooting itself, loose and floaty next to its immediate contemporaries, and the vita-chambers that respawn you steps away with boss damage intact, quietly removing every stake the fiction spent hours building. The world and the writing carry it comfortably past both complaints, which is why people still argue about the ending.