The DLC attempts to turn BioShock into one eternal round without respecting the eccentricities of the original.

BioShock is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, March 26, 2023.

BioShock’s Rapture is a place of necessity.

The game’s thematic concerns came out of these gamey considerations.

Give Big Daddies Little Sisters so that players are incentivized to attack difficult enemies to get resources.

You need a javascript enabled web app to watch videos.

Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?

Maybe that’s because his goals were similar to the designers'.

BioShock Infinite is similarly artificial, but it is also far less clockwork in construction.

Unlike the prior game, there is no marriage of convenience between practical and narrative concerns.

For example, Rapture’s Plasmids return, here renamed Vigors.

While Plasmids get several audio logs exploring how and why they came to be, Vigors get tertiary consideration.

Unlike in BioShock, their presence does not feed back into the narrative.

BioShock is obsessed with its setting.

Some abilities center around hacking cameras or turrets to create safe zones.

The game encourages you to know where vending machines and health dispensers are.

Playing a level means getting to know the ins and outs of a specific part of Rapture.

In contrast, Infinite is far more focused on a propulsive, blockbuster logic.

There is far less backtracking and less ability to engage with the systems of any given location.

The place-based systems of the original are almost entirely gone.

But this Rapture feels completely different.

In the DLC’s first part, you play as Booker.

The game plays identically to Infinite, with no real changes based on the new setting.

The original’s claustrophobic hallways are traded for Infinite’s vistas.

But the flat exchange of design shows how different the two worlds were in the first place.

However, only Part 1 is an exact replica of Infinite.

Those changes bring flexibility and choices, which feel more akin with the original game.

Burial At Sea Part 2 frames BioShock Infinite as a character portrait.

Being in Rapture, and by extension Columbia, is different for Elizabeth than for Booker.

In other words, Rapture is like Columbia to Booker because his violent heart treats all places this way.

However, even in Part 2, Rapture and Columbia are relentlessly made equivalent.

The game’s meta multiverse fills that fact with profound, metaphysical significance.

The DLC doubles down.

Elizabeth wonders if all people are trapped in what she calls “a wheel of blood.”

The revolutions that hit both cities are drawn in parallel.

The way that Elizabeth and Booker solve problems is almost solely determined by their own methods and their bodies.

The systems which make up Columbia and Rapture are functionally the same.

What Burial at Sea forgets is that not everything can be reconciled or retconned.

Obviously both historical and practical lines can be traced from BioShock to its sequel.

But Infinite’s ambition reaches for the sky even as it plunges into the ocean.

BioShock had the courage to just be a place.

Imperfectly rendered, sometimes trite or silly, but a place nevertheless.

More BioShock Infinite Retrospectives:

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly?