2007, A Deep Sea Odyssey: BioShock Reviewed

By Tyler Barber


Every five or six years a videogame is made that is avowed by gamers, game developers, and gaming critics as a beacon of the progression of videogames as both an art and a respectable form of entertainment. Enter BioShock; a rich adventure carefully crafted to provide both ominous moral, and gameplay decisions.

"Is not a man entitled to profit from the sweat of his brow?" asks Andrew Ryan, the megalomaniacal dictator of the maritime-metropolis ironically named Rapture. You find yourself struggling to answer these philosophical questions minutes after your plane crashes in the Mid-Atlantic where you made your way down to a sunken city. Built leagues beneath the ocean's surface, Rapture was a product of idealists and elitists looking to forge a utopia where science, industry and art are unconstrained by authority — genetic engineering becomes as common place as buying a new television. However, a macabre of irony is eerily present when you are introduced to Rapture with cryptic warnings splashed in blood across beautifully detailed Art-Deco walls. Bellicose scavengers roam Rapture searching for Adam, the genetic currency needed to splice genes into superhuman powers called Plasmids. Unfortunately, the side-effects of gene splicing disfigured, and lead to the eventual demise of both Rapture and its residents. All that is left is the ravaged skeleton of a city buckling under the weight of the encroaching sea.

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