Mashing Buttons

It has been a little while since I picked up Bioshock again. I’ve felt pressure to get through it so I can get on to Bioshock 2. I’m unwilling to start that one until I can experience the ending of the first game first-hand.

It seems the time away has done me some good. The reason I had left it for so long was that, quite frankly, I was afraid.

The way the game was designed puts you in the position of having to creep around quite a bit. The more you creep, the more fearful you become of what’s around the next corner. As a result, my progress through the game was excruciatingly slow.

Time away from Bioshock gave me some time to think. In the game there are Vita Chambers. when you die, you are revived inside one of these. They are dotted all over Rapture – usually at the start of an area or close to the final obstacle of that area. Even their presence is something of which to be wary: if you see a Vita Chamber, you can be assured something designed to kill you is waiting for its close-up. Interestingly, a Vita Chamber does not seem to have any major in-game penalty for its use. You don’t revive with full health, but that’s no big deal. With this in mind, some of my fear was lost. I say “some” because being attacked by something that teleports in what appears to be a cloud of blood is still utterly terrifying.

With this newfound bravado, I found my progress through the game much swifter. In an afternoon I left Neptune’s Bounty, found my way out of the Smuggler’s Hideout, through the Submarine Bay, and made it onwards to Arcadia. From there, I made my way through Arcadia and the Farmers Market entirely, fighting several Big Daddies in the process, and have since entered Fort Frolic, at which point my afternoon of Bioshock came to an end.

From a story standpoint, Arcadia is a pretty fascinating part of the game. One of the questions nagging at me throughout the game up to this point was “How do they get their oxygen?” Rapture is far under the sea and was built, according to the game’s fiction, between 1948 and 1951. How did they have the technology at the time? Arcadia answers this question: inside and outside the area are plenty of trees. Earlier on in Rapture’s history, oxygen was imported; now oxygen is produced locally thanks to the trees.

The plot for Arcadia is primarily centred around saving the trees. Rapture’s founder, Andrew Ryan, kills off the trees in an attempt to kill off myself and Atlas, my in-game benefactor. I find Rapture’s botanist and she directs me to a new genetic way to bring the trees back to life using chlorophyll solution, distilled water and bee enzymes. I found myself fascinated by the imagery presented of giant pine trees outside Rapture itself growing inside their own individual domes.

The sad part of progressing through this part of the game, however, is that I’m returning to the usual walls and floors and glass of Rapture. No more hills and trees and foliage and greenery. Fort Frolic is presented as quite a “titillating” place, though. So, that might make up for it.