Bioshock 4 is taking it very easy , at least judging by the latest rumors that it will be released in 2028. While waiting to hear something official, we took refuge in the indelible memories that the three previous episodes gave us: here you go 5 unforgettable moments from the Bioshock series .
Welcome to Rapture
The beginning of Bioshock represents one of the most exciting moments not only of the series, but of the entire history of video games . The plane crash, the flames and the salvation represented by an isolated lighthouse in the middle of the ocean: in a few minutes Bioshock tells us everything we need to know, leaving us poised between curiosity and panic, and then takes us into the depths of a utopian underwater city as beautiful to look at as it is dangerous to navigate. After more than fifteen years , the words of founder Andrew Ryan that can be heard during the descent to Rapture
still resonate in our minds : “I am Andrew Ryan and I am here to ask you a question: does a man have no rights to the sweat of his brow? No, says the man from Washington. It belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God. No, says the man from Moscow. It belongs to everyone. I reject these answers. Rather I choose something different. I choose the ‘Impossible. I choose… Rapture!’ .
The meeting with Andrew Ryan
Already shaken by the multiple revelations of the previous hours, around the middle of the first Bioshock we are finally granted the opportunity to meet Andrew Ryan. What emerges, in any case, is not a traditional boss fight, as could be expected from the “boss” of Rapture, but rather a disturbing and revealing conversation that ends without offering us any possibility of choice .
” What distinguishes a slave from a man? The slave obeys, the man chooses” , repeats Ryan, questioning all our beliefs. Who are we really impersonating? Are we really free? At that moment we discover that our character’s actions have always been manipulated by the sound of the words “Please” . And it is by saying them that Ryan allows himself to be killed with a golf club while we helplessly observe (like slaves ) the actions of our character, who until then had been nothing more than a puppet at the service of unscrupulous people.
Through the eyes of a Little Sister
Not having been directed by Ken Levine and presenting far too many similarities with its predecessor, Bioshock 2 is generally considered the weakest episode of the trilogy, but in reality it is an extremely solid video game with high-level flashes. The subplot involving Eleanor and Sophia Lamb, Tenenbaum, Subject Delta and the Little Sisters is really intriguing, for example.
Certainly unforgettable is the moment in which Bioshock 2 puts us in the shoes of a Little Sister , an entity that until then had represented a source of terror. Only through his eyes can we finally discover the suffering to which they have been subjected, how they have been genetically modified and how they are kept in a perpetual catatonic state with the sole objective of collecting ADAM from corpses around Rapture, escorted by their protectors, the Big Daddies. This moment shows that we never really know what suffering is until we have the opportunity to experience it first hand.
The ascent to Columbia
Needless to say, Ken Levine knows how to make introductions (who knows what he’s cooking up for Judas , his next project). In Bioshock Infinite he managed to replicate himself by creating the perfect counterpoint to the arrival in Rapture: this time, rather than descending into the ocean depths, through the lighthouse we are catapulted upwards, into a utopian city cloaked in clouds, Columbia .
Accustomed to the humid rooms immersed in the ocean of Rapture, one feels at the same time amazed and amazed by the brilliance of the flying neighborhoods of Columbia – colourful, bright and immersed in the clear blue of the sky. Never had a dystopia been so beautiful, it’s a shame that, behind this blinding beauty, atrocities and atrocities are hidden exactly like in its underwater sister.
A shocking plot twist
The plot twist of Bioshock Infinite is in some ways more shocking than that of the first chapter of the series. On the other hand, its plot is even more ambitious, involving time jumps and parallel dimensions (until it reunites with the beginning of the saga in the two DLCs Burial at Sea Part 1 & 2).
After a whirlwind of emotions, Infinite finally manages to surprise us in the finale, when it reveals the real identity of Zachary Hale Comstock , the game’s villain and founder of the floating city of Columbia. It turns out that he is none other than a future version of the protagonist Booker De Witt, putting us before the importance of choices and how a single moment in life can radically influence the fate of thousands, millions, billions of people. It also demonstrates that with so much strength and determination it is also possible to definitively put an end to a cycle of pain and suffering, even if this means making an equally radical choice.