“There is always a lighthouse” was designed to be a poignant revelation to underpin the narrative themes of BioShock Infinite. How myriad characters and ideologies can be found across an endless spectrum of potential universes that each have the chance to interweave with one another. It’s an inventive idea, and one the sequel came close to realising, but it was so obsessed with being perceived as politically mature and emotionally poignant that it fell short at every conceivable hurdle. Sure, it has some things to say, but it's also a game where you dig through bins for rotten food and fire crows from your hands.
It’s still a great game, but its ambitious story was so overwrought with pompous ideology and righteous ideas that it fell victim to its own lofty idea of what intelligent narrative exploration is supposed to look like. One of the defining takeaways is that freedom fighters are just as flawed as their racist oppressors because they also resort to violence in order to further their cause. Not that it matters, because Booker DeWitt is a human army who will march through them in a storm of bullets and hellfire regardless. Violence begets violence, and it doesn't matter if you're fighting for equal rights or for a world where racism isn't a thing. That's a little fucked when you think about it, but gamers like to feel smart, so BioShock Infinite became a hallmark of narrative brilliance for a time.
But history hasn't been kind to it, with the game undergoing a critical re-examination in recent years with fans and critics alike revisiting what worked and what didn't across Irrational Games' troubled sequel. It has a lot in common with Cyberpunk 2077, having been subject to a number of pre-launch trailers and press demos that were far from the layered experience we would eventually get. It's possible that a lot of the complicated narrative threads and player choice were lost in its inevitable evolution into a triple-A shooter, one that put frequent gunfights and unexpected twists ahead of something designed to stick in our memories.
Its examination of race through characters from several walks of life alongside its desire to delve into real historical conflicts and how all men are the same on the battlefield had the potential to be fascinating, but it was told from a glaringly white perspective that defined much of the gaming zeitgeist in 2013. I was sitting my college exams at the time of its release, so I was the perfect audience for a game that fed me complex themes and explained them to me in a way that was easy to understand. I felt smart, believing the ending to be a layered exploration of universal consequences that wasn't afraid to ask questions and label potential saviours as tyrants in disguise. In reality Booker was actually Elizabeth's dad even though they spend a chunk of the game kinda sorta flirting, so the whole thing is a bit creepy and weird. Real nonce material.
The actual narrative content of BioShock Infinite isn't what makes it so derided, it's what the story it told came to represent across the medium. Like I said before it was something we put on a pedestal, hailing it as a pseudo-intelligent example of what all games should strive to be, largely because it had a fun twist and themes we'd never seen blockbuster games explore before.
It launched in close proximity to The Last of Us, yet another game with a mature, contemplative narrative that rewarded players with a story and characters that weren't afraid to ask human questions about love, loss, and circumstance while having us question what is right and wrong in a world that is fundamentally flawed in so many ways. It has aged far better because it never tried to be smarter than it is - that, and it's basically Cormac McCarthy's The Road in video game form anyway, providing glimpses of hope amidst an apocalypse where all seems lost. BioShock Infinite on the other hard strived to be so much more and fell flat. I cannot fault its ambition, but I can spend all day tearing apart its woeful execution.
The original BioShock, whi𓆏ch takes the ideology of Objectivism established by authors like Ayn Rand and depicts them to the most logical extreme, has aged far better because despite a🎃ll its political themes and dense world building, the central message is plain and simple. I love that game, and it really does hold up, while Infinite falls apart because it tries to do so much without understanding the narrative or mechanical foundations with which this series is built upon.
Learning a bunch of words and themes doesn't make you smart, applying them does, and BioShock Infinite does so with the grace of a toddler scribbling on the living room wall. Yet it was a necessary milestone for the medium. We needed a game like this to examine where we were as storytellers and to see how far we'd come and how far we still had to go. Pushing the boat out too far is necessary to know how far we can walk out to shore without losing our heads under the water, and I'm pretty sure we can still see Booker's unfortunate little face bubbling beneath the surface.
BioShock Infinite has one of the worst stories in video games, but it came from a place of well-meaning, one that hoped to depict complicated characters and themes the medium was too afraid to touch back in 2013. It encouraged blockbusters to be riskier, to be more mature, and to perhaps not hold our hands when it came to emotional investment. The fact it failed to deliver on such promises didn't matter, because more lessons were learned in its failure than any success could ever dream of providing.