The late 2000s were tough years. The seventh generation of consoles and their games were well beyond my price range – being the poor College student that I was at the time – and, even once I finally got some money through my University student loan, there wasn’t anything worth playing…or at least, nothing that catered to my current, very narrow tastes. It was at this point that a friend recommended – practically begged, in fact – that I try BioShock. I was skeptical, but it had been out for about a year by that point and it was low enough in price that I decided it was worth a try.

Since then I’ve bought this game four times across four different platforms – Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. I will probably buy it again on Steam when I get my Steam Deck and it goes on sale. I love BioShock.

But…I don’t love BioShock for the same reason that everyone else seems to love it. Whenever I see praise for this game floating around on the internet, it’s always because of the “would you kindly?” plot twist, and frankly I think that’s probably the worst thing about this game. It’s not particularly shocking, or even that inventive – we’ve been seeing puppetmasters in mainstream Western titles for years. Maybe it’s just because I’m used to high quality narrative with more than a single plot twist, but I was never overly impressed with Bioshock’s ascended meme line. I certainly wouldn’t rank it up there as one of the better bits of video game storytelling.

It’s the atmosphere of Rapture itself that draws me back to this game time and time again; the way everything is so brilliantly crafted to create a claustrophic, often terrifying underwater labyrinth of rooms and tunnels filled with insane drug-induced maniacs and monstrous little girls guarded by dudes in diving suits. Even over a decade later, Rapture stands out to me as one of the best designed settings in a video game.

Oppressive visual design aside, this is one of the few games where I can really appreciate the decision to squirrel away lore in the surroundings in the form of audio diaries – unlike games such as Tomb Raider, these play whilst you’re exploring, rather than forcing you to sit still and listen to the entire thing. Which later games that chose to adopt this approach should have taken to heart: why on earth would I want to sit still and read/listen when I could be exploring whilst the game reads it to me?

I think one of the biggest issues I have with lore being hidden away is that it’s obtrusive – you have to hunt, and then stop and read, and it really breaks up the flow of the gameplay. It’s rarely worth it either. But even without exploring the beaten path there are a lot of audio diaries in BioShock that are literally staring you in the face, and they’re something to listen to and provide background context for the surroundings whilst you explore. It’s more fluid and much more enjoyable because of it. Some of it is banal, some tell a story of life before the madness, and some of it is just plain crazy. You never know what you’re going to hear next, and that’s part of the brilliance of it.

The NPCs in this game are all quite standout characters, too – even with the bare mimimum of fleshing out if you miss a diary or two they all have such vivid personalities, and with the full audio diary experience their descent into madness is quite well documented, from Steinman’s unhinged obsession with aesthetics to Sander Cohen’s…very weird take on art. I adore Sander Cohen, he’s one of the best side activities in any game I’ve ever played…and that you get a trophy called “Irony” for killing him and taking a picture of his corpse is just icing on the cake. Andrew Ryan himself is an interesting character as well, with some fascinating philosophical takes that are perfect for the time period this game is set in.

Gameplay-wise I think this has aged very well indeed, although it feels a tad unbalanced all these years later – plasmids make a joke out of anything not a Big Daddy, which you can just use Armour-Piercing ammunition on to achieve the same effect. But there is a lot of variety and a reasonable degree of freedom in how you choose to play…although the game does make you feel like absolute trash if you decide to harvest the Little Sisters. At least, it did with me. Although you get more than enough Adam to stay on top of things if you don’t, which is nice. Hacking is frustratingly basic and the game does seem to rely on it overmuch at times – unless you like shooting everything yourself anyway, which takes far too long in my opinion – but it’s not as aggravating as it could be, and what the enemies lack in variety they make up for in insane screams and ramblings. Character movement speed is also surprisingly fast.

We really need more games like BioShock in the current generation, it’s a rare experimentation in setting with pretty standard gameplay that works really well to create a unique experience that holds up amazingly even over a decade later. It isn’t one of those games that defines an era or a genre, but it certainly represents the best of both FPS and the seventh generation, and it’s a shame we probably won’t see anything else like it for some time to come…and that the franchise’s last entry was Infinite. Which I will definitely not be replaying. Once was more than enough with that…