Jodjuya Yulm

This game is so good. Wonderful refinement of the gameplay established in System Shock 2.

Story-driven first-person shooter set in the citystate of Rapture, a submarine art deco libertarian 'paradise' built somewhere on the seafloor of the Atlantic Ocean between Iceland & Greenland. We've arrived—courtesy of a passenger plane crashing into the ocean— in 1960, shortly after civil war has eradicated civilised society within Rapture. The only surviving citizens are homicidal maniacs genetically engineered to be superpowered living weapons. Our mission is survival, via wresting control over the city away from Andrew Ryan—its founder—to facilitate rescinding the city's lockdown and re-enabling bathysphere travel to the surface such that we can GTFO.

Genetically splicing ourselves with 'plasmids' to obtain X-Men-style superpowers of our own in order to survive Rapture's genetic modification arms race is a core gameplay feature. These plasmids provide both active and passive power-ups, and many of the active plasmids have multiple use-cases: direct combat effects, indirect/environmental combat effects, and environmental utility/problem-solving.

Gameplay and storytelling are meshed together so well. Especially the peerless multilayered environmental storytelling. The writing here is so good!

Combat systems are really nicely designed and well integrated with each other. The plasmids in particular provide a vast suite of tools for tailoring your preferred approach to any given combat situation and for helping to extricate yourself when things go pear shaped.

I especially enjoy the risk/reward mechanic of the research camera: you can choose to put yourself in danger by shooting photographs of your foes rather than shooting bullets at them, and your character then studies the photos to seek out enemy weaknesses and gain damage bonuses against them.

Your guns can be upgraded over the course of the game, but these upgrades are doled out sparingly. There's enough to go around, such that your arsenal is as fully upgraded as can be by the game's end, but you do have to pick and choose which upgrades you want for the time being.

Music and sound design are great. Enemy designs are varied and memorable

I even enjoy the hacking minigame.

Main detriment to the game's very many positive elements is its morality system:

The in-universe currency of genetic modification is the wonder drug ADAM - mutant stem cells harvested from a type of sea slug

There's a limited supply of the stuff and it's very slow to produce, so the city does its best to recycle its ADAM by extracting it from human corpses, who naturally don't need it anymore on account of being dead.

This harvest is undertaken by the Little Sisters: a special cleanup crew of enslaved and brainwashed little girls who have been mutated to be symbiont hosts of the aforementioned sea slugs, parasitically embedded within the girls' stomachs.

The girls extract ADAM from corpses with giant syringes and drink the contents of the syringe to feed that ADAM to their slug, which goes on to produce even more ADAM.

There are a few Little Sisters scattered around each level of the game, and when you encounter them you are given a choice:

HARVEST the little girl by killing her so that you can cut out her slug and fully consume all of its ADAM, which gets you a large quantity of the stuff, OR

RESCUE the little girl by non-violently purging the slug from her system. She survives the procedure but your kindness only nets you half the quantity of ADAM

(or you can just ignore her entirely and forgo getting any ADAM for yourself whatsoever if you really want to make the game much harder on yourself for some reason)

If you choose to consistently rescue the Little Sisters instead of killing them, you're eventually rewarded by their guardian/creator, Dr Tenenbaum, with bonus gifts of additional ADAM and unique plasmids which are otherwise unavailable. Every three Sisters saved nets you a gift.

If you rescue every Little Sister, you get the 'good' ending to the game, if you kill every Little Sister, you get the 'bad' ending, and if you rescue some but kill others you get the 'less-bad but still pretty bad' ending. (I think ignoring them entirely gets you the 'good' ending. AFAIK only kills are tracked, not rescues)

This goofy system is such a cartoonish caricature of morality that it's nigh impossible to take seriously. Especially as the incentives for either path are basically on parity with one another: HARVESTING gets you slightly more ADAM overall, and more of it upfront, but RESCUING, if you can delay your gratification by the mildest of amounts, gets you some unique powerful abilities and almost as much raw ADAM. It would be a much better system, IMO, if the decision were truely a dilemma – if the rescuer gifts ONLY included the unique abilities and NOT the bonus ADAM. Do you want to be a Meek Good Guy or a Powerful Bad Guy? Could you still do the right thing even when doing so comes with a high material cost?

Alas, you're unable to pick and choose what is received from the gifts, so there's no way to opt out of receiving ADAM while still collecting the other goodies; it's all or nothing. There's probably a mod for this if you're playing on PC, but my gaming is 99% Nintendo Switch so that door to a better game is closed to me.

The only other thing I didn't enjoy about this remaster is that it doesn't include gyro aiming. System Shock 2 got retrofitted with gyro aiming but not BioShock?! Disappointing!

QoL aspects I really appreciated:

Being able to disable the quest marker

Being able to disable the revive system

Having subtitles available for visual elements of the game(!), in addition to regular ol' subtitles for plot dialogue and enemy voice barks. All three of these separately togglable.

The in-game help system/glossary can be toggled at any time with a single contextual button press wherever you're looking at any interactable object in the game. No digging through menus if you're unsure about anything! Just one click and you're open to the relevant page! (& you still can dig through the menus if you want to be comprehensive about it and read every last word in there tip to tail!)

Additional content added as part of the remaster includes:

An annotated museum of concept art

Director's commentary on the creation of the game

Three standalone DLC levels, completely unconnected to the events of the story. Two puzzleboxes and one combat arena.

BioShock is one of videogaming's all time greatest hits, and I highly recommend it.

Five Blood-Splattered Monkeywrenches outta five!

"Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow" says the guy who feels pretty fucken entitled to the sweat of other men's brows.

Can't identify the allegiance of his presumed assassin because every single world power wants him dead and it's literally impossible to narrow it down.

"A man chooses. A slave obeys." Yeah man, and you chose to be a dick.

Property rights are absolute and higher than any other form of right! If you cheat my vending machines or break a window I have the right to machine gun you to death! If you violate an intellectual property contract I have the right to murder you with poison gas! If you deny me my profits by purchasing from my competitors I have the right to mutate you into a homicidal maniac!

Such a cheapskate he ordered his bathroom fittings and plumbing made of tin instead of brass. Such a cheapskate he wanted to impossibly reuse the protective suits that Big Daddies are grafted inside of.

Enslaves little girls, mutates them into sea-slug-symbionts, and brainwashes them into sewer-crawling abominations to harvest mutant stem-cells from corpses. Rationalises this as being 'for the greater good' (children aren't entitled to the sweat of their brows, apparently), plus it's their own fault anyway because this is how they participate in "The Great Chain" of Rapture's free-market economy. His ONLY objections to this cartoonishly unethical system are that those feral, enslaved, brainwashed, mutant sewer gremlins are gross and weird. They smell so bad and their clothes are so dirty! It's soooo totally yucky u guys! but there's literally no possible way for my inhuman slave abominations to become washed and cared for and dressed in clean clothes! Seriously, there isn't! I've checked!

(*cough* CHEAPSKATE!)

[yeah, Fontaine commissioned their creation, but he kept them as the shameful hidden secret that they were. Ryan is the one who turned the Little Sisters into a public-facing publicity stunt to enable massively boosting their output after 'killing' Fontaine and nationalising Fontaine Futuristics]

Sends his hitman after a parody songwriter who made fun of him. Personally bludgeons his secondary mistress to death with a lead pipe because Fontaine bribed her to get pregnant and then sell the zygote to Dr Tenenbaum.

Impales the corpses of his political opponents on metal spikes driven into the architectural columns in his office's foyer like butterflies on a corkboard, each one under an individual spotlight.

"where else but the bottom of the sea could we build an economy the parasites would not try to control, a society they would not try to destroy?" → Normal things to declare right before trying to control an economy and destroy a society

When 'The Market' goes his way: "noooo we can't have any form of regulation whatsoever! We have to let The Market decide! Blindness, insanity, and death are small prices for other people to pay for commitment to my ideals! If people want to put the entire city at risk by being unwilling to pay for heating for their pipes that's their free will and we can't infringe upon it!"

When 'The Market' goes against him: "anyone who's better at capitalism than me is a criminal!!! We have to secretly brainwash the entire population to create an army to defeat those criminals!!! Nobody is allowed to leave the city you have to join my army to defeat the criminals!!! Anybody that refuses to join my army is definitionally one of the criminals and you will be rounded up off the streets and shot!!! *'kills' Fontaine and nationalises his company*"

When he loses: *burns down an entire national park out of spite, flees the country, makes his own new country at the bottom of the ocean—with blackjack! and hookers!—and then poisons the entire underwater forest supplying the entire country's oxygen supply out of spite when he loses control over that too. Sets the entire city to self-destruct when he fully loses control over it.*

The man doesn't just take his ball and go home when he loses. He bursts the ball and then burns down the ball factory so nobody else can ever play ball again.