Bioshock 3: Cufflinks and Clockwork

Unless you've been living under a rock these past few days, you must already know that the third Bioshock game has been announced, that it's called Bioshock: Infinite and that it seems to have torn the fanbase in half. All the comments I've seen seem to find it either utterly amazing-looking, or utterly horrible for not being set in Rapture. I'm in one of those camps, but I won't say anything more until I've tossed out a few shiny links.

The Guardian's Games Blog has the trailer, as well as the original press release about the game.

Ken Levine talks up the new game over at Irrational's site (thanks to Bioshockfanatics for that link).

And IGN has run a deliciously long article that summarises the trailer as well as the short demo that was released to journalists.

Those are the ones I know about - if anyone else knows of more, I would love you for sharing, because I'll go on record right now and say that I'm impossibly excited for this game.

The Guardian was the first place I heard about it: my friend sent me the link, with no explanation, so when I clicked it and saw the article I just about died. I'd not been expecting an announcement about the game for ages.

'Course, the first time I saw this sentence:

"Bioshock Infinite will take players from the sea to the clouds and is set on a city in the sky."

My excitement turned into trepidation, because I love Rapture a hell of a lot and leaving it seemed a shame, besides which a flying city seemed a bit too fanciful by comparison. Don't get me wrong, I'm not gonna start arguing that a city on the bottom of the sea wouldn't get crushed by the water pressure, but it seems less the stuff of fairy-tales than does a city which floats among the clouds.

So yeah, I was worried. But then I watched the trailer, and to say that it won me over would be an understatement. I won't summarise it here when you can watch it yourself (and probably have done so already) - but my god, the world it shows and the questions it raises. Who are you, the snappily-dressed protagonist? Why are you getting beaten up by a snappily-dressed cyborg which seems a lot like the steampunky cousin of a Big Daddy? And, if you subscribe to the theory that Andrew Ryan'll be in this game, who is that snappily-dressed fellow dancing to a gramophone on the balcony?

(I first heard that theory posited as something along the lines of "Andrew Ryan is alive and somehow fifty years in the past thanks to plasmids!", which just made me laugh. But might he be the right age to appear as a young man? Not sure, but it'd be a nice nod to the Rapture games to mention him, á la Fontaine's audio diaries in Bioshock 2.)

The articles answer some questions and raise others, but questions aren't the only thing that hooked me: simply put, the game looks beautiful. Columbia is so gorgeously designed that I don't even know where to begin, with its balconies and blimps and adverts, oh my goodness, its propaganda and adverts. "Burden not Columbia with your chaff" is so... it's just so darkly, delightfully Bioshock that I already feel at home.

And I think that kind of thing is a key reason why a game can be Bioshock without being set in Rapture. Columbia is fantastical, yes; but the trailer has me trusting the developers to make me believe I'm walking around on a flying city, just like they made me believe I was trapped in a crumbling fishbowl under the Atlantic. And Columbia has a lot in common with that fishbowl, not in its location but in its themes.

The first thing you see of the city is a row of proud American flags: that kind of overt political symbol makes me feel that the developers know what they're doing, along with the propaganda that I already mentioned. IGN's article talks about death, collapsing sections of the city and a man making political speeches from behind barrels lined with guns. Columbia embodies a political ideal gone to seed, run - occasionally literally - into the ground. Distil, mix with superpowers and compelling-looking characters, and make the whole thing as brokenly beautiful as possible. What's more Bioshock than that?

I'll miss Rapture, and I'd like to see more of it, but I'm not going to cling to its bones and miss out on a chance to explore somewhere so new, so similar and yet so different, so fascinating. Heck, even the floating city part doesn't worry me any more. Where else would it go? The land? No, this has to start with a city flung somewhere fantastic. The kind of stories Bioshock tells would be impossible anywhere else.