Super Mario Maker Has an Important Lesson to Teach: Being a Game Developer Sucks

…or “A Diary of my Bittersweet Adventures with Super Mario Maker”

Ben Kuchera over at Polygon wrote an article shortly before Super Mario Maker released about how the game teaches one the anguish of being an indie developer. If you read Ben’s article, this post is going to seem slightly familiar; I don’t mean to copy his piece, but rather give my own spin on an idea that I think rings very true. I’d also like to broaden the thought a bit from indie developers to simply all developers. Yes, beneath its inviting and nostalgic exterior, Super Mario Maker has an important lesson for those who really sink their teeth into the level creation side of it: being a game developer must really be the pits.

Now, this is something I already knew, but it’s something that I’ve now, in some small, disconnected way, experienced for myself. I picked up Super Mario Maker the afternoon of its US release day, and holding the copy in my hands after I got into my car, I felt a kind of childlike glee. I couldn’t wait to dive into this robust world of imagination and start building and playing levels. I fiddled around with the level creation tool a bit and then hit up “Course World”, where everyone’s levels go after they upload them for the world to see. Already, there was a plethora of levels and several ones were already hugely popular (I knew this by the amount of “stars” they had acquired from players). Having just got the game, I was only allowed to upload ten levels myself until I earned more stars and therefore unlocked medals which would allow me to increase my max upload limit (up to 100 levels after acquiring all 10 medals). I wasn’t too intimidated by this. After all, the levels I’d played already had thousands of stars and creators seemed to already have achieved the ability to upload the max number of levels in just a day, and while their levels were good, they were nothing earth-shattering and I could already feel dozens of ideas forming in my head that would surely be a hit. It shouldn’t be too hard to rake in the stars as long as I shared creative and inspired levels, which of course was my plan.

Making some Mario

The first couple of levels I uploaded were basic and nothing to speak of really; I didn’t bother putting much effort into them because I didn’t have all of the game’s creation elements unlocked yet through the game’s annoying but oh so Nintendo “delivery system”, where the Course Maker is slowly expanded over the course of several days (or hours, if you know how to effectively cheat the system, which I recommend doing). As I unlocked more and more elements to play around with, I soon began to feel inspiration strike and I began to naturally get an idea as soon as I began to lay some blocks down. The first course I uploaded that I actually thought was worth a damn (not too many damns, mind, but at least one), I shared with some pride, this time actually somewhat pleased with my creation. I looked forward to seeing how it would be received. As of this writing, “Magikoopa’s Platform Keep” (I’ll share some of my course IDs at the bottom of this article if you’re interested) has a meager 131 plays and 5 stars. For the longest time, it didn’t get any stars at all. Ok, so in retrospect, that course wasn’t that great. I still didn’t have all the course-making elements at that point, and it’s still a largely basic level. It didn’t take too long to make, so I wasn’t too discouraged. The next course I made I spent a lot more time on and put even more effort into, but the one after that is where I really went overboard. I’d finally unlocked every tool and spent a combined twelve hours over the course of two days to build “The Grand Koopaship”, a massive flying airship designed with a meticulous attention to detail to resemble an actual ship. I paid special attention to the aesthetics of the ship and agonized over the placement of power-ups and how difficult each section should be. This thing has a cargo bay, bunks, a bathroom, a mess hall, a bridge, an engine room and finally the captain’s quarters, where a showdown with Bowser occurs before a fast escape out the back of the ship to the goal. It’s not a perfect course by any means, but I poured my heart into the thing and I think it turned out pretty nifty. It’s currently one of my most popular courses with 412 plays and 23 stars, which doesn’t seem too bad, but compare that to “Don’t press anything” (ID: AA64-0000-000F-7D4C) by creator Niramou, one of the first (or possibly the first, at least uploaded to the released game's servers) hugely popular Rube Goldberg-style “automatic” courses (in which you, um, don’t press anything to reach the goal), which currently has 1,676,474 plays and 104,848 stars. Yeah, my “Grand Koopaship’s” numbers suddenly seem pretty pathetic, huh?

So at this point you may be thinking: “Wah, wah, so you made some courses that no one likes and are salty about it?” (unless, of course, you own Mario Maker, are invested in creating courses, and are not part of the Star Ranking category elite, in which case there’s a good chance you’re already nodding your head along in sympathy to everything I’m saying), which is of course true, but I’m also working towards a point…sort of. So in order to better illustrate that point, I’ll stop talking about myself for the moment and concentrate on someone else, a maker by the name of “Ricky”. I know of Ricky from a YouTube Let’s Play group he is a part of known as “Adamant Ditto” (their Kirby Let’s Plays are really fun; check em’ out). Ricky made a course known as “Super Smash Labyrinth” (ID: 099D-0000-003A-EB5F), an ambitious and clever idea that allows the player to choose one of twelve pathways, each one beginning with a  transformation into a character from the original Super Smash Bros. via one of Mario Maker’s sprite-changing mystery mushrooms, with each pathway themed around the particular character one chooses. I can’t fathom that a course based on such a popular series and one that is such a well-executed idea would have anything less than top status in the charts. Last time I checked, it has a respectable 1,548 plays and 127 stars…but isn’t exactly “Don’t press anything” numbers. This gives me pause. It makes me think that maybe, just maybe, Mario Maker’s sharing system might be a load of total bollocks. And there are several other fantastic creators and courses I’ve come across, sadly not getting the recognition they deserve. Ricky has proven himself a maker to keep an eye on, with several other inspired courses including a spooky “Haunted Hotel” level (ID: 9C6B-0000-0043-BF08), another excellently done horror-themed level known as “Mirror Manor” (ID: 1992-0000-0072-2F13), an “RPG Adventure!” (ID: A5C3-0000-0091-03A0), and a lot more, but he still has yet to reach the max upload limit of 100 courses (last I checked he is capped at 50 uploads), and the fact that such a clearly worthy creator should be limited in any way is just crap.

Perusing Course World

And that’s what it all comes down to: that upload limit. I wouldn’t care nearly as much about stars and what’s popular and all this if it wasn’t for the fact that Nintendo has cruelly tied the amount of courses one can upload to the amount of stars they receive. This is a good idea on paper, requiring players to put effort into their creations if they want to keep sharing them, but it all falls apart when makers like Ricky and so many others are pulling more than their share of weight and are still faced with restrictions. The star requirements for each milestone are extremely strict as well; it takes 50 stars to just being able to increase the upload limit from ten levels to twenty levels and it only gets worse from there, requiring 150 stars to get to thirty levels, then 300 stars to reach a 40 level limit, and on and on until 5,000 stars nets you the maximum upload limit of 100 levels. This creates another issue; here I am with all these level ideas in my head that I want to do…but I’m hesitant to put a ton of effort into them if I might not be able to upload them and share them with the world. Therefore, I’m faced with a dilemma: make what I want to make or bite my tongue and try to make something that I think will be super popular and get a lot of stars in a short amount of time (in other words, make a level where you don’t have to press anything or a level with a mystery mushroom costume that’s a remake of a level from another game).

I tried to get around this by making an automatic course, but one with a unique spin on the formula and one that I could be proud of. I decided my creation would not just be a bunch of random nonsense floating in the sky (which can certainly be entertaining if done well), but it would have context and somewhat of a story behind it. I started with the theme of Mario being trapped in some elaborate machine and through the process of creating it, the idea evolved with some inspiration from the Portal series. I designed the course to have two “endings” of sorts: one where a player can choose to not press anything and let the machine take its course; here they would still hit the goal at the end, but Mario would also go flying into a sawblade afterwards, implying that just going with the flow will result in Mario meeting his doom. But, and here’s the Portal-esque part, if players cleverly observe their surroundings, they can escape the machine and discover hidden areas outside of it, such as the observation room where the machine’s operators are watching Mario go through it, and another path that leads to the core of the machine, a hidden boss fight, and finally the true exit out of the machine. I spent hours and hours fine-tuning this course, paying special attention to how it looked and operated, and I kept adding more and more details until finally I felt it was ready. Here was a creation, I thought, that would meet the popular demand for the automatic course, but innovate and put a new twist on it. After uploading it, I wasn’t able to play the game until two days later and I was eager to see how what I felt was my finest creation yet had been received…

The Mushroomatic Machine

…it had 5 plays and 0 stars. In a word, I was crushed. It was simply devastating to have something I worked so hard on and had such high hopes for get such a poor reception, or indeed, not even really be noticed at all. As time went on, it only got worse, because more and more people played it, but none of them starred it. Why didn’t they like it? I thought. Was it not exciting enough? Did they discover the hidden secrets? Did they strive to get to the “good ending”? I had agonized over the name of the course, trying to find something in the small number of characters available that would be both catchy but also capture the intricate nature of the level. Advertising is the most important aspect to consider when uploading a course if you want it to be played. All you have to recommend your course is a name, the zoomed out picture of your course’s layout (or at least part of it) and a second close-up picture of a particular section of your course that you can choose. If these things aren’t eye-catching, people will just pass you up. As of this moment, “The Mushroomatic Machine-2 Exits” as I called it, has a paltry 78 plays and 2 stars. Most people finished it; they just didn’t seem to care for it. I have no idea why, none of them left comments and all I have is a couple of red “Xs” on the zoomed-out picture of the course to show me where people lost lives. This feature doesn’t help much, by the way, especially when it doesn’t show where people died in the course’s “sub-area” (the second part of a level accessed by going down pipes), where most of some of my levels take place. Another thing to take into consideration is that many simply don’t know what “stars” are, or how important they are to level creators. Many people bought Super Mario Maker to partake in the playing side of things and not the creation side, and considering the game never explicitly tells the player about the starring system anywhere except in notifications that randomly pop up on the screen from time to time, it’s easy to consider the fact that many people may have enjoyed my levels, but just don’t think to star them or don’t know what starring is. I also can’t help but wonder about how helpful it would be if I was able to make a brief description of my levels in addition to their title. If I had been able to do this, I could have gotten across what I felt made my machine course unique, not to mention give some context for my other courses as well.

At this point, I had a nine-world (four courses per world) Mario adventure planned out in my head that I wanted to build in Super Mario Maker (well, not just in my head, as I outlined the whole damn thing with pen and paper). That was what I really wanted to start making, but with nine courses already uploaded out of the ten course limit that I was struggling to break through and the stars very slowly coming in, even after a handful of levels I spent hours of effort making, I didn’t want to start making that game when I wouldn’t be able to upload (and keep uploaded) the whole thing. So I had one final idea. One final crazy idea that would surely get some stars and “fund” my game. I would make a “remake” level, the other popular surefire thing. But if I was going to do this, I was going to make something I would enjoy doing, that I would be passionate about, and that would be a fun challenge to undertake…

So I decided I would recreate Clock Town from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask in Super Mario Maker, Stock Pot Inn included.

Four days and many hours later, I felt that I had pulled this feat off, at least as best as I could within the limitations of the game. In the end, it was a fun challenge, and also one that drained me. After my last big course failed “financially”, I tried not to get my hopes up too much, but surely…

Just over twenty four hours after uploading it, my Clock Town recreation had 13 plays and 3 stars. Not a bad turnaround compared to how slowly my other courses acquired stars, but still not exactly big money (last I checked it’s my most starred course with 24 stars at least). But hey, I finally hit fifty stars at this point and could now upload up to a meager twenty courses. That’s just great, but now all I could think about was how long of a road it was going to be to reach 150 stars and the thirty course limit, which still wouldn’t be enough to hold my ambitious nine-world adventure (which I eventually thought of a tenth bonus world for…aren’t I the dreamer?). Even after uploading six more courses (including one of the worlds from my planned game) following Clock Town, I still have yet to reach 150 stars and to date still only have just a little over 100.

Clock Town's clock in Super Mario Maker

I want to be clear about something: outside of a handful of very notable problems I feel the game has (which I’ll talk about more in a follow-up post, including some suggested remedies for my problems with the level sharing system), I love Super Mario Maker. The game is a childhood dream of mine come true and I’m happy it exists. It even reignited a creative side of me that I’ve been keeping dormant lately, which I can’t be more grateful for. With that said, my experience creating and uploading courses in Super Mario Maker has been completely demoralizing. Melodramatic? Sure. But I create what I feel is my best course yet, and one that I am sure will be popular, and no one cares or notices. I spend hours and days and weeks pouring my heart and soul into a creation I truly believe in, but no one is buying. I spend so much time arduously testing and re-testing, tweaking and re-tweaking, only to discover one possibly large problem I missed after uploading my level and to fret about whether it will break the whole thing for people. In the end, I can’t imagine making a whole video game, something I spend years putting my life into, only to have someone finish it overnight and nitpick about a bunch of stuff wrong with it. In the end, people are only buying the stuff that’s already popular, the stuff with the good review scores (stars) and the most sales (plays), whether that camp is full of several similar ideas or not (just to be clear: I don’t mean to say that the mega popular courses are bad, in fact most of them are pretty awesome and there’s some really inspired ideas in there, just that there’s so much more out there just as awesome that is getting ignored). Worst of all, perhaps, is when you see that someone else had your same idea, and that their version of it is getting a ton of attention while yours rots in the back alleys of the Course World server (this hasn’t really happened to me personally, but it’s definitely a possibility, and I’ve seen others execute ideas that I still have in my head, or two different versions of the same idea, one much more noticed than another, regardless of quality). I gave in, just a bit, and tried to make something that would appeal to the masses, but still something I can be proud of, and all to fund the stuff that I really want to be making. And my attempts to cash in this way fell on their face too. And yet I’m still dreaming of all the great worlds I want to put in my full Mario game, and getting more ideas every day. In the end, I’ve had a blast creating levels because of the passion I have for creation and the joy it brings me, even though I know few will likely appreciate or even play my stuff. Being a Mario level creator has its rewards, and I’m sure being a game developer does as well, but it’s also pretty shitty and I, for one, am totally burnt out on Mario making right now.

My conclusion with all this? Right before Super Mario Maker’s release in the US, I played through The Last of Us for the first time, and I wrote about how I thought it was an unrelentingly stressful and bleak experience that was almost difficult to play (and also a great experience I highly recommend for the record). After finishing it, I was greatly looking forward to relaxing with some colorful Nintendo fun in Super Mario Maker, but found instead an experience even more emotionally devastating. Game developers, you have my sympathy and infinite respect.

For those interested, here are a few of my course IDs, including the ones I mentioned in this piece (if you want to check out all sixteen of the courses I currently have uploaded, than simply check out my profile in the game):

Magikoopa’s Platform Keep: 5D6F-0000-0031-2F1D

The Grand Koopaship: 0662-0000-0040-5BFD

The Mushroomatic Machine-2 Exits: 1E81-0000-0049-6843

Zelda: Majora’s Mask-Clock Town: 4AAB-0000-0062-DC60

4-1: The Lost Village: 7464-0000-009C-8759

The Last of Us (Spoilers)

The Last of Us is not fun. Sure, there are aspects that might be considered “fun”, but that word does not seem appropriate in any way to describe this experience. “Engaging” is a better word to use, I would say, but that is of course a general term that doesn’t cover every nuance. Getting chased by Infected in a cramped environment from all sides, firing the only four bullets I have with a shaking gun and missing every shot except one, only to get ambushed from behind by a Clicker that rips into my flesh and instantly ends my experience isn’t fun, it’s fucking stressful. Trying to protect my three companions with a sniper rifle as people trying to kill them close in from all sides in a huge open environment with tons of places to hide isn’t fun, it’s nerve-wracking. What happens to Henry and Sam certainly isn’t fun. The Last of Us is slow-paced, breathless moments of hiding and listening before moments of abrupt and frantic violence. Trying to sneak up on an Infected to strangle it from behind only to have it suddenly turn around and scream at me, alerting dozens of other things that want to kill me and having everything go to shit isn’t fun either. There are few things, or perhaps nothing, more heart-sinkingly awful-feeling I’ve experienced in a video game than having something go wrong in The Last of Us, especially when it involves a horde of Infected. During these moments, I would usually just panic, run around aimlessly in circles and fire shots aimlessly at the horde in front of me as more slashed at my back before a Clicker sneaks in and mauls me from some unknown angle. Every. Damn. Time. Except during the times when I actually did make it through in one go. When the more I failed, the more I tried to learn from my mistakes. You can’t sneak up on Runners, Nate, don’t even try. I learned this the hard way time and again, and then finally, one time, I managed to take out a whole roomful of Infected with two carefully placed bombs and a single Molotov. I felt proud. I felt strong. I also felt good when I successfully snuck by a horde of Bloaters, Clickers and Runners undetected later on. I’d survived. Perhaps these moments, what felt like rare moments when things didn’t go horribly and end in cursing and frustration and bitter failure, were the few times where I might call The Last of Us “fun”.

But I still wouldn’t, because this is a brutal game that does not care about you. It will kick your teeth in and attempt to mess you up in any way it can. At least that’s how it was for me my first time experiencing it. It is a frustrating and unforgiving experience, and it’s all by design. I realized something about myself while playing The Last of Us, or rather it’s something I already knew about myself that this experience highlighted: I can’t stand when things are out of my control, and this game forced me to accept the reality that things will be out of my control sometimes, and sometimes I have to improvise and try my best to get out of what seems a hopeless situation. One of my favorite things that The Last of Us consistently does is thrust the player into dangerous situations that they must react to in the moment if they want to survive. Sometimes there may be a cutscene or some kind of brief warning scene beforehand, but then control is dropped, abruptly, into the hands of the player, at which point I needed to try not to freeze in panic, and look around for some way to get away from the tank and horde of angry Hunters suddenly bearing down on me, or move my ass away from behind that tiny bit of cover before the approaching dangerous men find and start shooting at me. Take too long to mourn your dead horse that just got shot through the neck and, yes, the pursuing men with guns will catch up to you and kill you. You need to run. You need to huddle in that nearby cabin, craft some supplies, and stay alive.

Combat was usually always messy for me in The Last of Us. Encounters with Infected were usually chaotic, jittery affairs where I could barely steady my aim enough to kill them. I’d often get away with a sliver of health left and it almost always felt like a miracle I’d survived. Many times, I’d only survive after several abrupt death screens, at which point the game cuts to black and a patronizing message to the effect of something like “Clickers can’t be melee’d, you will get eaten” or “Don’t run directly at enemies with guns, you will get shot…idiot” would greet me before asking me to press “X” to try again.  And if you get out of cover or run at an armed adversary with your trusty pipe with scissors taped to the end of it, you will get shot. When you get shot, your character stumbles backward and blood speckles the edges of the screen. And if you don’t get your ass back in cover fast, you will be killed. You can’t run around like a superman. You need to think, at least in large part, realistically. Sure, there are still plenty of “video gamey” elements here and I encountered a handful of glitches and hang-ups (at least in the original PS3 version) that took me out of the experience, but The Last of Us is more committed to a grounded realism than perhaps any other game I’ve played. It’s far from perfect, but its ambition is admirable. While Joel constantly bandaging up the same arm when he takes damage of any kind is a little silly, the act of having to hunker down and slowly patch oneself up instead of just magically auto-healing goes a long way in adding gravity to the experience and investing me in it more.

There’s a weight to The Last of Us. A sense of exasperation and heaviness that I don’t feel often in video games. Sure, there are other games that I’ve played with weight and seriousness…but The Last of Us still feels unique in its burdensome atmosphere. It was almost difficult to play, and yet I usually didn’t want to stop. The combat and the violence is brutal of course, but it’s more than that. It’s the way Joel walks, with his backpack strapped with guns and full of discarded notes about the tragic stories littering the world. The weight to his steps. It’s his noticeable sighs and heavy breathing. It’s the game’s use of the environment to show a far-off bridge that leads out of the hellish city-wide prison one is in; how I just want to get to that damn bridge, and I just keep hitting roadblock after roadblock. It’s seeing Ellie finally get a peer in Sam and watching the two of them joke and play darts, shortly before Sam becomes infected and is shot and killed by his own brother (who then kills himself). It’s seeing the completely broken man that Joel is, knowing that in a different world he would be a loving father and a good man still. The way that he desperately wants to protect Ellie so that he can protect himself, and the way that Ellie becomes almost as good at killing as he is.

I think the greatest strength of The Last of Us’s narrative is the attachment it fosters between Ellie and Joel, and it had to be, because that’s like, the whole game. Joel and Ellie’s relationship naturally grows, it’s fleshed out in emotional cutscenes that add depth to their characters and also by conversations and anecdotes that unfold as the two explore the crumbling U.S.. These moments made the action more meaningful, because I wanted to survive. Because I wanted Joel and Ellie to survive. The two of them feel like real people. Adventuring across the U.S. with them made me grow attached to them. The more the experience drew closer to its conclusion, the more nervous and anxious I got. I was afraid of how this was going to end. I was afraid of what was going to happen to Joel and Ellie. Most of the ways I imagined it would end were not positive. How could it be? How could this experience possibly have a “happy” ending?

I do not like the ending of The Last of Us, but it’s the right ending. It feels authentic. It all came down to a brutal choice for Joel: save Ellie or save the world. There’s nothing black and white about this situation. I appreciate that The Last of Us makes some attempts to humanize the non-infected people that the player kills throughout the game; the Hunters in Pittsburgh can be overheard sharing dried fruit with one another, talking about cooking bacon, and generally sharing camaraderie, for example. Marlene and the Fireflies are no different here, and one has to respect the sacrifices they’ve made and how they seem to be the only people in this world who haven’t given up on humanity. Marlene’s journals found near the game’s end serve to garner her in particular sympathy, and I really didn’t want to kill that surgeon putting his life on the line at the end (I shot him in the leg, but he still died). After experiencing just how completely awful this world is over the course of my journey, I had to question whether I would be willing to kill Ellie to save the human race myself, and wondered whether the game should have given the player a choice. I don’t think it should have, because Joel is a defined character, and it was true to his character to save Ellie’s life. Also, even if I had been given the choice, I know I would have done the same thing as Joel anyway.

As I said, the ending feels authentic, but it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, and I’m sure that’s purposeful. It’s unsatisfying for a few reasons. It’s clear that Ellie is discontent and uncertain, at least where we last leave her. It’s not by a whim that we spend the game’s final, brief controllable moments as Ellie, because the game’s developers wanted us to see this from her perspective. We’d seen it from Joel’s perspective: a father whose daughter had died in his arms before twenty years of surviving in a hellish world, slowly growing into a jaded, murderous shell. Joel didn’t know any other world except this one anymore by the time we catch up with him in Boston, and all he needed was a reason to survive. He found his best one yet in Ellie. Having to lose Ellie, having to go through the same thing he went through with Sarah is too terrible for anyone to bear, and so I completely sympathize with Joel. We then saw things from Ellie’s perspective during the “Winter” portion of the game, when she did everything she could to save the life of her companion, of the only person she had. But during the game’s final moments, we see things from a more mature Ellie’s perspective. Joel is someone who stuck by her, protected her and taught her the skills necessary to survive. Ellie’s grown quite a bit by the end though, and perhaps she now begins to realize that she is Joel’s misplaced daughter. Joel lies to her and it makes me hate him a bit. Joel is just kind of an awful person; he’s a killer who we see kill even when it isn’t entirely necessary and now he’s manipulative of the best thing to happen in his life in years. I do think Joel is redeemable, and he is relatable. I can understand why he’d lie to Ellie and do what he does at the end, but it’s still shitty. I want Ellie to know the truth. I want her to decide for herself. The other aspect of the ending that’s unsatisfying is that it simply doesn’t feel like a conclusion. It leaves me bitter not only because of the lie Joel is willing to base he and Ellie’s life on, but because I question just what kind of life the two can have in Jackson, in a world still ruined. As inviting as Tommy’s town seems to be compared to everything else I’d seen, I question how long it will hold up before something goes wrong. I also question whether the Fireflies will simply give up on looking for Ellie; I don’t think simply killing Marlene will stop them from looking for her and Joel. So I don’t like the ending, but I don’t think I’m supposed to. The ending is bitter. It’s cold. It doesn’t feel like a conclusion to anything. But it’s appropriate somehow. It’s accurate.

The Last of Us is a depressing game. It’s bleak and weighty and stressful. It made me long to play something like Mario Kart 8, something bright and colorful and cheerful. It’s not a perfect game and it’s not a demonstration of the peak of what video games can do or be and what makes them unique. It still relies a bit too much on the language of film for that, among other things. Perhaps its biggest flaw for me, besides the not too frequent but still frequent enough glitchy moments I encountered, might also be a strength actually. I think “dying” in a game like this is an interesting challenge for developers. It was especially frustrating to die in this game because it always broke my immersion, and I think in a game aiming for such an immersive, “realistic” experience, this is something of a flaw; it’s just a challenge when it comes to the nature of video games like The Last of Us. At the same time, these deaths are part of what made this game so memorable to me; I don’t think the game’s unforgiving difficulty is a negative (I played on Normal, by the way) and I think that such brutal circumstances serve the experience well. While the game’s punishing nature would still be effective if I had never failed once, the failures I suffered reinforced the harshness and cruelty of the experience and not only that, but I learned from them, so that by the game’s final third or so, I was more often surviving than dying, and suddenly I knew just how to handle a horde of Infected in a dark tunnel, and aim and fire my gun with a cool head and a steady hand, albeit with still some sweat on my brow afterwards. I’m not sure if others struggled with the game as much as I did, and I’m sure if I had made it through the whole thing without ever getting a “game over”, it would have been very rewarding, but perhaps my frequent failures enhanced the experience somehow as well. This is all just something to consider.

The Last of Us isn’t perfect, but it’s ambitious and it strives to take this medium to new heights. It’s not the zenith, but it’s a step and it demonstrates the potential of video games to deliver an emotional experience that can do more than simply entertain. It contains a narrative that is grounded and relatable and perhaps most importantly, it is an experience that is incredibly human. Is this the “Citizen Kane” of video games or whatever praise people were giving it in abundance at its original time of release in 2013? I don’t know. Truthfully, I don’t even know what that really means. If it means that The Last of Us is highly innovative and big step forward for the video game medium, I’m not so sure, but perhaps…it is these things in some ways at least. Ultimately, here’s what I think: The Last of Us is good. It’s not like I play every game that comes out, not even close, but I’m willing to guess it’s one of the “must-plays” of recent years, and for a “AAA” title, it does a fair job pushing the bar forward for the medium. I plan on picking up the remastered PS4 version when I eventually get the console and going through it again there (hopefully that version irons out the technical blunders and bugs). I do think this is an experience worth undertaking again for me. It’s worth my time and it’s worth yours.

Rayman Legends (Wii U) Review

I love platformers. I love platformers a lot. Rayman Legends is a damn fine platformer. Set one-hundred years after the fantastic Rayman Origins, Legends finds Rayman and friends being rudely awakened from a century-long nap to see the Glade of Dreams once again overrun by nightmares, now stronger than ever, having created all new threats like armies of dragons and skydiving toads. Legends carries over the wonderful sense of humor and personality from Origins, while introducing a host of creative new levels and experiences. The game’s central hub is an art gallery of sorts that links to all of the game’s various worlds and modes from paintings. There’s a lot to see and do here: besides five core worlds and a sixth bonus world mostly comprised of remixed levels, there are also special daily and weekly challenge stages, a multiplayer football/soccer mini-game known as Kung Foot, a gallery of collectible creatures, and even forty unlockable remastered levels from Origins. I’m going to keep the focus on the core experience here, which is the new worlds the game offers, and it’s also important to note that, as it indicates in the title, I’m reviewing the Wii U version only and in addition to that, the single-player experience in particular (this will all be important later).

The first thing one likely notices about Rayman Legends is its enchanting art direction and visuals, which like Origins, are simply a treat to take in. Legends takes things a step even further than Origins though, incorporating more dynamic lighting and subtle 3D elements into the mix. The result is a beautiful technical achievement for video games. I’m amazed that video games have come so far technologically-speaking and can actually look like this and still move at a solid frame rate and function properly. I suppose it’s cliché to say, but it’s fitting that Legends’ many levels are accessed from easels in an art gallery, since each one can accurately be described as an animated painting. The game’s multi-layered world is rich with detail and texture, from strange tree people walking around in the far background to tiny dewdrops beading on a giant tree root that Rayman just slid down. Enchanting forests and creepy castles, beanstalks rising from palely-lit swamplands, and deep-sea caverns littered with metallic waste all come to life in this ocular banquet. Sometimes I wouldn’t move at a level’s start as I took a blissful moment to take in the game’s rich aesthetics.

Legends feels like a much more high energy, boisterous experience than its predecessor. It feels grand and epic and seems to be constantly moving at a frenetic pace, darting from one zany platforming challenge to the next in a more concise, more focused, and altogether briefer experience than Origins. Part of the game’s feeling of grandeur comes from its titular theme of “legends”, placing a focus on grand set-pieces and gigantic boss battles with massive dragons, toads, and luchadores. Rayman and friends control with a fluidity and motion that makes stringing runs and jumps together into a form of interactive poetry. More levels than ever before focus on an “endless runner” style of platforming, where one false jump or screw up means death (these levels are never frustrating though when one instantly respawns at a nearby checkpoint to try again; the real fun comes from trying to master them without failing though). It’s amazing that these kinds of levels work as well as they do, as one loose screw in the form of a misplaced platform or enemy could have turned them into an unwieldy mess; I can only imagine the amount of rigorous testing required to perfect the design of these challenges. What is amazing about the level design and control of Rayman Legends is how intuitive everything feels: somehow when running up a wall, hopping over pillars of fire backwards and upside down and leaping from bouncy drums to stacks of monsters, I always knew exactly what to do. Every precise jump I made felt exhilarating and sometimes it felt like a miracle that I had survived, but I know that in actuality it’s down to the game’s precisely crafted systems. I quite enjoyed perfecting the “Invasion” challenges, where monsters and gimmicks from another world take over sections of a level, which feel like an evolution of the speedrunning treasure chest chase levels from Origins, but unquestionably the standout running levels in the game are the musical levels. These sublime platforming masterpieces, where one’s every action is timed to the melody of wacky covers of famous songs like “Eye of the Tiger” and “Woo Hoo”, are a revelation, a highlight of the entire platforming genre, nevermind this game, and I’d love to see more stuff like them from this development team or others in the future. These levels are the showstopper, but one shouldn’t ignore a myriad of other fantastic levels as well. Generally, Legends has some of the tightest level design I’ve ever seen in any platformer.

Tying all of this experience’s grandness, energy, and beauty together is a wonderful musical score that is joyfully integrated into the experience in a way that only a video game can accomplish. The musical levels are the obvious example of how this game masterfully integrates music into every facet of the experience, but they are worth mentioning again, and again and again. But this display of musical creativity doesn’t stop with them: the score often changes multiple times in the same level, transitioning between each area to set the mood or situation. Nothing ever sits still In Rayman Legends; everything hinges on a playful interactivity that never lets up. The soundtrack here is grand and sweeping when flying through the air amidst the ruins of a sky castle and moody and mysterious when swimming further into the depths of a sunken industrial complex. It rises in tempo and pace as you land more perfect jumps and get further and further in one of the precise Invasion challenges. It sometimes brings to mind the whimsical animated films of Disney and at other times mimics something you might here in a James Bond film. This is a fun, moving, and brilliant soundtrack. The game’s main theme refused to leave my head every time I turned my Wii U off.

I hope it’s clear at this point that I feel that Legends is a platforming joy, but this otherwise fantastic experience is tragically marred by one very irritating flaw: the Murfy levels. Murfy is a fairy-like character that shows up in a handful of specific levels and that the player controls with the GamePad’s touch screen and uses to manipulate certain elements in the environment, such as cutting ropes or moving platforms. If one is playing cooperative multiplayer (which supports up to five players), one player would control Murfy with the GamePad while the other(s) would platform through a level (players can also control Murfy even in regular stages in multiplayer), but in single-player, an AI-controlled character automatically does the platforming in these levels while the player solely controls Murfy. I do not like the Murfy levels. I found these levels to be boring at best and teeth-gratingly frustrating at worst. It’s hard for me to put my finger on what exactly makes these levels not work. Maybe it’s my extreme disdain for when shoehorned gimmicks bring down a great game that would be so much better without them, maybe it’s the fact that what is clearly something designed around multiplayer has been forced into the single-player experience at its detriment. But I think what it really comes down to is that these levels make me feel like I’m watching someone else play the game while I tinker with some puzzle-game off in the corner on my low-res GamePad screen. It’s about expectations: I expect to be playing a fun platforming game, and when I go from a great platforming stage to a level where I do none of the platforming, and have to try to get a decent, but certainly not great AI that sometimes doesn’t behave like a rational human player do what I want it to do by manipulating elements in the level around it, it becomes very frustrating, and has no place in a platformer as fluid and fun and beautiful as Legends…at least in single-player. I can imagine the Murfy levels being quite fun with a group of friends, on both sides of the equation, and I think they’re a neat use of the GamePad in that regard. It’s just a shame that they were shoehorned into the single-player, and that they’re frequent enough (though thankfully still in the minority) to seriously intrude on my enjoyment of this game. Legends already feels a bit light on the number of new core levels, and the Murfy levels’ inclusion certainly compounds this issue.

I’m aware that the single-player Murfy levels play out differently in the versions of Legends that don’t have access to a touchscreen, such as the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. In these versions, the player apparently actually does the platforming themselves and Murfy is controlled by a few button prompts. I chose to purchase and play the Wii U version because that was the original version of the game before Ubisoft delayed it and ported it to other systems, and therefore the Wii U version is the developers’ original vision for the game, which is what I wanted to experience. That said, there’s a decent chance I’d enjoy the Murfy levels more if I was the one actually doing the platforming, so I would have at least appreciated having the option to play them this alternate way in the Wii U version. Perhaps the ideal situation, however, might have been having these levels off to the side in a separate co-op specific section of the game with more traditional levels in their place for single-player.

The Murfy levels are my main gripe with Legends, but there are a few other points that I want to address that keep Legends from being truly all that it could be to me, and that ultimately make Origins hold perhaps a slightly higher place in my heart, although I’m still debating that (also Legends cheats by including levels from Origins). Let me try to explain. There are fewer main worlds in Legends than in Origins, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but even with so few worlds, some of them felt a bit underwhelming to me, or at least didn’t live up to a lot of their potential. I love the idea of the worlds themed around the Day of the Dead and Greek mythology, but the former largely felt like a retread of the food-themed world from Origins and the latter, which had so much potential in a game supposedly themed around legendary monsters, is largely set in featureless catacombs and lava-filled caverns that are fairly boring aesthetically, at least compared to the feast of riches the rest of the game (and Origins) provides. Where were the full levels set on a Mount Olympus-like environment, or the battles against Rayman-styled Greek gods and monsters? We only get a glimpse at this potential in the world’s boss fight stage and in its opening stage, which is *sigh* a Murfy level. Maybe I sound petty, and ironically the Greek-themed world has some of the funnest levels from a pure level-design standpoint, but this is simply how I felt playing the game; perhaps Legends was too hyped up for me, or perhaps the inspired worlds in Origins simply set the bar too high. The very big exception to my disappointment in the game’s world line-up is “20,000 Lums Under the Sea”, which is a bizarre and wonderful mixture of deep-sea industrial environments and stealth elements all wrapped up in a presentation inspired by secret agent clichés. It’s a bunch of my favorite video game tropes all wrapped up into one atmospheric package and is not only my favorite world in Legends but one of the coolest worlds in any platformer I’ve ever played. As a side note, I also love the underwater world from Origins; these games do underwater platforming damn well not only in terms of control and mechanics but also in regards to level design and aesthetics.

Speaking of Origins and the reasons why I might prefer it to Legends: besides not having any Murfy levels to suffer, I loved just about every world in Origins and although they may have generally relied more on familiar platformer tropes than Legends, they used these themes in captivating ways and I found most if not all of these lands to be creative and really fleshed-out. Origins’ own food-themed world in particular combines several different themes and tells a sort of story through its levels. I love that kind of stuff in platformers. Origins also simply feels like more of an adventure. There was a world map. There was progression. It felt like a journey through the Glade of Dreams that covered a wide range of territory. Legends is neat and focused; its levels are all neatly lined up in a row in the art gallery, and players can tackle them in a somewhat nonlinear fashion. Therefore, Legends feels more like a collection of awesome levels that Rayman and friends are just having fun with than an actual adventure to save the world like in Origins. Honestly, I can appreciate both approaches and I can see some preferring one or the other, but I think ultimately Origins’ approach just leaves more of an impact on me personally. Origins also has this unique atmosphere to it that I love, but then again I also love the grand and energetic atmosphere that Legends has. I guess I could compare the merits of both games here all day, but when it comes down to it, I feel Origins has stronger worlds and feels more like a story, and that combined with no Murfy levels makes me currently lean a little more in its direction.

Despite those dang Murfy levels and my other nitpicks about unfulfilled expectations from the game’s worlds, I still love Rayman Legends. Even though a Murfy level might make me rage during one moment due to some utterly stupid move on the part of the AI, the next expertly-constructed platforming level would make me grin from ear to ear and forget all about it. Despite the stuff that dragged the experience down in places for me, Legends’ best moments filled me with visceral joy like few other games can do. The fact that I find Origins to be the overall more complete and fulfilling experience in many ways and yet I still basically like both games equally is a testament to just how strong the strong parts of Legends are. This element of so much of the game being so good makes the stupid Murfy bits all the more frustrating to me, but oh well, I’ll shut up about that now. The bottom line is that Rayman Legends is a zany, superbly fun bundle of imagination and joy in these dark and depraved times of ours and you should play it. When one considers the inclusion of the forty levels from Rayman Origins in addition to the core Legends levels, plus Kung Foot and the daily and weekly challenge stages, the amount of imagination and wondrous fun to be found in this experience is, indeed, nothing short of legendary.

Plus I will never not smile when listening to this song.

BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea (PC) Thoughts

Spoiler Warning: I’ve tried to avoid major spoilers and don’t go into specific detail about any plot points, but you still might want to be wary of some vague spoilers here and there if you have not yet played this game, especially in the second paragraph.

An appropriate tagline for BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea, the DLC follow-up to BioShock Infinite, might be “Irrational Games returns to what they do best”. They tried something similar but different with the sky-high action in the sunny city of Columbia, and while I’m glad BioShock’s successor took us to a new setting, I can’t deny that there’s nothing quite like the halls of the deep-sea city of Rapture. I love the opening section of Burial at Sea: Episode One because we get the rare chance to experience a small piece of a dystopian society when it was still a utopia. Stepping out of Booker’s office and exploring a Rapture that is bright, clean, and active with citizens who haven’t lost their minds is a treat, and I love the more open nature of this starting environment as well as the environments in Burial at Sea as a whole. Walking through the populated bars and shops of Rapture, with massive windows looking out on the city’s neon-lit skyscrapers (seascrapers?) made me reflect on how cool living in a city at the bottom of the ocean would be…before it all goes to hell, of course. The transition to shooting and violence also feels much more organic and less jarring than in Infinite proper, as Booker and Elizabeth are first attacked by the mad artist, Sander Cohen, and then sent on a one-way bathysphere trip to Frank Fontaine’s massive sunken department store turned prison, an incredibly hostile environment crawling with Splicers that resembles the Rapture we know and love from the original BioShock. This was a fairly smart way to have a game that takes place in Rapture before it fell and still have a first person shooter where you freeze people and shoot them with a shotgun. Exploring the derelict clothing departments of “Sub-Rapture”, feeling on edge every time a crazed Splicer lurking somewhere out of sight would ramble into my headphones, I felt a kind of tension that Infinite lacked. Perhaps it’s the closer quarters, or the often smaller groups of enemies, or the respawning enemies that kept me on edge, but something about the combat here just clicks with me more than in Infinite; it feels easier to manage but also more impactful somehow. It’s too bad Episode One seems to enjoy withholding resources such as plasmid-powering EVE and money from the player, because the episode’s short length means plasmids and weapons will mostly go without full upgrades and I felt like I was constantly running out of EVE and ammo in the middle of a fight, which limited my options in a brawl. I would have loved to have fully upgraded the Old Man Winter plasmid, which I had a blast combining with Bucking Bronco to freeze enemies in midair before they fell to the ground and shattered into icy bits. Also unfortunately: Episode One’s narrative starts out strong, but ends with a silly twist that only serves to muddle Infinite’s already muddled narrative even more. To be fair though, this is only part one of a two-part story…

Burial at Sea: Episode Two once again opens in a unique and interesting way, in a beautiful-looking and memorable sequence that is somehow simultaneously silly and inspiring. If there’s one thing Irrational seems to nail, it’s opening its games. Immediately after the opening, the narrative becomes even more messy and convoluted though. After making a shallow effort to explain the logic behind the twist at the end of Episode One, the story then throws an even more abstruse twist into the mix that feels like a contrived attempt to explain why Elizabeth can’t use her Tear powers anymore and that just raises more questions and injects more plot holes. Despite all this, once things got rolling I felt way more connected to Elizabeth as a playable character than I ever did to Booker (although I think much of me caring a lot about Elizabeth is owed to Courtnee Draper’s great voice performance as opposed to the game’s writing). I felt close to Elizabeth after playing Infinite and Episode One and cared about where her story went. By the end of Episode Two, however, Burial at Sea seems to be much more concerned with tying into the original BioShock in neat ways than delivering a satisfactory conclusion to Elizabeth’s story, which I found to be disrespectful to her character. While I think the tie-ins to the original are, as I said, neat, I wish the original BioShock had remained something separate and the links between it and Infinite had remained tenuous; instead, Burial at Sea ends up being a straight link to the original, shoving its overt connections in the player’s face and tying everything together in a neat bow. It’s an interquel, and ultimately little more than a prologue for the original game that overall cheapens Infinite as its own distinct entity and that doesn’t do justice to the character of Elizabeth, a character that I’ve been invested in this whole saga and whose ultimate fate basically amounts to being a catalyst for the events of the first game. It could’ve been worse and the story does do a fair job of linking Elizabeth’s story with the story of Jack and the Little Sisters, as well as overall connecting Infinite with the original, but I can’t help but feel Elizabeth as a character got cheated. I’m just a bit mixed on the whole affair; I’ll admit that having all the Irrational BioShock games being one big sealed up story does feel somewhat satisfying, but this overt link certainly wasn’t needed and I question whether or not it devalues the original, rather than adds to it.

Anyway, while the narrative  and the idea of Infinite, Burial at Sea, and the original BioShock all being one seamless, connected story is a point of contention for me, I actually quite like the other aspects of Episode Two’s design, even more than Episode One. Episode Two is a much lengthier and more complete and focused experience than Episode One, and makes that previous chapter feel like simply a warm-up. This time, the player finally takes on the playable role of Elizabeth, who has basically been the main character this whole story anyway (finally playing as her just feels right), and Episode Two places a large focus on stealth, on running and hiding and sneaking up on enemies. It accomplishes this in part by giving the player new plasmids and weapons, such the ability to turn invisible and see through walls and a crossbow equipped with tranquilizer darts and knockout gas, that encourage players to go about things in a quieter, and shockingly, non-lethal way. Players still have the ability to kill foes, but the game is principally designed around stealth and right from the outset, the narrative makes this clear (the more moral way of doing things is perhaps shoved a little too much in the player’s face early on). I’m disappointed that choosing to kill or not unfortunately doesn’t seem to have much significant impact on anything in the end, but I appreciate the new options and gameplay approach and like that the less violent combat choice suits Elizabeth, who isn’t a pathological killer like Booker. Stealthily creeping through huge environments crawling with Splicers, sneaking through vents, using sneak attacks and trying to use a limited amount of tranquilizer darts puts a whole new spin on the classic BioShock design and makes Episode Two feel like a whole new experience. Trying to survive with only the crossbow and non-lethal means, which is the way I played, also makes for a much more challenging and tense experience.  All this really pays off, as the game feels incredibly fresh, despite taking place in the familiar Rapture setting. I also love the environments in Episode Two, which feel varied and include a handful of creepy lab sections that focus on building atmosphere and story rather than combat, and quite frankly, I love that shit.

Overall, Burial at Sea is a mostly welcome return to Rapture, and despite my reservations about the narrative, I overall enjoyed it quite a lot, perhaps even more than Infinite proper. Episode Two is easily the star half of the package, not only because I’m a sucker for stealth games, but because of how well the stealth elements blend with the atmosphere and tenseness of the scenario. Elizabeth is alone, stranded without her reality-bending powers and with little to defend herself in a hellish deep-sea prison filled with ranting maniacs who will kill her on sight. She’s vulnerable, but also highly intelligent and extremely capable. All of this combined with Elizabeth’s heightened sense of humanity compared to Booker invested me in her character and the experience on a more serious level than anything in the Infinite saga prior, making me carefully consider every step I took and adding a sense of weight to the proceedings that flying around as Mr. DeWitt, sawing into people’s necks and electrocuting them until their heads popped off, before eating potato chips and chocolate bars off the floor seemed to lack (though some of that latter aspect is still present, admittedly). Episode Two also rarely felt repetitive and was never boring for me and some parts will probably stick out in my mind as notable moments in any game I’ve played, such as the unique opening and one late-game sequence that is notable for how uncomfortable it made me, which was definitely the intent.

As for my final thoughts on the whole “BioShock Infinite saga” as I’ve labeled it, having completed all of it now, I’ll say that it was an engaging ride, and one worth taking, but a flawed one. I think the original BioShock still stands on its own as a fantastic experience and while Infinite and Burial at Sea weren’t needed, they’re an…interesting follow-up. I admire the ambition of the developers, but the end result is a fun, engaging, pretty-looking, but messy experience. For more thoughts on BioShock Infinite proper, check out my previous post on the subject. The BioShock series as developed by Irrational Games is sealed up now, and it’s also sealed up when it comes to my capacity for it. Sure, 2K Games will likely continue to cash in on the series, and more stories could be told in a new city, or in Columbia or Rapture, but the narrative certainly doesn’t demand it and I most likely won’t be taking the trip if that day comes. Especially if it’s another trip to Rapture. Burial at Sea pretty much opened the lid on any remaining mysteries with the city, and its story feels told.

Some Thoughts on BioShock Infinite

I’ve been tossing BioShock Infinite around in my head for the past week or so since I completed it and I just can’t seem to decide whether I think the game is annoyingly overrated, something I actually enjoyed quite a lot, or something I overall liked, but was underwhelmed by in several ways. So I thought I’d hash it out with myself here for a few paragraphs and if the game is still relevant to you, maybe you’ll find some food for thought or perhaps want to add something after reading this. I mainly want to discuss the game’s atmosphere and narrative, as those are the points which I find myself thinking about the most.

Like its predecessor (the original BioShock), Infinite excels in world-building and saturating the player with its potent atmosphere and sense of place. The floating city of Columbia is a fully-realized world full of details and its sights and sounds would often stick in my mind long after I’d stopped playing the game. To put it simply: Infinite is an engrossing experience. The opening of Infinite is reflective of the original, except instead of descending below a dingy lighthouse to a grim, murky city beneath the sea, players ascend a dingy lighthouse to a beautiful, sunlit city above the clouds. This feeling of familiar yet contrasting themes is prevalent throughout the game. While this aspect works to the game’s benefit in several ways, it’s also somewhat of a double-edged sword because I believe that much of the reason why Infinite didn’t impress me as much as it could have is because the original BioShock impressed me years ago with similar material. That said, Infinite still stands on its own much more than BioShock 2, which felt redundant and unnecessary to me.

All that said, I find the ways Infinite does differentiate itself to be interesting. For example, protagonist Booker DeWitt’s first steps in Columbia proper are not spent fending off deranged maniacs with a wrench, but simply strolling through sunlit streets and a fairground lined with gift shops, carnival games, and people relaxing and chatting jovially. I find this to be a unique strength of Infinite that sets it apart from the original: that we arrive in Columbia when the city is still living and breathing, instead of after its downfall. Indeed, many of my favorite sections in the game are the ones where you can just walk around and take in the world around you without having to shoot at anything. I think one of the smartest sequences of events in the game follows Booker as he explores the mysterious Monument Island Tower, which concludes in a thrilling escape sequence, followed by Booker waking up in a beautiful beach environment. A rosy late afternoon sun, a self-sustained “ocean” that ends in waterfalls that tumble into the sky, a Ferris wheel off in the distance, and people wearing old-timey swimming trunks (the game is set in 1912) relaxing among the sand set the scene. I was free to walk up to people and get some amusing commentary, eat stray hot dogs and cotton candy, or focus on the main task at hand of searching for Elizabeth (who Booker was sent to Columbia to find), who happens to be gaily dancing at the end of a dock nearby. Later on, as the sun further sets, Booker and Elizabeth go for a twilit stroll around a boardwalk environment complete with an ice cream shop and a bookstore, and even though there were people sitting on a bench having a contest about who could be a more racist white person, the atmosphere and visuals (the game’s luscious, stylistic art direction definitely stands out) were lovely, and I was fully immersed in the world. In these moments, I thought about how I’d like to play a game like this, where I just walk around and talk to people and further a narrative. When soon after this same area is suddenly turned into a gunfight arena, with soldiers who yelled garbled insults at me before I electrocuted them and summoned a murder of crows to pick away at their flesh before blasting their head with a shotgun into a fountain of blood, I couldn’t help but sigh a bit, even if I was having fun. Often, it felt like the combat just gets in the way in BioShock Infinite.

Of course, as pretty as Columbia looks, through its white citizens’ racist, xenophobic mumblings and their troubling devotion to “the prophet”, among other details here and there, it’s clear that this city has something ugly bubbling beneath the surface ready to pop. Earlier on in the experience, Booker’s sunny stroll through the fairground comes to an abrupt end when he jams a guy’s face into a spinning hook-blade, followed by murdering the local police force in a hail of cartoonish blood. I’ll admit, this abrupt change to ridiculously over-the-top and unnecessary violence was incredibly jarring at first and it threatened to shatter my immersion completely. And while I’m still mixed on Infinite’s portrayal and use of violence, the more the experience went on, the more I found a grim appreciation for the contrast between the ridiculous mass murdering and the colorful, almost whimsical visuals. On some level, this combination of the cartoony art direction and absurd violence works and since our protagonist is a violent man who seems to solve all his problems by bashing someone’s skull in, at least it fits his personality (and also the theme of Columbia looking pretty on the outside, but being ugly underneath). The contrast between the more calm walks around populated areas of Columbia and the wild, chaotic combat sections also lends the game an entertaining pace, even if at times it feels like the game falls into a repetitive formula of “shoot a bunch of people, loot a bunch of trash cans, rinse and repeat”. At the same time, some sections are soiled by the game’s incessant need to throw chatty soldiers at Booker, such as one of my otherwise favorite parts of the game, which is the spooky, slow-paced Comstock House environment, which didn’t need the soldiers and would have done just fine with the creepy searchlight creatures and brainwashed inmates wearing pajamas and ceramic masks.

Full Narrative Spoilers Ahead (If you read on, I’m going to assume you’ve finished the game)

Unlike its predecessor, Infinite places a great focus on a compelling central narrative that everything else seems to revolve around. In BioShock, there is a central story and it’s quite interesting, but I remember the true focus of the experience being all the smaller stories and side characters that serve to flesh out the true star of the game, the incomparable setting of the undersea city of Rapture. In Infinite, it’s the opposite: the city of Columbia and its inhabitants serve the story of the game’s central characters, and the star here feels like Elizabeth and the personalities that surround her. For me, BioShock Infinite is ultimately an experience with a lot of fascinating elements that does well enough with what it has, but fails to truly live up to the potential of any of these elements. I feel so much more could have been done with Elizabeth’s jail-keeper, the Songbird, for instance, both from a gameplay standpoint and a narrative one, and that’s where BioShock mainly falls short of its potential for me: it’s narrative.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of multiple realities and the idea that doorways could be opened between them, and Infinite does a decent enough job exploring the concept, but so much more could have been done outside of chasing a gunsmith around and making machine gun turrets appear out of nowhere. I was intrigued when the narrative first took Elizabeth and Booker into an alternate version of Columbia, but just when it really starts to have fun with the concept (introducing a reality where a different Booker DeWitt is a martyr of the Vox Populi), this idea sort of falls away. Later on, time travel of sorts is introduced into the mix as an older Elizabeth pulls Booker into a far future where Comstock succeeded in brainwashing her to be his successor, and the resulting Comstock House sequence, as I already mentioned, is one of my favorite sections in the game, but this event only served to remind me of how much more could have been done when the ability to traverse multiple realities and timelines is involved. Several of my favorite works of art have tackled time travel and multiple realities and took the concepts way further and in more interesting directions than Infinite; Chrono Cross and The Dark Tower novels to name a few.

But perhaps the reason I feel this area was underutilized has more to do with Infinite saving its most interesting concepts until the very end, and ultimately having a good story with fascinating ideas, but a messy delivery. Chrono Cross introduces the existence of two parallel realities where two versions of the same person can go down very different life paths at the very beginning of the game, and proceeds to explore the concept for the remainder. Infinite chooses to introduce us to such a concept in the last five minutes in order to produce the “gotcha!” effect and no doubt prompt the player to replay the whole thing to see how all this adds up. Perhaps there are merits to this approach, and perhaps if I do replay the game my feelings will change, but I can’t help but feel a bit cheated. I love the concept of basing a story around two versions of the same person from different realities who went down very different life paths, and who ultimately conflict with each other, but I feel that so much more could have been explored here. Furthermore, I question how much the revelation of Booker and Comstock being two different versions of the same person really adds to the story outside of “huh, well that’s interesting”. Perhaps one might argue that the multiple realities and all that jazz aren’t the focus, but just devices used to tell the heart of the story here, which is the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth. But in this regard, I feel the game also falls a bit short of its potential. I love Infinite’s themes of redemption and self-hate and the idea of Booker being a father trying to redeem himself for giving up Elizabeth puts a fascinating lens on their relationship, which given more time to sink in, may have left an incredible emotional impact. Maybe it would have been better if the revelations of Booker being Elizabeth’s father and also of Booker and Comstock being related came earlier and the narrative had some time to play with these ideas and build on them and use them to its advantage. I can think of another game (which I won’t spoil) that has a similar theme of someone with buried memories trying to redeem themselves for hurting a loved one that is much more emotionally resonate because not only is the relationship between the two parties clear from the outset, but after the big revelation the player has time to take in the weight of the truth and the ending lets it simmer, providing more emotional closure for both the game’s protagonist and the player.

Infinite ends with Booker deciding that drowning himself will wash away all his sins, but how exactly does that work again? And how exactly did Booker redeem himself? Initially, he felt guilt for committing atrocities as a Pinkerton agent and a soldier. Later, he feels crushing guilt for giving away his daughter to pay off a debt. So he atones for all this by…going to Columbia and committing even more violent atrocities and finally deciding to drown himself to cancel out Comstock’s existence (who he blames for the whole thing), but wouldn’t that also cancel out Elizabeth’s existence? And maybe I’m missing something here, but how is this one version of Booker DeWitt dying supposed to prevent other Bookers from becoming Comstocks again? Or does Booker know this won’t accomplish anything, and just wants to end his life due to his guilt and sorrow? Also, the coin flip instigated by the Luteces early in the game as well as the alternate Booker who became the martyr for the Vox Populi seem to suggest that the Luteces have recruited many other Bookers to rescue Elizabeth, but the Elizabeth that lost her finger is the daughter of only the Booker we play as, right? Are the Luteces recruiting different versions of Booker to rescue different versions of Elizabeth? And if there are other Comstocks who kidnapped other Elizabeths from other Bookers, that means there are other Luteces who created machines and if the Luteces we know are “scattered across the possibility space” then how do they reconcile with their infinite other number of selves? Or...wait! Did it ever explain why Elizabeth has reality manipulating powers? And what exactly was the Luteces’ goal again? For that matter, if they have the power to go anywhere and traverse time and space as they see fit, why do they need Booker’s help? Is doing things themselves against the “rules”? Are they just trying to help Booker? And if people get nosebleeds and remember dying in alternate realities, wouldn’t Booker have had a nosebleed in the other realities since he died in the one where he’s a martyr? How does that all work again? And what about that ghost? And what about…

Ok, I’m done now. You see, my final point is that I feel like BioShock Infinite has a compelling narrative that’s more concerned with telling an engaging story, a page-turner if you will, than it is with having any kind of consistency or holding up under scrutiny of all its rules (or lack thereof) and details. I’m not saying I’m against a story that makes me think, I’m just not sure Infinite’s narrative is worth all the thought. To the game’s credit, I was engaged all the way through and kept wanting to know what would happen next, especially during the game’s ending sequence, which I found to be both beautiful and captivating. The scene when Booker and Elizabeth are gazing out across an endless ocean at an infinite number of lighthouses with an infinite number of doors is a beautiful sight, and this coupled with the mystery and compulsion to keep wanting to know what was behind each consecutive door made me reflect on why I love video games and the unique things an interactive medium can do so much. Even still, when all was said and done, I couldn’t help but look back and think about how the game plays with several fascinating ideas, but doesn’t really go the mile with any one of them, instead gluing them all together and turning out something good, fine enough, but not great like it could have been and not, in my eyes, something truly special. I’m sure there are countless essays, videos and diagrams out there that will tell me how wrong I am, how all of Infinite’s many threads align perfectly and how its narrative is truly a work of genius, and I’m curious to check them out, but right now, all I see is an otherwise engaging narrative that fails to live up to its potential, both emotionally and intellectually.

In Conclusion (Narrative Spoilers End Here)

BioShock Infinite immersed me, entertained me, and engrossed me. I overall like it, but I don’t love it. It’s not an experience that I feel is absolute required playing, a glorious achievement for the medium, a triumph in interactive storytelling, or whatever other bombastic praise I’ve seen critics heap on it. If others consider Infinite a masterpiece on their own terms, that’s fine and I’d love to hear their thoughts, but for me it’s an overall good game with several strong points, but I guess I’ve either seen better or can imagine better or maybe both. Also, many of the game’s strong points owe a great deal to the original BioShock, which is the game that had a much greater impact on me. Perhaps it’s because Infinite followed that game six years later, and fails to really do anything as ambitious or “wow-ing” as its predecessor that I’m just a little underwhelmed by it. But perhaps it’s unfair to criticize this game so heavily based on expectations of what it could have been or might have been because Infinite is certainly worth playing and ultimately a good successor to the original that does a lot of things well; I just don’t think it’s worth peeing your pants over, and I don’t think it’s as spectacular and forward-thinking for video games as I’ve heard some claim (the original BioShock deserved such praise at the time, but what does Infinite add to that legacy that’s so significant? This is what I’m missing). Where Infinite does deserve praise, however, is in its ability to mostly successfully mix so many different components such as strong art direction, great world-building and atmosphere, a well-realized AI companion in Elizabeth who I did find myself quite attached to by the end, ambitious storytelling that is flawed but nonetheless engaging, and exciting (though repetitive) combat mechanics. Infinite does all of these things and admittedly does all of them well, just for me anyway, I suppose it ends up being an experience less than the sum of its parts.