A Look Back At The Story of Bioshock

Bioshock 1 has one of the most genius stories i have ever seen its central plot is brilliant and the attention to detail when it came to its setting in world building is arguably a masterpiece just on its own today i want to look back on bioshock's story and uncover what really made this one of the best games of all time despite it being 14 years old as always spoiler warning ahead for the whole story of bioshock And with that let's get started as always we need to start at the prologue but for bioshock we need

to go back even further that title bioshock it's such a bizarre word when you think about it many games have a very distinct title with weird meanings but at least i could tell you what the words mean cyberpunk 2077 is a game with a cyberpunk art style that's set in the year 2077. a game like dragon age is a bit tricky as i've never played dragon age before so While its title as a whole makes no sense to me i can at least understand what the individual words mean dragon age and origins and maybe draw

some conclusions about the game but what is a bioshock i like many might think it's a homage to system shock 2 which was irrational games first project but furthermore it could also be a shortened version of biological shock which in the context of the game makes sense given how adam ruined this society and how our Protagonist acts throughout the game but we haven't gotten there yet so i'll return to this in a moment as we start the game the player needs certain questions answered in order to feel invested in the story who are we how

did we get here and does the story make sense bioshock creates a sort of meta narrative based around these answers but once again more on that at the end of the video our first interaction with the game is a cutscene and bioshock wastes No time getting right into the action as the plane were traveling on crashes in the middle of the atlantic ocean we awake amongst the wreckage and need to find land the only place within eyesight is a giant lighthouse next to us i've always seen this lighthouse as a beacon of light in a

dark time although it's a bit more literal in this case as the only light we can see is the moon the burning plane and this lighthouse as we enter the door shuts behind us and we See a giant statue of a man with the phrase no gods or kings only man written on a banner while it's confusing as is this confusion should actually start earlier why is there a lighthouse in the middle of the atlantic ocean even if we were to ignore that why isn't there people in the lighthouse there's so much wrong with all

of this and while that does sound like a criticism i actually find it to be a wonderful decision as it's making the player question Everything they see it's also the start of many mysteries this game will tease to the player which causes them to become more invested in the world around them in an attempt to find out more as we head down the stairs we see three plaques with the words art industry and science written on them while a violin cover of bobby darin's beyond the sea accompanies us in the bathysphere what's important to remember

is why we're going in this submarine we're in the middle of The ocean and it's the 60s even if others had survived that plane crash who will be going to call for help our only option is this bathysphere as it's either this or swimming at night in the atlantic ocean and i'll take my chances we presumably descend deeper into the lighthouse while a message plays from andrew ryan someone who looks oddly similar to the statue upstairs bioshock has many memorable moments and this will be one of three key moments throughout The entire game i have

rejected those answers instead i chose something different i chose the impossible [Music] rapture might be my favorite setting in any video game ever made not just the idea but the reasoning behind it is brilliant the fact that a city not only exists at the bottom of the sea but also functions at the bottom of the sea is Something that has never been done before andrew ryan also says that rapture was made for those who do not fear censors or morality it's a judgment free place but not in the sense of people getting along and being

happy together but a place that allowed those who wanted more to get more injured ryan says that the surface was constrained by laws and ethics but rapture was no such place and it's because of this ideology that allowed rapture to blossom into What we see now a bustling city under the sea completely shut away from society at least that's what it seems like until we actually enter rapture our first encounter with the city is a very grim one as we're going to be introduced to a man named johnny until we get to see him sliced

open right in front of us we then meet with johnny's killer who screams at us before attempting to open the bathysphere it's possible that her anger is the same as the people who used To be here as there are signs everywhere saying things like ryan doesn't own us let us leave and the rapture is dead earlier i talked about a light that shines in the darkness when i brought up the lighthouse atlas is like the lighthouse but in a more metaphorical sense as atlus saves us from this person who is trying to kill us his

charming demeanor and attitude makes him instantly likable and that is further reinforced by his own actions as once Again he's trying to save us we push further and are able to arm ourselves with a wrench we can take a couple practice swings to test out our new weapon but we can also get a look at these splicers atlas was talking about as they aren't alien creatures but they don't look human anymore everything seems to be going smoothly so far given the circumstances until we see the gatherer's guarded vending machine [Applause] Hold on and everything will

be fine [Applause] look mr bubbles it's an angel i can see light coming from his belly wait a minute he's still breathing it's all right i know he'll be an angel soon i can't explain to you how genuinely terrifying this was when i first played the game currently we don't understand what a big daddy or a little sister is just yet so seeing a tiny child with a Syringe as big as she is walking with a moving scuba suit is probably the most terrifying thing you'll ever see we also discover that we can now cast

electricity through our hands which is just another bizarre and crazy thing that rapture has we also get a look at a concept that is shown throughout rapture and it's how the world continues to reinforce that you're underwater it's not enough just to have a few windows that show the sea but the effects that The outside environment can have on rapture such as the plane wing crashing into the tunnel causing all the water to flood inside there are even smaller instances of this such as the water falling from the ceiling or just puddles of water in

places where it shouldn't be bioshock also shows other problems that rapture can have like a lack of electricity or when this elevator falls and instead of just being a cool scene to ramp up the destruction we can Actually see someone walk out of it while on fire it makes rapture seem real as it showcases how a place like this can have problems but also what problems a place like this may face like water damage and poor infrastructure if you want to go even further than this this is also the first showcase of how the splicers

interact inside the game as this female spicer is trying to sing a lullaby to her baby despite it being quite the frightening tale she's talking About how her baby's gonna be sold by the pound once her dad is gone and how she'll be alone when her parents are both dead except it seems like she's losing her mind as she's struggling to figure out why her baby doesn't feel the same anymore until we realize her baby's actually a pistol atlas was also listening in on this lullaby as he says that it was the plasmids that caused

all the chaos there's even an audio log not even a couple minutes later that Captures one of the moments of rapture's downfall here's a toast to diane mcclintock silliest girl in rapture silly enough to fall in love with andrew ryan silly [Applause] [Applause] it seems that an explosion went off during the new year's eve party presumably right where we're standing Which killed numerous people we don't know why but if we're to believe atlas plasmids caused it in some way later we get to see the little sister and big daddy again and are able to observe

them without the fear of being stabbed and it's quite the brutal scene it shows the dynamic relationship between the two and also the importance of the little sister and the strength of the big daddies we learn that the little sisters gather at em while the big daddies protect them From people who want to harm them it's also assumed that people might want to harm the little sister because of the atom that she carries after some fighting we make it to the end of the intro where andrew ryan appears and notices that we've invaded his city

he asks for a part of the cia or kgb as he probably assumes that the only people capable of finding and infiltrating his great city would be the government and he also thinks that the government Either wants to put an end to his city or nationalize it to things he'll never let happen despite being just a voice for a majority of the game it's his personality and the power in his voice that makes him feel like a threat and i've always liked how impressive the voice acting was for him of course we have to escape

his ambush and arrive at the medical pavilion ending the tutorial bioshock's intro is pretty much perfect we get a cohesive set of circumstances That show how our character made it to rapture and then get introduced to what rapture looks like how its inhabitants interact with the city and a few pieces of information for the player to think about like plasmids adam big daddies little sisters and the downfall of rapture there is even a ton of things we still don't know yet like who we are who atlas is and how the plane crashed and while i

do wish more backstory was given on this once you beat the game you Realize it's impossible to talk about right now there was so much mystery with bioshock from its setting to its characters to even the actual plot that it makes you want to learn more and while this information and mystery can be considered overwhelming when shown all at once these mechanics characters and locations are everywhere so it's hard not to remember them and it also gives the player something to go off of instead of being left in the dark all Game it's also been

like 15 minutes since we started the game so it's not like it's been four hours of game time without any answers we're just getting started so having a bit of mystery is perfectly fine this early in the game and the way this is pulled off in bioshock is expertly done from here things start to become harder to talk about as bioshock's main world building device is the audio logs we find scattered around the map there is a Common critique amongst gamers that it's unimersive when there are audio logs or recordings scattered throughout the world as

it makes no sense that this many people would be using them when talking about the most mundane of topics and while i definitely agree with this sentiment i've always just chalked it up to a limitation of game design especially in the case of bioshock where there are no npcs the player can talk to to learn about rapture so all their Information has to be from the audio logs thankfully there is a ton of them in this game and are extremely easy to find as they glow and are more often than not found in areas you'll

be traveling through anyway these provide lots of context to rapture's downfall and explain a lot of what's going on around the city except they are everywhere throughout the game and not placed in the most linear fashion for example we see these ghostly apparitions Throughout the game but it isn't until we get to arcadia roughly 3 or so hours into the game where we finally learn why we can see ghosts i have no problem with the way these audio logs are structured it just becomes a little harder to explain when making a video about it so

for now we'll just be going in the order of the game intended and occasionally go off the beaten path to discuss some other aspects of the game like right now as it's a perfect time to talk about Rapture itself as i said before it wasn't just the scenery of the city that made me love rapture but it's what it represents that intrigued me just like the title of the game we need to address the main name of the city rapture by definition is a feeling of intense pleasure or joy but it's also a theological belief

within christianity assuming my research is correct it's an event that would be the end of times where those who are faithful christians Whether alive or dead will be taken above the clouds to meet the lord all those who are not faithful will not be taken up thus are condemned to whatever destruction the rapture brings rapture the city relates to this as you can infer that this place above the clouds would be considered a paradise for all christians so rapture is a place for those who want to experience a paradise away from the mainland as ryan

said it's for the artist who doesn't fear Censorship or the scientist who isn't bound by a petty morality rapture allows the creativity of the mind to be the only limit within its walls and this is why the city of rapture had so many scientific breakthroughs the residents of rapture never needed to worry about whether or not what they were doing was unethical dangerous or controversial as they were given complete freedom rapture essentially went through a never-ending golden age of technological advancement People were able to conjure elements through their hands and were able to have not

just their facial features reconstructed but their entire gender and even their race changed as well even though it all went to eventually just the concept of rapture is genius it's incredibly thorough and really highlights the stellar writing of this game as the biggest question that comes to mind is why build a city in the ocean and yet the devs managed to not only Give an answer to this question but actually make it quite believable continuing where we left off we had just escaped andrew ryan's ambush and have made it to the medical pavilion according to

atlas this is the direction we have to head in if we're to save his family i said earlier how bioshock's intro showcases how some of the splicers interact with the city and while in that case it was just a small example this concept gets brought up again but with More depth added to it from the moment we enter the pavilion we see signs and posters of a dr steinman he's the overseer of the medical pavilion and is also a very accomplished surgeon one thing you'll notice about bioshock is how all the name characters have a

story about them each character has a backstory and a reason for coming to rapture and all their stories tie into the overarching story of rapture each area also has a distinct look to them And a reason for being in the city and both the levels and characters within them all tie into rapture in some way which we uncover from the audio logs dr steinmann performed cosmetic surgery on the people of rapture but due to the circumstances of the city he too became corrupt due to rapture being a place where people can show their truest forms

and are able to push the boundaries of their studies dr steinman would use this time to perfect his craft everything was Going well until the discovery of adam as this sparked an idea in steinman's head as he thought this was a perfect opportunity to revolutionize the industry hoping that with this new technology surgeons could sculpt any kind of flesh with ease but this of course led him down a darker path see steinman was a perfectionist and of course when you're a perfectionist your standards are incredibly high but adam managed to push these even further Adam

presents new problems for the professional as your tools improve so do your standards there was a time i was happy enough to take off a water to or turn a real circus freak into something you can show in the daylight but that was then when we took what we got but with adam the flesh becomes clay what excuse do we have not to Sculpt and sculpt and sculpt until the job is done dr steinman didn't go crazy just because of adam it was a combination of adam rapture and his inability to let the smallest problem

go he would change things that patients didn't want and given that he's a professional in his line of work he used this to reinforce his actions why argue with the professional after all they know all there is to know steinman lost control And began working on anyone he wanted even if they weren't a patient of his his final decline is how we see him in game he moved away from the faces of his patients to their whole physique claiming that this one was too fat or this one's too tall or that this one is too

symmetrical he ended up losing his mind when he was introduced to adam he wasn't an addict to the drug but an addict to his work he saw the potential of adam and his first thought was how Far can he go without thinking how far should he go this shows that adam and even the policies of rapture affected so many of its city's residents and due to their different fields of study and different levels of wealth and social status we're able to see how it affects everyone differently this style of storytelling is flat out genius it

makes you want to go to the next area and uncover what the level is about what it provides the city of rapture and how its Unique setting caused its unique downfall no game has ever gotten me to care this much about one small level and i find that in itself very impressive after we have dealt with dr steinman we enter the second key moment of bioshock as we approach this hallway we see a big daddy get thrown through the wall this is the first time we have not only seen a big daddy up close besides

the cutscene from earlier but we actually see one defeated so it must be a really Tough opponent who brought him down except it's just another splicer even though i've always found this almost impossible to happen that's not the point of the scene as now that the big daddy is dead the little sister is alone the splicer takes this opportunity to grab the little sister so he can take her at him but a mysterious woman shoots him before he can do that i'll bring her up in a moment but right now she and atlas give us

a choice these little Sisters contain atom the core foundation of rapture and if we can get more we can buy more plasmids and tonics to get stronger but we're also doing so at the cost of potentially killing her rescuing a little sister will net us 80 adam but she lives harvesting her will give us 160 but she dies it's a case of morality are you willing to sacrifice the life of a little girl for the benefit of your own especially when you uncover their origins it makes the choice even more Important the little sisters were

a creation of tenenbaum the woman from earlier after discovering a sea slug that was able to cure the wounds of a smuggler when it bit him after some research on the slug she discovered what caused this anomaly and dubbed the substance atom she also discovered that had the ability to splice people's dna giving them the opportunity to essentially have superpowers leading to the creation of plasmids the problem With atom is that on its own there wasn't enough to change anything but tenenbaum found a way to create atom inside people's bodies but once again this also

failed as it wasn't enough the only test that worked was with young girls which was the start of the little sisters another problem arose is there wasn't enough girls to go around as who would willingly subject their daughters to this experiment so fontaine can spread with tenenbaum to create an Orphanage that would be used as a front to exploit the children and specifically take the girls to use them as hosts for adam despite how creepy they may look when you rescue them you discover that they are just in fact little girls not some mutant creature

but a living breathing human she with the assistance of a dr shu chong who we'll get to in a moment subjected the little girls to mental conditioning so they can become valuable hosts so she cares enough about The little sisters that when someone else hurts them she'll defend them but when she hurts them it's okay her logic is clearly flawed and there is a reason for that that she feels awful about what she did but the majority of the audio logs we find say the opposite this makes tenenbaum a hard person to trust which not

only reinforces the game's concept of morality when it comes to the little sisters but also strengthens the relationship between you and atlas it's A great idea on paper but horribly executed in games sadly according to tenenbaum if we save enough of her little one she'll give us a reward this is in the form of a present near the plasmid vending machines that has atom a plasmid and some other items like ammo and eve the number of atom is consistent every time so for to compare the two we find out that every three little sisters rescued

gives us 440 atom assuming you collect the present and 480 if we Harvest all of them if the player were to rescue harvest all 21 little sisters they will get either 3 000 80 atom or 3360 atom respectively this is already a problem on its own but they continue to add more items for the player easily making rescuing the best option without even thinking about the morality of the situation a 280 atom difference in the grand scheme of things is really not that big of a deal especially when you get to the end of the

game when you can Upgrade your plasmids that run as high as 180 atom now maybe i play the game differently than others but i never needed many plasmids during my playthrough i wasn't constantly starved of atom i just needed a few important tonics and some go-to plasmids and that was it you really don't need an entire arsenal of tonics and plasmids to complete this game unless you're doing a sort of challenge run or something what they should have done was kept the Rewards from the present but cut the atom we get from the gifts and

rescuing in half going from a total of 3 360 atom if you harvest them to 1 680 if you choose to rescue all of them this also cuts your survivability in half all health and eve upgrades are 80 atom each buying all of them throughout the game will set you back 1280 atom leaving you only 400 to use on upgrades and plasmids so it creates this situation about whether or not you should dabble in more Health or eve or use the atom to upgrade your plasmids this would make saving the little sisters a lot harder

to do and force the player to actually choose between rescuing or harvesting them are you still willing to stick to your morals and never harvest one no matter how hard it gets or are you going to cave in furthermore are you going to justify your actions or live with the fact that what you did is wrong if you plan on justifying it aren't you no Better than the people who live here like steinman who used his work as justification for his ruthless actions or the loads of other people will meet soon who also did evil

things because they were furthering their field of study i'm also not the only one that thinks these rewards should have been handled better as the creative director for the game even agrees yeah and we went back and forth a lot about what the rewards for harvesting versus saving Would be and actually i think we should have really pushed further that the rewards for saving were much more much more should have been much more meager than the rewards for harvesting you probably have noticed by now that we've spent a lot of time talking about dr steinman

and the little sisters but not about the actual medical pavilion itself and this is where Bioshock tends to suffer a bit the medical pavilion level has 17 audio logs the player can find and only eight of them aren't made by dr steinman while this sounds like a great opportunity for the other logs to introduce more lore on the other doctors and patients bioshock doesn't do this the other eight audio logs are random logs like andrew ryan talking about the vandalism of vending machines or dr shu chong testing out a new plasmid you could have put

these Anywhere else in the game and you wouldn't bat an eye as they fit anywhere since their story isn't related to a specific area it's not a bad decision to make these kind of audio logs but it's clear that it makes it harder to fill the others with more content about the actual level it makes the medical pavilion seem only about dr steinman and not the other people in the pavilion thankfully the environment does attempt to assist them in some ways but the rest Of the level lacks in any sort of story outside of steinman

this also isn't a level issue but more of a whole game issue sometimes it always feels like the world revolves around specific key people and never anyone else our next level is a great example of the opposite as neptune's bounty has no end boss well sort of and we'll get to that regardless there are 19 audio logs in here and there's a very diverse cast of characters within them as most of them Have between three to five logs each on top of this majority of the logs add to the level's ecosystem neptune's bounty was used

as a cover up for a man named frank fontaine and his smuggling ring many items inside rapture were considered contraband as that would disrupt everything rapture was built for and a large majority of these audio logs aren't about one person but the area as a whole such as when tenenbaum discovered that slug we talked about Earlier this links to the creation of adam but also adds to the level itself as this discovery was found here there's also an audio log about a man named sullivan who is a detective for andrew ryan who's trying to find

evidence against fontaine his audio logs show the steps during his case as he attempts to interrogate a smuggler of fontaine's we can actually find the location of where this interrogation happened in the level and this also relates to the level as a Whole again as this is where fontaine does his smuggling so it would make sense that a detective would be here this is the weird problem with bioshock's audio logs but i do want to make one thing very clear i do not hate the concept of these logs there are great ways of providing lore

and world building to the game even if they really shouldn't exist as we discussed earlier plus they're audio logs not notes meaning the player can walk around and Explore the level while listening to it rather than sitting still and reading text however it's very clear that there is some favoritism and inconsistency with these audio logs where one area will have most of logs be about one character another may have it be about the actual level and sometimes it's neither it can make the story harder to follow at times as events may occur earlier than when

they get explained and can also be the opposite where something Gets explained but then is shown to the player later with the hopes that they remember it getting back to the actual story neptune's bounty is the next level we come across then as i said earlier there is technically no boss in the level at least bioshock's version of a boss as peach wilkins doesn't have that audio log treatment that many others got like dr steinman he only gets three audio logs throughout the game so it's clear he wasn't intended to be a boss or Main

character of an area just a roadblock for the player to go around this is further reinforced by him denying us access to smuggler's hideout and subsequently atlas's family until we can get him a research camera i'm not the only person to say this but from a story and gameplay perspective this camera is very video gamey the fact that a camera is able to analyze genetic material from a simple picture is a possible stretch that i'm willing to Just barely forgive but it is in no way entertaining to start a fight with a camera so you

can snapshot a picture of your enemy then get back to fighting at the end of the day it's a really small part of the game so i tend not to dwell on this too much the fight that follows though has always been a blast to do as it forces you to get creative with your plasmids incinerate can be used to open up more doorways which double as cover and sources of eve and ammo furthermore You can make this encounter much more entertaining if you picked up the security bullseye from earlier and don't even get me

started about new game plus as this makes this encounter even better peaches is a bullet sponge however and does take numerous hits to die from pretty much anything but it does add to the intensity of the fight so i didn't really mind it after somehow making it out alive we arrive at smuggler's hideout where the cora fontaine Smuggling ring is located despite it being the shortest level in bioshock it does an amazing job showing off its environment as all these boxes we see throughout the level are the contraband fontaine was smuggling in we also do

get to see a flashback appear on screen when we enter the area this isn't the first time we've seen one and it won't be the last but it's relevant later so we'll leave it for now it's also here where we finally meet up with atlas and help him Rescue his family we let atlas through the door and we watch as he attempts to free his family ninja ryan comes on the radio and mocks us saying maybe you could warn him or if only you could do something except just stand there and watch him die on

its own it's exactly as it sounds but i've always found this to have a double meaning after knowing the ending of the game but just like the flashbacks and the tons of other things we've talked about before today we'll Talk about that later we run down the stairs to help atlas but he is overwhelmed by splicers and needs to fall back but as we approach the sub to finish the job he started it explodes in front of us this is a turning point for the game atlas the man who saved us and who we can

consider to be a dear friend of ours had just watched his family die in front of him atlas and now the player will want revenge for this and the only person to enact that on is andrew ryan That's why our next objective is to find the bathysphere in rolling hills as this will take us right to andrew ryan himself our next level arcadia is simultaneously where the middle of the game starts and also where it starts to plummet in regards to the story from a gameplay perspective this is just like the previous levels but with

new plasmids new enemies more upgrades and different environments i thoroughly enjoyed the gameplay when going through These sections but it carries the levels as there isn't much story to go off of however i will admit that there is the occasional audio log sprinkled in the next few levels that is very important to understanding the backstory of rapture and that there is a very unique sense of style to these places as they all serve very unique purposes arcadia is a literal forest of trees which is how rapture is able to produce oxygen despite being hundreds of

feet under the Water however the majority of the audio logs in arcadia are dedicated to one person julie langford the creator of the arcadia forest except she's not a main boss like steinman in fact she helps us which is a nice change of pace but her audio logs don't really add much substance one talks about her tests regarding this lazarus device and how she wants to test the rosa gallica flower to see its results but she was unable to due to a recent lockdown if The bright colors and presentation weren't obvious it's clear from the

audio log that these flowers will be important later even if you didn't piece that together she'll have you go fetch one anyway so it doesn't matter if you caught on or not another talks about this cult with an arcadia called the satarin except it's just about how they steal her equipment and how they believe they're touched by the gods we do get to see this cult in the game as all the Houdini spoilers in arcadia are a part of the group but nothing else is developed they're just a cult with no motivation and no real

reason to exist as from what we gather from the audio logs they just drink human blood and plasmids steal julie's research materials and are avoided by many of the people in rapture as they brutally kill anyone who isn't a part of them the question is though why well if the wiki has anything to go off of it was Discovered that this cult was put into the game very late in development and thus the devs ran out of time to add any proper backstory to them while i will at least recognize that there was an attempt

to add backstory assuming that article is true it wasn't present in the full release thus i can only go off of what we have in game this same sort of storytelling though occurs all the way up until we meet andrew ryan where there is that lack of substance in the audio Logs save for a few key logs at specific points everything we have to do was made by the devs to add length to the game and extend its gameplay once again taking everything into account i don't mind this as the gameplay was fun and i'll

gladly take another couple hours of it but when only looking at the story it's clear we're being dragged along and constantly stalled for the sake of run time to get to andrew ryan from here we need to get through arcadia except Andrew ryan shuts off some of the oxygen so we need to turn it back online with the help of julie to turn it on we need to create the lazarus vector julie was working on so we need to go from arcadia to the farmer's market to grab the materials then go back to arcadia to

put it together we then have to hold out from a never-ending wave of splicers as they attempt to shut down the device after this we travel to fort frolick to find that bathysphere only for the Artist and serial killer sander cohen to interrupt us after dealing with him we make it to hephaestus a large industrial power plant where we can go to andrew ryan's office only for it to be locked to turn off this electrical lock and get into his office we need to blow up the power plant using a literal bomb this takes around

4 or so hours to complete which doesn't seem like a long time until you realize this campaign's run time is close to 10 hours that's also Being extremely generous given the quality of the bioshock remasters is awful and continues to crash and this game doesn't have any consistent auto saves as the only trigger when you enter a new level so assuming you get wrapped up in game play and forget to save like i did you might be losing a couple minutes to a whole hour of progress so if anything it's actually less than 10 hours

but still it's clear that a large portion of the game is within these Levels technically you could argue that the first few levels do the exact same thing as it does take quite a bit of time to get to smuggler's hideout but not only are these levels short as that whole sequence takes around half the time the levels themselves are covered in numerous audio logs related to the area or the main boss of said area we've already discussed before how arcadia does attempt to do the same but fails by not providing enough substance farmer's Market

suffers from the exact same fate as arcadia and hephaestus has a couple important logs that are helpful to understanding the downfall of rapture but fort frolick and sandra cohen are probably the only exception as xander cohen is actually a really entertaining villain and there is one extremely important audio log that has relevance to the end of the game sander cohen is extremely creepy and also a bit sad at the same time he's a poet composer Sculptor and playwright he's clearly talented in the realm of art but he too was subjected to the same problems many

had thanks to adam where steinman became more infatuated with his work thanks to adam as he attempted to erase all the problems he had sandra cohen would use this opportunity to also enhance his craft he created artwork from his victims by covering them in plaster and setting them up in various poses it's horrifying especially when you discover That they're actual people as they bleed when you hit them as i said he's creepy and his mannerisms and speech reflect this too but he's also quite the sad person as his audio logs and even some dialogue from

andrew ryan point to him seeing us as a spark he needed to keep going the reason sandra cohen keeps us here is that he needed help completing his masterpiece a full four picture display of his colleagues who betrayed him next to a ton of bodies it's our job To kill his colleagues and take their pictures i do like how the pictures we take with the camera are the actual photos and not some preset photo the devs had in place so nice touch when we put the third photo in the picture frame he freaks out claiming

that we are doubting his work in his fit of rage he has numerous spider splicers attack us he calms down after a while and does apologize for the unnecessary outburst but it's clear that he does not like People who dislike his work by us helping cohen and seeing his masterpiece through to the end we can possibly give him the strength he needed to keep going with his artwork and convey to him that he is indeed an excellent artist it also seems that he may have planned to kill andrew ryan at some point as one audio

log says that he wants to create a requiem for him it's also during this level where we uncover a very important scene of jasmine jolene who we find out As andrew ryan's mistress who's talking about her recent pregnancy i'm sorry mr ryan i didn't know i didn't know fontaine had something to do with it wha what are you doing no no don't play i love you no don't wait no [Music] that creepy doctor tenenbaum promised me it wasn't gonna be a real pregnancy they just take the egg out once mr ryan And i had oh

i needed the money so bad but i know mr ryan's gonna suss it out gonna no i wasn't being careful gonna know i saw the mr ryan's gonna be so mad at me from what we gather it seems that andrew ryan had discovered what occurred and beat her to death with a pipe this incident just like many we have discovered today will be relevant later but not too much later as after running Through the power plant crafting the bomb and destroying the power we can finally come face to face with the man himself an assassin

has overcome my final defense and now he's come to murder me in the end what separates a man from a slave money power No a man chooses a slave obeys you think you have memories [Music] a farm a family an airplane a crash and then this place was there really a family did that airplane crash Or was it hijacked forced down forced down by something less than a man something bred to sleepwalk through life until they are activated by a simple phrase spoken by their kindly master was a man sent a kill or a slave

a man chooses a slave obeys would you kindly powerful phrase Familiar phrase would you kindly would you kindly get this would you kindly find that would you kindly find that would you kind of forget this do you kindly head to ryan's office and kill the son of a sit would you kindly stand would you cut Run a man chooses a slave obeys kill oh my juices oh face [Music] this is what makes bioshock so hard to speak about as so much of this game revolves around this key moment and Summarizing the journey here in just

a few short sentences is a disservice to the effort that went into creating this plot twist right before this we actually get to see a room that andrew ryan was working in trying to piece together what was going on he was confused why there was some random person who just happened to survive a plane crash right next to the entrance to rapture and who is capable of defeating all that he throws at him by the time we arrive ryan Manages to uncover the truth we're a sleeper agent for atlas we from birth were created to

be this way that child of jasmine's that tenenbaum took from her was us she paid jasmine for the baby and conditioned the child to respond to the phrase would you kindly meaning not only was atlus lying to us we the player never had any freedom in our choices and to top it all off were ryan's son in some ways it's almost poetic someone who preaches about men choosing and slaves Obeying has a son who is the complete opposite of him ryan a man and his son a slave as if this plot twist wasn't already bad

enough the game isn't done yet is when we take ryan's genetic key and put it into the override we stop rapture from self-destructing but now give control of rapture to atlas who is actually frank fontaine this wouldn't have been as good if it was anyone but fontaine the one who ran the smuggling ring in neptune's bounty and the one who Worked with tenenbaum to condition us was the guy who saved us the whole time that room from earlier also shows us some of the experiments jack underwent before being sent out of rapture such as when

dr sung forced us to snap a dog's neck because he said the phrase bioshock without a doubt has one of the best if not the best plot twist in gaming history from the moment we have started the game we had no free will the present we were given sparked the plane crash so Even before we could play the game we are being controlled video games as a whole give the player a choice it could be small choices like how to kill the enemy in front of you or it could be a large choice like the

ending of a game but bioshock took this idea and twisted it completely by tricking the player into thinking they had the freedom of choice when in fact the only choice they were given was when to turn the game off this revelation also ties into four Things i've noticed over the years and i've always wondered if they were intentional or not firstly jack has a tattoo of chains on his wrist possibly signifying that he's a slave to atlas next is when atlas's family who we eventually discovered didn't actually exist blows up in the bathysphere andrew ryan

says maybe you could warn him if only you could do something except just stand there and watch him die at this time in the game ryan doesn't know who We are so this wasn't intended to be a double meaning but i believe the devs made him say this on purpose as this line can be interpreted as us once again being a slave to atlas with no way to do anything about it thirdly when we meet the little sister at the medical pavilion atlas never says the words would you kindly it's possible that not even tenenbaum

knew of atlas's true identity and if he had said that phrase over the radio she would have caught on Immediately this is something fontaine tries to do throughout the story and that's to play the long game by convincing us that his family died in the bathysphere we made our bond with him even stronger as we now have a common goal but that's exactly what fontaine wanted the last thing i noticed was some symbolism in the first location minutes into the game as there's a statue holding up a ball with the words welcome to rapture on

it this is easily A reference to atlas the greek giant who is forced to hold up the world for all eternity this could be seen as a foreshadowing of atlus trying to hold up the world of rapture by defeating ryan and being the leader of the city but it's also a reference to atlas's demise as in greek mythology this was atlas's punishment so this could be foreshadowing atlas's punishment in game as he just made us an enemy all of these might be completely wrong but the fact That they line up so well with the game's

themes and story make it impossible to see it as a coincidence from its plot twist to its symbolism it's one of the best writing i've ever seen however we're still not done with the game yet fontaine has betrayed us and without any real objective anymore it's only fair that we enact the same revenge again but on the man who actually deserves it during the reveal of fontaine he says goodbye and launches An army of security bots to chase us during our escape a little sister appears and guides us to safety before falling down the vent

shaft we awaken and discover that we are in a secret room in rapture where the little sisters relax and play together it's a really cute moment as we can see all the little sisters interacting with one another tenenbaum then informs us that she was able to reduce some of the mental conditioning that fontaine put on us but We aren't completely cured to achieve this we need to head to dr sung's laboratory and find his cure for it fontaine now the head of rapture notices that we're awake and attempts to shut us down but only ends

up being able to lower our health a bit by making our hearts stop momentarily it's a lot better than being completely manipulated but he can still control us in some way so we definitely need that cure the location where this cure is found is a Place called olympus heights where all the super rich stayed in luxury apartments many characters we've already talked about today like tennenbaum dr su chong and even sandra cohen lived in these apartments i've always found it interesting how these apartments are right next to apollo square which is known for housing the

poor and homeless you can even tell from the railroad station next to each area as the area near olympus heights is quite pristine Given the circumstances and the one in apollo square is extremely run down both the audio logs and the environment will tell us that there was clearly a revolution starting here and at the head of this was atlas in order to avoid suspicion and hide under the radar fontaine faked his own death and changed his name and face to atlas we learned in arcadia that atlas was at one point a politician but he

claimed those days were over it seemed that fontaine was Using the poor as his army and there is numerous audio logs to back this theory up andrew ryan wanted to create the perfect society but it fell victim to social status and given his own policies within rapture there wasn't much opportunity to crawl back to the middle class those who were rich succeeded and those who were poor suffer just like every other society in existence fontaine sees this opportunity to gather an army of like-minded individuals and Use them to do his bidding going back to neptune's

bounty we have a couple audio logs from peaches that talk about how he disliked ryan and preferred fontaine's way of running things at least initially until he realized that fontaine might actually be worse than ryan this really shows that even rapture was doomed to fail as a society the only way it was possible to save this city was for ryan to help the poor and make sure everyone was happy but given his own beliefs and The beliefs of rapture that was never going to happen the downfall of rapture didn't happen overnight it was a long

string of events that progressively got worse and worse the atom addiction the mistreatment of the poor the manipulation of fontaine the actual culture surrounding rapture all of it contributed to its demise getting back to the story we end up finding the cure for our mental conditioning and allowed jack complete freedom for the first time In his life one thing that's important to note is his freedom because it's not like he was completely controlled he still did things in his life before coming to rapture but he was never completely free as fontaine could easily change that

by saying one simple phrase while gathering the cure we also found a dead body on the table and discovered that it's dr shu chong's quite ironic that dr su chong died to his own creation he was of course the original Creator of the big daddies and was the one who created that defense mechanism in them that attacks anyone who hurts the little sisters good to see that he's dead given how much pain he caused people after finding the cure we can now kill fontaine except before we get a chance to heal locks the door of

the educational facility which is only unlocked via a big daddy which means we need to become a big daddy despite how bothersome this area can be in regards To its confusing layout and plethora of enemies from a lore perspective it's quite intriguing as this is the facility where the big daddies and little sisters were made one thing that's been missing from this game so far is the who the big daddies are and how they were made and thankfully this area answers that question it seems that the big daddies are people who had their skin and

organs grafted to the suits which may explain why they can't take them off in jack's Case he didn't need to graft his skin and organs to the suit as he just needed to trick the system into thinking he was a big daddy which is why he isn't injured during the process however he does need a voice module so he can sound like one and just by looking at the device it definitely doesn't look safe after becoming a big daddy we help out a little sister who gives us a syringe and unlocks the final locked door

to fontaine where we can now finally start The boss fight and both this and the endings of bioshock are honestly quite bad fontaine is a giant creature now flowing with adam and while i'm willing to just barely believe something like this is possible the fight overall is just bad all you do during the fight is shoot him until his health is gone and then when he returns to his machine to gather more atom you stab him with the syringe and you do this four times until he dies you would think after the second Time he

would stop recharging his atom this way but apparently not the boss fight does ramp up in difficulty as the security bots and splicers come to his aid but it's sort of hard to ignore the giant naked man trying to kill you especially when he functions just like a big daddy and stuns you when you're hit after defeating him he'll smack you one more time and all the little sisters will come out and aid you by stabbing him which admittedly is pretty cool Afterward the game goes into one of three endings and the conditions of the

ending depend on whether or not you harvested or saved the little sisters one ending is when you save all of them the other is when you harvest all of them and a third is if you do a mix of both you don't need to rescue every single little sister but out of the ones you interacted with within the game you do have to save them i do like the happy ending where all the little sisters grow Up and live normal lives before all meeting again to be with you on your deathbed but the other is

just bizarre as jack takes control of rapture for himself and uses the splicers as an army to overtake the surface and launch a nuke like the ending started okay but ramped up in intensity immediately why does jack need a nuke why bother killing those on the surface what was even the point of this ending this just like the morality of harvesting and rescuing the Little sisters was something the developers wish they had improved on for the final release regardless we have made it to the end of the game and thus finished the story of bioshock

this game is without a doubt one of the best of all time it truly has one of the best stories in the gaming industry and is one i wish i could experience again for the first time bioshock has an incredible level of detail put into its story from its world building to its Story of specific characters this couple with its incredible plot twist makes this a very hard game to beat when it comes to comparing its stories it's one game i will always recommend without hesitation and was the perfect start to a brand new series

thank you all for watching today and i hope you didn't mind the change in direction with this video as it started to become a more of a storyteller video as i incorporated many small plots like Steinmen the creation of atom as well as the audio logs to further discuss them i normally wouldn't have done this but bioshock became quite the tough video to talk about when i didn't include these extra details so i hope it was still entertaining thank you for making it this far and if you enjoyed be sure to like and subscribe if

you're new and thank you to my returning viewers for coming back i haven't decided whether the next video in this style of Commentary will be the sequel to this game or another series but we'll just have to see if you have a game you want me to talk about be sure to let me know in the comments below i've gotten asked quite a bit to talk about the arkham series as well as the borderlands games which are already on my list so excellent thinking with that however take care everyone and goodbye [Music] You