This is an impressive feat, mimicking personalities with architecture. There’s only a few materials, a few types of buildings, and a few types of people: the characters are represented in their architecture. If you paid attention to your surroundings, architecturally, up until the point of your first combat encounter, you should have noticed a number of things. So what does this have to do with architecture? We all know what that means, don’t we? Somebody is suffering for these people to live the way they do. All of a sudden it comes back to you: the statues, the patriotism, the robed figures - it’s meant to be a utopia. And it’s all confirmed with the #77 baseball throw. Nobody could be this patriotic, this sure of themselves without being a little bit of a zealot. Advertisements make broad proclamations of sovereignty, of truth, of freedom. You walk past stark white buildings of stone, wholesome brick homes, and great archways. Who are they? Who built all of this? None of this is very clear until you see the rest of Columbia first hand. From here, you enter an idyllic, Eden-esque garden containing more of these nameless individuals. Gilded doorways and pillars line the path you walk towards the group of robed figures. This happens with the Founders towards the start of the game. The game is set up to provide the player with allusions to a certain group of people well before they are actually introduced. One thing that I noticed about Infinite is how you see a setting first, and then its inhabitants. Only the encouragement of friends and fond memories of the original BioShock drove me to give Infinite a try. All I had seen was brief glimpses of row houses and dockyards whilst watching my brother play for about 15 minutes, and that hadn’t really piqued my interest. To be fair, I hadn’t played it before I wrote that.
It’s pretty much just historical.” (In terms of architecture, I meant) Well, turns out I was sort of wrong on that one. Now, I know this game had been suggested to me by fellow writer Luke Schultz at Monolith, to which I had replied: “Infinite is nothing special, really. What did I just see? How did so much content manage to be crammed into such a small amount of time? Why am I so sweaty? These questions, and a million more, ran through my mind as I attempted to wade through the architectural masterpiece that is BioShock Infinite. A question that is, in fact, worthy of its own quote block: After playing about 3 hours into BioShock Infinite, my mind was only able to formulate one solitary question, a query that even Shakespeare couldn’t have phrased more eloquently.
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