Most Intriguing Idea: I Love the 80s: the FPS!

Best Design Decision: High walls around outposts

Worst Design Decision: As usual, zombies

Summary:

Video game violence is mostly stupid and unbelievable. This makes Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon a superior FPS almost by default, as it is one of the few first-person shooters with a story and world dumb and ridiculous enough to match its gameplay. Sergeant Rex Power Colt punching a cybershark with his cyber-fist makes sense in a way that Dude McBro gutting a jaguar to make himself a new purse never did. What’s more, Blood Dragon improves on Far Cry 3‘s formula in almost every way. Most of the outposts have high walls and interesting interior level design, and there’s no experience penalty for setting off an alarm, eliminating the tedious long-range stealth approach that the main game incentivized (a lack of silenced weapons is also important in this regard).  The missions still have area borders, but mostly take place inside so this doesn’t matter quite as much. Weapons and upgrades are now rewards for completing challenges rather than just climbing towers, making them feel more earned.

Blood Dragon wobbles towards the end, however. The penultimate mission is a series of arena fights against running zombies that is not only pointlessly frustrating but also completely disconnected from everything else that the game is about. Worse, this gets followed up with a training montage (including a dubious sex scene) that goes on waaay too long. The final mission, with its laser arm and machinegun-equipped dinosaur, is almost perfect, but the game ends on a slightly down note with another overlong cutscene where the big bad dies without any player intervention. Blood Dragon could also have done with a bit more quantity and variety in sidequests, and really needed a more thorough reskin on its vehicles. A real night-day cycle would also have been appreciated, although I can understand if the developers didn’t think they could make the neon aesthetic work in daylight.

Blood Dragon is superior to the base game. The missions, with that one exception, are better, the level design, especially in the outposts, is much improved, and the tone of the story meshes much better with the tone of the mechanics. I liked it.

Verdict: Recommended

Most Intriguing Idea: Transforming into a chicken to save the world.

Best Design Decision: Enemies you can wrestle!

Worst Design Decision: Bosses you can’t wrestle.

Summary:

To avoid the dreaded term “Metroidvania”, I’ll call Guacamelee! (really feels like it needs an inverted exclamation point in front) an “exploratory platformer” starring a tequila brewer turned Luchador named Juan. The game has many points of similarity with Metroid, with new combat powers serving to remove obstacles in addition to taking down enemies, and the chicken form mimicking some purposes of the morph ball. The world, however, is a loose web rather than a dense one, and most of its areas radiate off the Santa Luchita hub. Despite the Dualshock’s mushy triggers, the controls are generally tight and responsive, but the game puts such stringent demands on the player that things can still get pretty frustrating. This is particularly true in platforming segments that require the player to quickly switch back and forth between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

While I found the platforming brittle at times, my real disappointment came in the boss encounters, most of which did not allow me to use Juan’s throws or suplexes, and some of which did not even allow me to perform combos in any real way. Much of the game’s primary combat is combo focused, and tactical throwing is very important to many of the fights. To have almost none of that paid off in the boss battles felt like a letdown.

Verdict: Cautiously recommended

What should be evident to you after reading Eric’s post is that the basic dynamic of combat involves trading Booker’s renewable resource (his shield and health) for his enemies’ non-renewable resources (their health). Typically health regeneration mechanics give rise to cover-oriented gameplay, and Infinite encourages this in some respects. For instance, most of the vigors in the game can strike multiple enemies and make them “vulnerable”. This enhances the damage that Booker can do to them, but more essentially it prevents them from firing on him, extending the amount of time it’s safe for him to be out of cover.

Popping out of and into the same cover spot is not the best choice, however. Because the shield is small relative to the health bar, suffering some relatively permanent damage is almost a certainty in any combat scenario. Booker has numerous opportunities to obtain health items from the environment and bodies, but cannot keep any with him for future use. These factors encourage movement and scavenging during battle. Additionally, the two-weapon limit prevents the player from hunkering down even when the health dynamics make this favorable – ammunition runs out too quickly. Again, the player must move to acquire ammunition or new weapons, particularly during more intense combat encounters. In this regard, the vigors can be used to obtain breathing room that allows Booker to run and scavenge while enemies are unable to attack.

Obviously the player should try to combine attack and resupply, and Infinite makes it relatively easy to deal damage while on the run. The absence of any reticule bob makes aiming from the hip on the run a practical option, and even when they’re moving, enemies are relatively easy to hit. Rapture’s splicers would tumble and jump to avoid fire like escapees from the Cirque du Soleil, but Columbia’s troops tend to keep their feet on the ground.

Ideally Infinite should make it easy to scavenge while sustaining fire, but functionally this isn’t the case. I can’t speak to how well things go on the PC, but on consoles the functions for reloading, picking up a new weapon, scavenging a body or container, catching supplies thrown by Elizabeth, and bringing in new objects through tears are all mapped to the same button. The predictable result is that Booker regularly interrupts his shooting to gulp down a can of beans rather than reloading, and occasionally picks up a new gun when the player is trying to summon a turret. While it badly overloads the X button, Infinite reserves a button for crouching, even though this is almost never of any tactical advantage and is at odds with the mobile focus of combat.

Of course, the player may still find himself pinned down, or fail to find useful supplies while ranging around the combat zone. For these cases the developers have provided Elizabeth, who helpfully tosses Booker regenerative items and ammunition. Elizabeth also resurrects the player if he gets killed, and she herself cannot be injured in a fight. After years of escort missions made frustrating by boneheaded AI, this seems like a really good idea. Unfortunately it addresses a real problem in an inappropriate way.

The downside of invincibility is that from the standpoint of the player Elizabeth is purely an asset. Booker is fighting to protect Elizabeth, initially as an investment, and later as a result of his emotional attachment to her. This makes her his responsibility, from his point of view, which is the starting point of their relationship. The player, however, knows that Elizabeth cannot be harmed and is therefore only ever fighting to defend himself. In the context of combat, he is dependent on Elizabeth rather than the other way around.

This may be part of why the Siren fights fall flat for so many players. The battles mean to trade on Elizabeth’s confrontation with her mother, an emotional conflict that doesn’t involve Booker directly. His angle on this fight is his desire to protect Elizabeth, emotionally as well as physically. The demonstrated reality of the game, however, is that Elizabeth can’t be harmed, so the player lacks this protective reaction. To the player, Elizabeth is only in danger when the progress of the game is out of his hands and in the developers’.

Elizabeth’s combat invulnerability also hollows out the game’s final battle. The Vox open this battle by threatening Elizabeth, but of course by this time the player knows that she’s not in any real danger. Instead of actually going after her, the Vox soldiers attack the giant lightbulb that powers the prophet’s ship. Because the setup is so ridiculous, the ensuing wave battle is devoid of any emotion aside from frustration.

That frustration comes from the level design. The balance between mobility and cover means that battles in Infinite are at their best when the player can easily move in and out of firing lines. This means that arenas should have a high density of “standing cover” or vertical blocking that breaks up the enemy line of sight without hampering player movement, and defined entry points so that the player can quickly locate and control enemy positions. For much of the first part of the game Infinite has these features in abundance. The first fight on the rooftops, for instance, takes place in an area with lots of tall cover objects and occluded sight lines. So long as the player does not advance too quickly he will not take too much fire. This tendency to put Booker on the opposite side of an arena from his enemies and provide plenty of room to hide while standing is upheld in most areas up until the moment that Booker summons the gondola to the First Lady.

The ensuing fight is actually pretty instructive, because it contrasts so clearly against the previous one that happened in this area. In Booker and Elizabeth’s first visit to the Soldier’s Field, the city policemen set up an ambush at the top of some stairs. On the ground level, there’s plenty of tall cover to break up sight lines and feed the game’s better combat dynamics. When a second wave of policemen does arrive, it’s in the form of cops that the player has likely already seen when he explored the level in its peaceful condition, contributing a narrative feel to the flow of combat. In the second fight, enemies arrive on barges and several of them disperse to the skylines, spreading throughout the upper part of the area. Other soldiers start to fire rockets from the barges, and eventually a Motorized Patriot arrives on the gondola. Although the design of this zone still blocks many sight lines, the player will almost certainly be taking fire from unknown enemies in an unexpected direction during the ensuing battle. Consequently, this shootout takes on the “spammy” characteristic Jon Blow complained about on Twitter (the compiled tweets are near the bottom of Kirk’s article, which is worth reading in its entirety).

A few of the remaining skirmishes will be directional, but from this point on most of the major battles happen in large arenas with very good lines of sight, enemies inserting at many different spots, and open areas that cannot be crossed safely even with a maxed-out shield.  These problems are all in evidence in the final wave battle, which takes place on a large open surface with minimal defilade and a second tier that enemies spawn onto. This means that the rhythms the player learned in the first part of the game no longer apply, and even when elements of an arena support these dynamics, they tend to be detonated by special enemies like the Handyman or Siren, as Schwarz discussed.

This construction has a perverse effect on player priorities. Stronger foes like Crows or Firemen are meant to draw the player’s focus, but in the context of a large open arena these enemies are actually much easier to manage than the everyday mooks kitted out with rifles. Long-range shooting poses a much greater danger to Booker’s shield than the relatively easy-to-dodge attacks of the minibosses. In these cases, only the Motorized Patriots deserve player attention equal to their apparent deadliness.

The game’s late tendency to engage at range produces a distancing effect and helps to other the enemies that Booker is facing. The lack of sophisticated AI dynamics that Eric describes also emphasizes that the game’s enemies are less than human. Aesthetic beats like heads exploding due to shock jockey or bodies burning down to ashes further encourage the player to treat enemies as abstractions rather than people, which is compounded by the Vox’s tendency to wear masks. One might say this mirrors the dehumanizing behaviors of Jeremiah Fink, who thinks of his workers as oxen, and Zachary Comstock, who unfavorably compares people of African ancestry to his childhood dog. Even if you buy that, this is the wrong character beat for Booker, who recognizes (but does not respond to) the humanity of his enemies and the wrongness of his actions. In part because Infinite‘s enemies aren’t convincing – or even interesting – simulacra, the player isn’t able to share in his understanding.

Infinite‘s shooting mechanics don’t benefit its narrative. The player’s balancing act between moving and taking cover produces interesting decisions up until the arenas become too open, but it doesn’t seem to tell the player anything about Booker. The impressions that do accumulate from the player’s combat experience mostly work against Booker’s character. Arenas that don’t play to the strengths of the shooting dynamics make combat progressively less interesting in its own right, and the failure to establish any combat stakes concerning Elizabeth reduces the emotional impact of battles that should be climactic. BioShock Infinite may need violence, but it doesn’t need this design.

Most Intriguing Idea: Introducing powers as characters

Best Design Decision: Giving characters one purpose or power at a time.

Worst Design Decision: Over-reliance on narration.

Summary:

I heard many good things about Thomas Was Alone last year but I didn’t get around to playing it until recently. It’s a minimalist platformer that tends more towards puzzles than reflex play, which is just as well since I felt the controls weren’t quite as crisp as I would like. The game starts off with a single rectangular character, the titular Thomas, and slowly adds new characters with different jumping and environmental characteristics. One can float in water safely, for instance, and another falls up and jumps down. Some well-written and excellently-performed narration does most of the work of introducing the characters, although Thomas has some nice moments of expressive play. When Chris first bounces off of Laura, for instance, there’s a great feeling of freedom that belongs to both the character and the player. The long first part also does an excellent job of connecting an ability to a name, so that in the second part I was thinking “Oh, now I have Sarah’s power” instead of “Oh, now I can double-jump.”

The unfortunate downside of the narration is that towards the end of the game, it has to do too much work in not enough time to introduce the new characters. As a result the story in this part didn’t feel as immediate or interesting to me, and the final success was less moving than it perhaps could have been. As the array of powers enables some of the best levels in the game, I would have been happy for Thomas to take more time here and set itself up for a really strong ending. Nonetheless, I found the game delightful and would recommend it to almost anyone.

Verdict: Recommended

BioShock Infinite is a violent game, and it has to be. That’s a contrast to BioShock, an equally violent game where combat conveyed nothing about its main character and had little to do with the game’s themes other than spurring the player to engage in its various economies. Any stimulus — using plasmids to solve environmental puzzles, for instance — would have sufficed. That’s not so in Columbia. Violence is essential to who Booker DeWitt is, and what Columbia is. Their story cannot be told without it.

The first moments of Booker’s journey through Columbia seem to reveal an idyllic city in the sky, but these scenes only thinly disguise the brutality at the core of its society. Within moments of emerging from his rocket capsule, Booker sees a sign proclaiming that “The seed of the prophet shall sit the throne and drown in flame the mountains of man.” Flickering candles, trickling water, and angelic singing soften the blow of the words, but Booker’s journey through this chapel culminates with his being drowned in a rather vicious “baptism”.

When Booker gets out into the city it seems again a peaceful and welcoming place. The city is having a fair, and everyone is out and about. Yet the statue of the prophet holds a sword, hardly a shepherd’s implement, and some of the posters show children armed with guns, an image that will be even more disturbingly recapitulated later at Soldier’s Field. Chatting cops show off a vicious-looking device and boast of how they wish they could “bust some Vox skull”. Carnival attractions based on shooting the Vox are well-attended, but the high striker and the juggler have no audience. The raffle itself is a contest for the right to be first to pelt an interracial couple with baseballs.

Once that’s revealed, violence seemingly explodes out of nowhere, but really it has been present all along, bound up in the fabric of the city. Columbia is a gun pointed at the head of the world, meant to burn that “Sodom below” clean of sin. The man wielding the weapon is Zachary Comstock, whose own wife judges him a “monster”. His solution to the problem of worldly sin is very telling. He does not minister; he does not witness. He takes those who will follow him up into the sky and plans to slaughter the rest.

If BioShock is a universe of constants and variables, then one constant is what kind of man walks away from the river in 1890. As Elizabeth and her “mother” both attest, he is a monster. The only difference between them is that Booker sees what he really is, a truth that Comstock rejects.

For Comstock, the waters of baptism transform his past and future atrocities into heroism. The Hall of Heroes explicitly frames the massacre of women and children at Wounded Knee as a triumph over bloodthirsty savages. He also heaps praise on himself for Columbia’s intervention in the Boxer Rebellion, a justified punishment for the lies of wicked Chinese nationalists. The propaganda here matches classic American distortions of such events, but it is telling that the Columbians who object to this display do not complain about their false depiction of Comstock’s victims. Rather, Cornelius Slate and his compatriots denounce the display because it does not award the real perpetrators of these acts their due credit. They don’t contest the righteousness of these murders.

Booker, in contrast, knows the immorality of his deeds, but this hardly makes him an admirable person. Recognizing his sins, he continued to commit them. He left the army to break strikes for the Pinkertons, then found work as a heavy in New York. Killing became his business, so when Elizabeth tries to thank him for saving her, he merely growls, “Job’s a job.” Booker doesn’t fight to protect others, or promote his beliefs. He murders scores of people because he believes that will wipe away his debts. If acknowledging his own evil makes Booker a better man than Comstock, refusing to change it makes him a worse one. The monster is the constant.

Booker has to be this way for BioShock Infinite to earn its closing moments. This is a game that ends with the main character, the player’s avatar, getting ingloriously killed by his own daughter. Booker doesn’t go out a hero, he dies like a chump, and the measure of how well Infinite‘s story works on an emotional level is that this seems so natural and right. Part of the reason it goes so well is because the player instinctively understands that there is no third-road alternative. There is no “good” Booker hiding in some corner of the BioShock multiverse. He is always a monster. The player has seen the monster in Comstock, and played the monster in Booker — either way, it always ends in blood.

Infinite has to walk a fine line with this approach, however. The goal is to keep Booker sympathetic enough that the player wants him to succeed, yet unpleasant enough that the player accepts the necessity of his death. In part, the game achieves this by posing his enemies to the player in much the same way that Comstock framed is own opponents. Booker kills the Columbians, but that’s okay because they are wicked American racists. Booker kills the Vox, but that’s okay because they are bloodthirsty savages. Lest you think I’m stretching the comparison too far, let me remind you that the Vox literally nail the scalps of Columbia’s elite to a board.

The player may be taken in by this trick, but Booker is not. When Elizabeth accuses him of being a monster, he doesn’t protest that the Columbians are really awful people who deserved what they got. He merely points out that they will fight to recapture her. There’s no moral dimension to his killing; a job’s a job, is all. His only concern is getting Elizabeth safely out of the city — in which regard making her invulnerable in battle is a shortcoming of the system.

What’s unfortunate about Infinite‘s combat is that it delivers its culminating point in the Hall of Heroes, with about 2/3 of the game left to go. The painted dioramas of Comstock’s propaganda, recalling the earlier encounter with the carnival attractions, and the revelations embedded in Slate’s ravings provide the last ideas we need in order to understand the game’s protagonist and antagonist. It’s telling that the fight between the remnants of Slate’s men and the founders as Booker emerges from the Hall of Heroes is one of the last times that an encounter structure has any narrative dimension. From here on, the combat has no story to tell, and feels like it’s there merely to pass the time while other aspects of the plot wind their way through the game’s quantum babble.

The narrative problem with BioShock Infinite‘s combat, then, is not its existence, or even its degree, but its volume and timing. Violence lies at the heart of Columbia, in both the sharp explosion of its genocidal mission and the slow, grinding brutality of its racial and class oppression. That came to the city through its founder, Comstock. It must find its reflection in his counterpart, Booker. That said, it is not wrong to wish that Infinite were less violent. Recoiling at Booker’s deeds is the best possible response to have to them. The player should not be comfortable with the things Booker does, but he needs to understand Booker. He needs to know that Booker is the kind of man for whom bloodshed is the only solution. The violence of BioShock Infinite successfully shows that the monster cannot be washed away. It can only be drowned.

Many of the game’s secondary mechanics feel like irrelevant additions made to satisfy the expectations that come with the name BioShock, but the one that really stood out to me as poorly executed was Elizabeth’s lockpicking ability. When she first reveals that she can unlock certain optional doors and safes, lockpicks are very rare. I’m not even sure it’s possible to find enough lockpicks to unlock everything before reaching the Plaza of Zeal. By the time Booker and Elizabeth reach Emporia, however, lockpicks are in absurd excess. As I walked through the burning town, Elizabeth constantly pointed out lockpicks that I couldn’t even grab, because I had already reached the inventory maximum. So, lockpicks go from extremely precious to essentially valueless over the course of just a few levels.

In addition, the locks themselves go from being primarily a way to obtain access to new side areas to being a mechanism for regulating advancement. The proliferation of “hairpin” locks nominally integrates the mechanic into the narrative, but functionally these locks exist to keep Booker in a spot until something desired has happened. Most of the time this is a fight, since Elizabeth will not pick locks during combat, but it’s also occasionally used to prevent Booker from moving forward until a conversation has been completed. As a result, the lockpicking feels like a bait-and-switch: a mechanic that promises new areas to explore, but in fact serves to restrain the player’s motion. The stinginess and carefulness that the sharp resource scarcity teaches early in the game quickly become irrelevant, and lockpicks, once an exciting environmental find, become an active irritation. It’s a system that feels like it was never tuned at all, or tuned to serve one purpose and then used for another.

If the lockpicking feels superfluous, the world-building feels like it left something important out. As in the previous BioShock games, Booker DeWitt has various magic powers he can use alongside his guns. In Rapture, these powers were called “plasmids” and their existence and dependence on ADAM formed a critical part of the story of that city. In Columbia, these powers are called “vigors” and how they came to exist is not mentioned even once. Even Booker, who manages to summon up enough curiosity to interrogate Elizabeth about her tears and consider the mechanism that allows the city to float, never bothers to ask exactly how it is that he’s now shooting fireballs out of his hands, even though this newfound ability obviously freaks him out. This strikes a bizarre character note, calling to mind something Roger Ebert said about The Fantastic Four movie:

This is absolutely stupendously amazing, wouldn’t you agree? If you could burn at supernova temperatures, would you be able to stop talking about it? I know people who won’t shut up about winning 50 bucks in the lottery.

While the Columbians’ blasé attitude towards vigors could perhaps be explained by years of exposure, it’s amazing to me that Booker doesn’t constantly run around asking what the hell these things are doing to him. Instead he merely shrugs and decides to chug every bottle he sees. It’s a weird character beat, but it’s even weirder world-building in a game that’s otherwise very careful to say at least something about its other fantastic aspects. Failing to explain this, even tangentially, makes it seem like the game forgot something important.

Of course, this is a game that forgets an entire Elizabeth. To understand what I mean, consider the universes the game plays out in:

Universe 1: Booker is pulled into this universe and ascends into Columbia. He finds Elizabeth in the tower and travels with her to the Good Time Club, finding Chen Lin dead.

Universe 2: Booker and Elizabeth leave the Good Time Club and find Chen Lin alive in his shop. They go to the shantytown with the intention of (somehow) carrying off his industrial tools.

Universe 3: Chen Lin had his tools and armed an uprising of the Vox. Elizabeth and Booker fight their way through Finkton and Emporia, but Songbird attacks them and carries Elizabeth away. Booker never rescues her and she destroys the world, but pulls him forward in time to give him a way to save her.

Universe 4: Booker re-enters the timeline of universe 3 several months after he was removed from it, creating a new branch. He rescues Elizabeth and destroys the siphon.

Universe 3 differs from universe 1 in several important ways. The version of Booker that tried to infiltrate 3′s Columbia came too late: Elizabeth had already been removed from the tower and taken to Comstock House. Booker-3 then joined the Vox and perished in an attack on the Hall of Heroes, becoming a martyr for their cause and inspiring their successful revolution.

In this universe, Comstock-3  lays a trap for Elizabeth-1 at the mausoleum in Emporia and scolds her for following a false shepherd (Booker-1). This is a universe in which Songbird is still searching for Elizabeth-1. It captures her at the bridge to Comstock House – a building where Comstock-3 already has Elizabeth-3 in his clutches! Strangely, nobody remarks on his good fortune at suddenly discovering he’s a proud father of twins. Instead, BioShock Infinite and its characters completely ignore the existence of Elizabeth-3, and the game treats the Vox uprising itself as the only difference between universe 1 and 3 (and ultimately 4).

This may not stick out in play for a couple of reasons – the Voxophone recordings that explicitly lay out this universe’s scenario can be skipped, for one thing. Also, the behavior of Comstock-3 and Songbird-3 comports with what the player has come to expect of their universe 1 counterparts, even if it doesn’t make sense in their particular timeline. The Booker-centric continuity experienced by the player can paper over inconsistencies like this to some extent (this is also why it doesn’t immediately seem odd that the city is still burning when Booker returns and saves Elizabeth several months after the initial Vox uprising). Looking at it carefully, however, it seems like Irrational lost track of what was going on, or what universe the story was taking place in at any given moment.

BioShock Infinite had a long development cycle that included many delays and major revisions, and each of the problems I describe here seems like it stems from an attempt to pull something together after it had gone off in many tangents that didn’t necessarily work well together. The oddities of the lockpick economy may have emerged from a game that previously had more side areas to explore, or required lockpicks rather than hairpins to open plot doors. Both the vigors and the fate of Elizabeth-3 might have been described in Voxophones or scenes that didn’t make it into the final game and weren’t replaced. None of what I’m describing represents a devastating flaw in the game or a plot hole that ruins the narrative. Yet, careless plotting, incomplete world-building, and ill-tuned and irrelevant mechanics constantly rear their heads in BioShock Infinite, and as a result, for all the polish that it has, it feels sloppy.

In a comparatively large number of universes I am bothered by simple continuity. The Booker DeWitt that Elizabeth brings to the site of the baptism comes there from 1912 and has already lived through the event. Killing him, while probably cathartic for everyone involved, wouldn’t erase 23 years of misdeeds committed by the possible DeWitts (ranging from mostly drenched to completely drenched) that walk away from the river. This can only be accomplished by drowning the 1890 version of DeWitt, who is curiously absent during the scene. Killing Booker at the end of his adventures wouldn’t seem to do anything to the Booker that exists at the beginning of them.

Of course, the whole ending sequence takes a rather strange view of who Booker is, being as much a (modified) tour of his memories as an exploration of multiple universes. However, the game very clearly establishes that simply entering a new universe does not fuse the different versions of its individuals together. Otherwise, Robert Lutece’s entry into Rosalind’s universe would be even more distressing, to say nothing of Booker’s entry into Comstock’s. Indeed, if existing in the same possibility space caused some kind of fusion the lighthouse tour immediately preceding would have played out very differently. So, in order to work, the ending must discard not only the rules that informed the entire preceding game, but also the ones that governed scenes shown just moments before.

In a rather smaller, but still infinite, number of universes, I am more irritated by the asymmetry between problem and solution. Say the Elizabeths drown 1912 Booker and somehow that does cause 1890 Booker to die. Well, rather, it causes an 1890 Booker to die. Just a few minutes before Elizabeth guides Booker back to the stream, she explains that the multiverse has millions upon millions of Comstocks, and it’s clear from the land of lighthouses that there are many versions of 1912 Booker running around. Why, in light of these ideas, would we subscribe to the belief that the possibility space of 1890 Booker is singular? Rather, there are millions upon millions of 1890 Bookers, and drowning just one of them should not trouble the infinite number of Bookers and Comstocks descended from a man who visited a river in an uncountable number of alternative universes.

Granted, Elizabeth does discuss “constants and variables”, but as the Lutece’s coin-flip tally shows, the constants are not singularities of events, but rather multiple appearances of a similar event in similar contexts. Elizabeth implies that the BioShock games are two instances of the same event in vastly different contexts, and perhaps this linkage explains why so much of Rapture found its way into Columbia.

A diagram in the game implies that the multiple universes of BioShock Infinite form by branching, rather than existing timelessly in parallel. This suggests a solution – go back far enough, and you could find a branch point that safely and completely eliminates Booker DeWitt. But how far back would one go? If an infinite number of Booker DeWitts reached the stream, then a slightly smaller but still infinite number of Booker DeWitts were born. You could smother a baby a minute for 50 years and still not eliminate all the Bookers from universes where the 11th day of the week is named Bunzday (after Dan Bunz, whose heroic goal-line stand saved the earth in the Transtime Football Wars).

What if we eliminate Booker’s mother? There’s an infinite number of her, too. The problem is not really reduced by climbing back up the family tree, because the numbers involved are so large. The collateral damage, however, for trying to address matters by offing Booker’s great-great-great-great-great grandmother is likely to be enormous. You’re not just taking out Booker DeWitt, you’re eliminating hundreds or more people (per universe) who are barely related to him. The number of possibilities only gets manageable in the few instants immediately following the Big Bang, but lopping off branches of the causal tree here involves mass murder on a scale that makes Comstock’s ambitions look trivial.

In an even smaller, but still infinite, number of universes it bothers me that BioShock Infinite doesn’t pay attention to its own ideas about Booker and Comstock, or the multiverse in general. The multiverse is not the land of “or”, it’s the land of “and”. In a single universe, either Booker walks away from the stream as himself or gets dunked and becomes Comstock. In the multiverse, Booker walks away and he gets dunked; these possibilities merely occur in different branches. If Booker gets in the water and drowns, therefore, this does not eliminate any branches, because the very nature of the multiverse denies the possibility of exclusivity. Drowning Booker merely generates a new branch of reality alongside the other two. The infinity of Comstocks are still visionary genocidal maniacs, and the infinity of Bookers are still drunken, dissipated jerks.

This isn’t to say that Elizabeth’s action is pointless; it generates a new set of universes which are likely better off for having no version of Booker DeWitt within them. Of course, these may be the universes that instead contain Andrew Ryan.

The ending of Infinite still works, on an emotional level. Although the studious player will find plenty of hints on a second playthrough, Ken Levine makes the wise choice to hold off the game’s big twist until its final seconds, where it lands with maximum impact and minimum time for processing. By the time the player has gotten over the shock of the moment, the last piano note plays and the game cuts to black. The realization that BioShock Infinite ignores its own timeline, its own descriptions of the multiverse, and the very logic that underpins the entire story to make that ending work doesn’t hit until some time later, if at all. So, in some small but infinite number of universes, I’m not bothered by the ending at all, and this post is a discussion of things I could have found wrong with it. For the people living in those universes: I hope you liked that pistachio sandy.

Of course, almost none of the games I saw were in their final forms. Promised features may be removed, many bugs will be fixed, and gameplay may be tightened up and improved before these hit the market for real. Still, just in case my preliminary judgments might be helpful to you, here are some of them.

One of the games being advertised on screens around the center was McDroid, which I learned was a tower-defense game about a pirate strawberry farming robot defending his stolen crop from mutant insects. The robot can put turret weapons onto predetermined bases or mount them on its back to make itself into a mobile battle platform. Between fighting off the critters and making sure to gather strawberries, the wave-based levels got to be super-hectic, and will be even more so with the planned 4 player co-op. The game looked lovely and had a great sense of humor. The developers are targeting PC, Mac, and Linux releases – a playable version is available on Desura now but they are hoping for some Greenlight votes.

One of the most striking games I saw was Contrast, a 3D/2D puzzle platformer that’s about two months away from release on Steam. The main character can move around and solve puzzles using some fairly standard 3D puzzle-platforming. However, wherever there are shadows, she can slip into shadow form to use them for 2D platforming. Switching back and forth seamlessly looks like it will be an important way to approach the game’s challenges. As expected from a game about shadow, there was a heavy noir influence in the art style. It was a little brown, but the muted colors served the aesthetic, and the gameplay looks to be really interesting. I’m looking forward to it.

In the more 2D mode of puzzle-platforming I ran into The Swapper, a game where the player creates clones and swaps into these bodies in order to move around the environment. Even in the early level I saw there were many clever ways of using these multiple bodies, although seeing four copies of a dude running around a screen got a little freaky. To avoid an undue influence from twitch, the game slows down while the player is aiming, although this didn’t keep it from being a bit tricky to pull of swaps at times. This game also has a distinct look, which a developer told me was achieved by building models out of clay and other materials and then inserting photographs of them into the game. This sounds like a lot of work, but it achieved a level of texture in the environments that isn’t always achieved. This one is also about two months away from a Steam release.

I also ran into some less cerebral platformers, including Shovel Knight, a game being targeted for Nintendo platforms and PC (it is currently on Greenlight, and there is a Kickstarter). As the premise (yes, it really is a knight armed with a shovel) suggests, this is a lighthearted game, and the developers are mainly focused on getting the action tight. As you might guess from the 16-bit aesthetic and the gameplay style, the game is built from influences like Zelda II and MegaMan, although I was also reminded of DuckTales by the way the protagonist pogoes off of the ground and enemies. I appreciated the goofy concept and the grin-inducing enemies, and the controls were tight.

I also got my hands on Guacamelee, a lucha libre-inspired game with a distinctive cartoon art style. Given the wrestling backdrop, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the usual punches and kicks mostly serve as a way to set up kills based on grappling. There’s a world-switching mechanic where some enemies and obstacles only appear in one or the other world. This felt underdone and disconnected from the other systems in the level I was able to play. The level was also undermined by a much too on-the-nose Mario reference and the fact that all the dialogue was addressed only to the male half of the co-op team that was playing. Overall, Guacamelee doesn’t feel super original, but I enjoyed playing it and the art style appealed to me. This should be coming this spring via PSN.

I had a good time with Super Time Force, a game from Capybara coming to XBLA later this year. It’s a clever little pixel-art game that plays somewhat like the bizarre love child of Contra and Braid. The player has an arsenal of characters he can use to take on levels that last 60 seconds apiece and end with a boss. At any point, the player can rewind time and continue playing again, with the same character or a new one. Critically, when this happens, the ghost of the previous playthrough still appears and still does everything it did before. This means that if a character dies (easy enough, since they go down in one hit) the player can go back, get another character and use that one to save the first. Moreover, the player can get multiple copies of a character on the same screen in order to launch lots of attacks at a boss. When this happens the screen can get insanely hectic. Obviously this is going to be a pretty difficult game, but it’s a blast, and players will get a lot of mileage out of trying to optimize their level times.

MechKnight Chronicles: Knightfall is almost all combat, primarily influenced by Knights of the Round and Guardian Heroes. A combo-driven hack ‘n’ slash for 1-4 players, Knightfall is planned to have levels that are “webbed”, where the player can choose (and switch between) various routes that have effects on subsequent scenes. The plan currently is to have 10 playable characters with various fighting styles. The art was pleasantly chunky and colorful, the controls were nice and tight, so I’m feeling optimistic about this one. My understanding is that Knightfall will be coming to PSN, and the developers are hoping to get on Greenlight soon. Depending on how that goes there may be a Kickstarter.

I also ran into a number of intriguing roguelikes on the show floor. The standout here has to be Legend of Dungeon, a pixel-art dungeon delver with local multiplayer. This is a game that has some really interesting ideas going on, including procedurally-generated music that’s assembled from 18 tracks based on what you’re encountering at the moment. I was also intrigued by the game’s mechanic for trailblazing, which is needed because the game’s structure involves going to the lowest level of its dungeon and then climbing back out. The aesthetics and gameplay seem very promising. It’s currently in pre-beta, with availability planned for PC, Mac and Linux, with possible Android or Ouya appearances down the line. A Greenlight campaign is underway.

I saw a less traditional experience in the form of Tower of Guns, a one-man show by ex-38 Studios developer Joe Mirabelle. This game is a roguelike FPS coming for PC “before Thief comes out”, according to its creator. It’s not a standard FPS: each playthrough uses a single, quirky gun and there’s no ammo management. The player can collect items that level up the gun, and getting damaged levels it down. So, there are some interesting mechanics at play, although the color palette is a little too brown for my taste. It’s on Greenlight now.

The developer of Delver’s Drop pitched it as a blend of Spelunky and Zelda, which seems fair enough, if staggeringly ambitious. The player drops through various levels of a randomly-generated dungeon that features combat and some relatively simple puzzles. I noticed a number of little things in the design that spoke to an effort to develop a coherent world, which I appreciated, and the game was colorful without abandoning its dungeon aesthetic. I was told that in the final version, characters who die will remain in the game for the next playthrough as undead versions of themselves, which is an interesting twist on the tradition of finding your corpse. It’s on Greenlight now, coming in October for PC, Mac, and Linux, with iOS, Android, and Ouya on the table for 2014.

Speaking of the undead, I ran into two non-awful games featuring zombies. Ray’s the Dead is a Pikmin-like strategy game of collecting and dispatching various types of zombies to consume a town. I heard different things from the developers about when it would be ready, but the controls still need some work so the Halloween date I heard sounds a little optimistic. The scenario is, of course, rather gruesome, but a cutesy art style keeps things lighthearted. As you might have guessed, the game is on Greenlight, and there may be a Kickstarter so they can enhance the audio.

Zombie Tycoon II is an RTS-lite where the player will use a mobile base spawning zombies and other creatures to take over a town’s buildings in the face of opposition from soldiers and rednecks. There will also be a vs. multiplayer option. I liked the aesthetic and the approach to upgrades, but I felt like the balance needs a little tweaking and some of the controls are not to my liking. This is coming to PSN sometime this year.

Although I’m not generally a tablet gamer, I was intrigued by Colliding Forces, a strategy game that seems to have been strongly influenced by air hockey. On each turn a player gets a few actions to create, move, or upgrade pucks with various abilities. The controls were smooth and intuitive, and the abilities came with some interesting trade-offs. This is coming to iOS soon and Android eventually.

I had a few moments with Dejobaan’s Drop that beat like an ugly baby, which plays out like a fusion of Audiosurf and another Dejobaan game. The player drops through 3D levels that are generated in response to a player-selected audio track, the objects passing by to run up the score. Success makes the world more colorful, and running into objects grays it out, though the game doesn’t force you to restart a song or anything. I enjoyed it, though I’m not sure it could really sustain a play session. If you want to experiment, it’s out now as an early access game on Steam.

Tiny Brains is 1-4P puzzle game that will definitely work best in 4P mode. It centers around a group of lab animals, each of which has a unique physics-based power. Players have to work together to solve the game’s environmental puzzles – for instance, an early challenge requires one player to create a small wall, another to push it across a gap, and a third to teleport by swapping places with the wall. Thinking as one person it’s sort of trivial to solve, but with four people trying to communicate to each other it could be pretty fun. This game has been created pretty rapidly by some ex-Ubisoft guys, and release plans are not firm yet, but keep it in your tiny mind.

I caught up with Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best Games, who is hoping to bring the extra content of Serious Sam: Double D XXL to Steam sometime this year. MBG also has a party game called Pig Eat Ball, which is about pigs eating balls and then possibly barfing them back up, coming to Ouya and possibly XBox Live Indie Games this summer.

The last game I toyed around with at the show was Race the Sun, a game about dodging obstacles in a high-speed vehicle. The gameplay and the graphics are both minimalist, but the game does an excellent job of conveying a sense of speed. The game will come with a level editor, and the developers are also hoping to implement a form of asynchronous relay multiplayer. The game can be preordered now for a May release on PC, Mac, and Linux. It’s also on Greenlight at the moment. Other platforms may be coming.

Most Intriguing Idea: Making a style-action game deep and accessible.

Best Design Decision: Making weapon swaps, rather than extended moveset memorization, the basis of melee complexity.

Worst Design Decision: The punitive resource price structure.

Summary:

A lot has been written about DmC: Devil May Cry, most of it by angry series fans prior to the game’s release. It’s true that Dante has a somewhat harder edge here than previously, and it’s especially true that the combat system is easier to parse and master than in earlier iterations. Neither of these things turn out to be weaknesses. Dante makes sense as a character in this story, one that’s actually pretty clever and interesting for an action game. The level design, while a bit too dominated by boring hallways, features some really inspired sets. I particularly enjoyed the upside-down world on the route to Barbas’ tower, as well as the architectural overlays that popped up in Mundus’ tower. The simplification of the combat system makes the game accessible without really dumbing things down – there’s a great deal of complexity and uniqueness, even though many of the attacks play out with relatively similar sequences of button presses. I would have liked to see a little more variety in the boss mechanics, and I thought the resource pricing played against the effort to improve accessibility. Still, I thought DmC made good on the effort to open the series to a broader audience, without betraying either its style-action roots or the essence of its cocky main character.

Verdict: Recommended

Most Intriguing Idea: Games are a waste of time

Best Design Decision: The “gamification” feedback loop is really well-constructed.

Worst Design Decision: The loop so dominates the game that its real point feels disingenuous.

Summary:

Little Inferno for me felt like it had the same problem as Spec Ops: The Line – it is too much what it’s trying to critique. The game’s loop of burning items to earn money to unlock or buy more items is really effective at driving play, so much so that the game’s later lament about lost time feels more like an embarrassed admission of guilt than a compelling message about priorities. I’ve got no intrinsic problem with the game’s moral, but it seems like something that could be just as effectively – and more honestly – conveyed by a 15-minute free flash game as by a 3-hour $10 downloadable. But even though it gets too preachy at the end, the game is fun and some of the toys and combos are cute.

Verdict: Cautiously recommended