Bioshock Remastered

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Bioshock Remastered on Steam

MSRP: $19.99

Platforms: Windows, XBox One, PS4 (original version also available on XBox 360 & PS3)

Release: 9/15/16 (original released 8/21/07)

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Several years ago, I played the first couple of hours of Bioshock while home alone at night & true confession time – I didn’t sleep well that night or for quite a few nights after that.  I consider myself pretty resistant to the kind of creep that gets under your skin and has you looking around corners long after you’ve closed out the game or stopped watching the movie, but Bioshock gets under my skin.

Diving into the remastered edition for the first time since its release (and yes, pun is FULLY intended there), I wanted to try to pinpoint what exactly made the terror in this game so pervasive.  It’s a complete package – the setting, the story, the lighting, the enemy design all factor in, but I think above all else, it is the sounds of Rapture that are most likely to haunt you.

Bioshock opens with the player character surviving a plane crash and dragging himself through the debris to a nearby building.  Inside, you find a bathysphere that takes you into Rapture – what was once a utopian city under the sea, and is now something much much darker. A friendly voice on the radio helps you get acclimated (and serves as a bit of a tutorial), but nothing can really prepare you for the horrors that await you inside.

If you’ve somehow managed to miss Bioshock – or like me, have wimped out after barely scratching the surface – the recently released remastered edition makes this a good time to give it a whirl.  If you experience flickering graphics, make sure you have both VSync and Antialiasing turned on in the options.  Most of the initial instabilities of the remastered version seem to have been patched out, and once I took care of the graphics issues early on, I haven’t run into any glitches or bugs.

Bioshock does have multiple difficulty modes – so if you’re not proficient at first person shooters, you can still play through on easy and still be terrified. There’s about 10 to 15 hours of story here, and the remastered version includes collectible director’s commentaries throughout the game.  I’m not at all surprised that Bioshock won a whole bunch of video gaming awards back in 2007, and is still widely regarded as one of the best video games of all time.