“Half an hour later, for reasons I won’t go into, I’m ramming a metal gear into a man’s eye socket until blood geysers all over my face. I’m drenched. Everyone’s screaming. Four more men are coming for me, and this blunt steel prong is all I have to kill them with.”

My preview and interview is up now.

This will sound bad, but the last thing I expected was for BioShock 2 to be worthwhile. It’s like making a Fight Club 2 – either you’re not gonna have that twist, or we’ll kinda see it coming. It wasn’t any lack of faith in the team – BioShock was very much Ken Levine’s gig, sure, but the prospect of a Jordan Thomas gig is just as enticing. But starting from a position of Least Necessary Sequel Ever, given too little time to both form a studio and significantly reinvent the game (MoonShock!), and committed to the obsequious inclusion of multiplayer – I could see fun, I could see interesting, I couldn’t see “I’m glad they made this.”

I am glad they made this. It feels like a remake, a ridiculous thing to do immediately after a great game, but some of BioShock’s systems needed it. By the last third of that game, you’d found enough interesting plasmids and tonics to develop some properly demented playstyles, ones very personal to your preferences. BioShock 2 is saying: what if that moment was just a few hours in, and you could just keep getting more bizarre, manipulative and powerful from there? Mechanically, it finishes BioShock’s clever sentence.

Plot-wise… I guess my only problem with the plot is that I missed almost all of it. As a Big Daddy might, I grasped that I was after my Little Sister, but all the other voices in my head seemed like a very long list of names all angry at me for something I didn’t understand. After hours and hours of hearing her talk about it, I still have no idea what Lamb’s plan for Eleanor was, or even what she believes in – except that it isn’t ‘the self’. I thought doing philosophy at uni would help, but I think I need a degree in listening. I can barely process basic information in a game unless it affects the level in front of me.

Both BioShocks often feel like two different game ideas, layered on top of each other but not convincingly connected. There’s the Ecosystem, this alien world of inhuman protectors stomping around with delirious gatherers, while packs of crazed aggressors try to steal them away. Then there’s the Backstory, a tawdry tale of fifties dames and johns doing the dirty on each other while high-minded well-to-dos carry on like they own the joint.

I buy into both, and I even buy into the Backstory leading to the Ecosystem, as the failed utopia finds a physical outlet for its neuroses in Adam, and creates something monstrous. What never works for me in either game is that the Backstory is still going on. Ryan set these Splicers on me? Why, don’t they just attack everything anyway? And now these Splicers are working for Lamb’s Family. They came to see the fundamental validity of her ethos in the last ten years, did they? In between screaming “Semen! On EVERYTHING!” and scampering across the ceiling with meathooks?

Michael here feels disillusioned by objectivism, and is thinking seriously about his worldview.

It makes it hard to understand what’s happened in the ten year gap. Lamb’s seized control – of what? What does control constitute in a leaking city of lunatics and corpse-sucking drones? And it leads to a structural clash: you must find your child and stop the demagogue psychologist as soon as possible! WAIT: You have not harvested or saved all the Little Sisters on this level, are you sure you wish to proceed?

WAIT: The rest of this post contains ending spoilers, are you sure you wish to proceed? Show.

This is my idea, in ten steps, for how BioShock could have unfolded after your encounter with Andrew Ryan in his office. It was written in 2009, but coming back to it in 2020, I feel like I should clarify a couple of things at the top:

• Although I did vaguely try to limit myself to stuff that’s not too outlandish, I actually have no idea what it’s like to make a game of this kind so I don’t claim my version is practical in scope.
• It obviously comes from dissatisfactions with BioShock’s actual ending, but I’m not imagining those were down to a lack of ideas. I know games are made under unseen constraints, triple-A games triply so. It’s very easy to sit back and do armchair game design, and it’s also very fun, and you also can’t stop me, so here we are.

1) As in the game, Fontaine forces you to hand control of Rapture over to him using Ryan’s key. You can’t help but obey.

I’m also going to add a few comments on these steps as I go along, there’s no need to read these if you just want the gist. This one’s a note about voice acting. Atlas has a very exaggerated, slightly comic Irish accent. I wish that when he turned out to be Fontaine, his true voice was very plain, deadpan and serious: I think the contrast could have felt really menacing.

2) Tenenbaum manages to reach you on the radio for the first time since you entered Ryan’s office. Having heard about your command phrase, she asks if you would kindly DROP THE GODDAMN RADIO then meet her at her nearby hideout.

Seriously, once you’ve found out someone who can violate your mind is on the other end of it, maybe leave the radio. Since Tenenbaum knows about your conditioning, she could order you to do it.

3) At the Little Sister sanctuary, Tenenbaum impresses on you that Fontaine is nearly unstoppable now that his genetic key is tied to Rapture, since Vita Chambers now work for him rather than you.

This factor never came up in the game, but to me it seems like the most important part of the handover of control to Fontaine: it would make him invincible, and you vulnerable. They do take Vita Chambers away from you much later, before the boss fight, but not for any stated reason.

4) She explains that the only way to stop someone who’s invincible within Rapture is to flood the whole city. You have to breach a wall in the central ventilation system, but the only thing that could drill through glass that thick – and survive the ensuing flood – is a Big Daddy.

The whole mood of the game is about the menacing inevitability of the sheer force of the sea. Enormous work went into making every room and every corridor of the whole city scream “THIS PLACE IS GOING TO FREAKING FLOOD!” I’d like to see it flood.

5) You have to become a Big Daddy. Tenenbaum tells you how, and says to meet her at the bathysphere station you came in on once you’ve breached Central Ventilation. Near the Little Sister orphanage, there’s an iron-maiden-like steampunk machine that stitches you agonisingly into the suit.

People say BioShock should have ended in Ryan’s office, but some of the most fascinating places and moving scenes are in that final section. The places where Little Sisters and Big Daddies are indoctrinated are two I’d want to keep in here.

6) Once Big Daddied, you’re virtually impervious to the Splicers between you and Central Ventilation – you can drill them in the face or charge them with right mouse to knock them flying. When you reach it, there’s an obvious crack in the glass there to drill.

It’s tough to model what happens to a live human when you put a conical drill into them, so let’s just have them die when you hit them. There’d be no pacing reason to make this section challenging – it’s the reward for the terrible thing you’ve just done to yourself. Vita-Chambers no longer work for you, so challenge runs a higher risk of frustration anyway.

7) When the wall is breached, the force of the ocean smashes you into the opposite wall. But once recovered, you can stomp out of the wrecked room and out onto the sea bed. All around you can see water surging through Rapture’s walkways and buildings, spreading out from Central Ventilation.

I was slightly sad that after that enchanting vista on the way in, you never got an impressive overview of Rapture’s scale again. This would be that, but with a twist of drama.

8) There’s an airlock that gets you into a room adjacent to the flooding bathysphere station, but the door between the two slams shut just as you arrive. Through the glass, you see Fontaine wade over to the bathysphere where Tenenbaum is helping Little Sisters inside. He cocks a shotgun and blows her away. Her body bobs in the water, Little Sisters scream blue murder.

There’s only one way out. Tenenbaum wants it for the sisters, Fontaine wants it for himself, and whatever your plans, you need it.

9) There’s a conspicuous crack in the glass between the two rooms which you can drill through to break in. Some Little Sisters are already inside the Bathysphere, the rest are huddled on a windowsill by the door – the water is already too deep for them to cross.

10) Fontaine attacks you immediately, and his weapon is vicious enough to significantly hurt you. He’s an unspliced human, however, so a single ram or stab of your drill kills him gruesomely. Only for him to respawn ten seconds later, from the nearby Vita Chamber.

The idea is that your final fight with Fontaine should be a reversal of all those Big Daddy battles you’ve had. They were big and tough, but you could respawn again and again. It always seemed like the hardest decision to make in BioShock was not what to do with the Little Sisters, but whether to attack the Big Daddies in the first place. Getting to feel what it’s like from their perspective could be a fun play on that.

At this point, you’ve got two options:

A) If you don’t care about the Little Sisters, you’ll have to physically drag the ones already inside the bathysphere out before there’s room for you to get in. You can leave them splashing in the water anywhere. Once you’re in, closing the door behind you activates the bathysphere. Before it rises, Fontaine appears at the window, screaming something you can’t quite hear through the glass. You ascend, and the end scene rolls.

B) If you want to save them, you can pick one of the huddling ones up from the windowsill in your enormous hand and carry her over to the bathysphere. If you’re shot from the front by Fontaine, the blast will kill the Little Sister you’re carrying and she’ll fall into the water. You can keep your back to him to protect her, but he’s powerful enough to kill you before you get all the Little Sisters across. Killing him gives you enough respite to carry one Little Sister across safely before he respawns. At any time, you can close the bathysphere door from the outside, at which point a control panel by it lights up, and you can use that to send it to the surface and save whoever’s inside. Once it’s gone, the end scene rolls.

End scene: You, as a Big Daddy, standing motionless as the water rises time-lapse fast, everything zipping in motion-blur streaks around you. Once our view is entirely underwater, everything goes silent and slow. The body of a little sister drifts slowly past behind you.

When all is still, Fontaine suddenly scrambles into view, thrashing spasmically, screaming bubbles, clutching his throat, red in the face. After some violent jerks, he lies completely still.

A few seconds pass, then a light flicks on in the background. We cut to a close-up of it: the Vita Chamber doors slide open and Fontaine bursts out again, screaming bubbles louder and louder as he thrashes towards us, and his terrified face almost fills the frame before we cut to black.

Obviously this needs to be re-rendered a few different ways:

• Without you, if you got in the bathysphere and escaped.
• Without the Little Sister body, if you saved them all.
• With your body, if you died in the final fight.

There are ways in which BioShock does more with its subject matter than any other game I can name, but mostly it’s just amazing to have something to sink your brain’s figurative teeth into. It has ideas. There are themes. I think I even saw a paradigm.

I’ve started capitalising the ‘S’, you’ll be riveted to hear, because a) it’s correct, and I’m a fan of correct, but also b) it’s very System Shock 2. You can even draw a line from each of Rapture’s districts to each of Shock 2’s decks. They might not be able to say so legally, but there is a Shock series of games and this is one of them. The best, in fact.

I was slightly bemused when I first heard that they wanted to make a game set somewhere “more interesting than a spaceship”, because Shock 2 did such an extraordinary job of making that ship a vast and exciting place to explore. But yeah, I get it now. This is an order of magnitude more artistically exciting.

I’m not talking about the bits where you kill children, because they’re not very good and they don’t need to be. Everyone will fixate on them forever and ever and it will be boring and terrible and that’s a shame. They’re not important, either emotionally or mechanically, and the game has so much more going on that is provocative and brave and weird and brilliant.

The lunatic fans seem to be satisfied, by the way – although they frantically crave documentation of every microsecond of the infanticide. And one called me a ‘filthy worm’ for giving it a score as low as 95%. While I was away in France last week, the first copies were delivered to subscribers, and one guy on the official forums got to be a mini-celebrity for a few days by being the only person who’d read the first ever review of their holy game. People grilled him for info and implored him to type in the first few sentences. I love being a part of something that inspires that level of excitement, even if I’m just riding Irrational’s coat tails.

There’s a line in my review that starts “So kindly avoid any…” I would just like to say, for the record, that this line originally read slightly differently, and you will probably be able to guess precisely how once you’ve completed the game. It was a very obvious and weak in-joke that hinges on something enormously spoilerific but invisible to the uneducated eye. I couldn’t ask Tony to make sure he kept it intact when he was sub-editing my review because it would have entirely ruined the game for him, so I’m just going to have to ask you to come back here in a month, sneer slightly at my failed attempt at a bad joke, then switch your neural interface back over to whatever Zero-G Hyper Sports event the future will presumably be full of.