Time to Revisit Rapture – Again

If you’ve played and enjoyed Bioshock 2 (that means you, Drew), you may be lamenting the fact that though the story ended beautifully, the story ended. If you bought the sequel, you probably share with me a love for Rapture as a place and the Bioshock series as an examination of human lives in the face of nonexistent moral boundaries. Or whatever. Maybe you just like the dynamic combat system, cause that’s pretty awesome too.

Either way, I’m going to recommend Minerva’s Den, Bioshock 2’s $10 single player downloadable content, as highly as I possibly can. The DLC is actually an entirely new story about an entirely new character, who finds himself thrust into a situation he doesn’t understand. If this seems like a pattern, it’s not just a tired Bioshock cliche – it’s the nature of Rapture. In this place, people use other people for their own purposes and people are kept in the dark. Because the only person you can trust is yourself, shared information is scarce and even when available it is untrustworthy.

Anyway, that’s Rapture. This small slice of one man’s life, though, is fascinating, engrossing, and moving. All that, and it speaks volumes about ourselves, our own longings, and our own desires to control our own fates and the fates of those close to us.

Also, there’s some sweet new Plasmids and a crazy big laser gun.

There’s a large contingent out there that refused to play the sequel to Bioshock because they considered the story of Rapture to be closed. I disagree, because to me Rapture is a place where people lived. While Bioshock told the story of the leader of Rapture, Bioshock 2 and Minerva’s Den show us that there are other people who are less pronounced and less officially important. Nonetheless, they have stories to tell and we have something to learn from them.