10 Reasons Why We Love The First Two Bioshock Games

3. The Would You Kindly Twist

Would you The strength of this plot development is that it was based on a detail that you didn€™t pick up on. Which you didn€™t think about because you were just playing the game. You saw it as just another familiar component of gameplay, where you needed to press a button or open a door to get on with it. Because games tend towards linear narratives, the player accepts these blindly. Then you enter the room with the phrase that you realise that you have heard throughout the game. Admittedly the placing of this room is more to do with dramatic licence rather than practicality, but this is something that you think about afterwards. The confrontation with Andrew Ryan completes the reveal which changes what you thought was happening in the game. It is not the epic final boss battle the audience was expecting, it is a shift in perspective. The player still gets one, just against a different opponent. This is the sort of twist that if it kept being repeated, would get tired quickly. But it helps the wider world of video games. It makes the player kept in the back of the mind, that not everything in the game world or the characters might be as straightforward as it seems.
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David is a life-long fan of films, novels, comic books and animation. He reviews books for http://concatenation.org and is responsible for two cats.