BioShock Infinite's Intro Is The Only Great Thing About It

thegamer.com:

BioShock Infinite begins the way all great shooters should: with the player character on a vehicle they cannot control bound for a destination they cannot imagine.

When we first meet Booker DeWitt, he’s in the backseat of a rowboat headed for a lighthouse. This is a kind of intro that narrative shooter fans may recognize. The first Half-Life began with Gordon Freeman on a tram heading into the Black Mesa Research Facility. That game’s DLC Blue Shift started with Barney Calhoun, a Black Mesa security guard, taking the same trip, and Opposing Force, Half-Life's other DLC, opened with a helicopter full of marines choppering into Black Mesa. Half-Life 2 doesn’t fix what isn’t broken, plopping Gordon onto a train headed into the dystopian City 17. Episode 2 even gets meta with it, opening in the wreckage of the train crash that closed Episode 1.

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Reading that list out, it might seem samey, repetitive. But Valve has developed some of the best FPS games ever made and practically invented the narrative shooter. So, it’s worth considering why so many of its games begin in the same way. What does it achieve to open a game like this?

In BioShock Infinite, the on-rails intro gives us a moment to get our bearings. Though there is thick fog ahead, we eventually see the lighthouse peeking through it. When we enter, we see a spiral staircase heading up. The first BioShock began with the player, having survived a plane crash, swimming to a lighthouse and boarding a bathysphere to descend to the underwater city of Rapture. Infinite inverts this dynamic. Though the player, again, approaches a lighthouse from the water, here their journey will take them up into the clouds.