Video game settings are characters of their own

destructoid.com:

The following contains spoilers for Episode 2 of the BioShock Infinite DLC Burial at Sea. Proceed at your own risk.

One of the things I love about games is how much they lean into genre fiction. Games have never been afraid to lean hard into sci-fi, fantasy, westerns, apocalypse stories, and so on. This means we get a lot of stories that stand out with their unique characters, mechanics, and lore, but one of my favorite aspects of games has to be how settings take on a whole personality of their own. Rather than serving as a backdrop for the action, so many game settings take a front seat in the story, driving home its themes and moving the plot forward.

Perhaps my favorite example of great settings in games comes from the BioShock series. Cities like Rapture and Columbia are built out with compelling, storied histories, complete with uncannily beautiful vistas that conceal proletariat factions at war with oppressive figures. They’re gorgeous, but with the express purpose of highlighting the games’ more sinister themes. Visually stunning locations like Fort Frolic and Monument Island show us how the respective founders of the cities chose to showcase their love of excess, while also making us understand how each city met its downfall.

Look, I just really love the BioShock series (where’s that fourth game, 2K?), and a recent playthrough of BioShock Infinite‘s Burial at Sea DLC only reminded me of that. I have to highlight just one more moment from that series, because I think it’s so masterfully done.

Episode 2 opens on a street in Paris, where Elizabeth is sitting at a cafe enjoying a view of the Eiffel Tower. In this sequence, all of the citizens greet her happily by name, birds and butterflies flit about, and artists