Just a heads up, there's a high-res trailer downloadable here.
Still, and I hate to go all Jack Thompson on y'all, it does creep me out that the player is allowed to kill little girls- even encouraged by the Adam that can be collected.
Kind of. If you befriend them they'll get you Adam willingly. You can also apparently get a type of adam-power that makes them believe YOU'RE a big daddy and they'll hand over the Adam in a state of delusion. Both non-violent solutions to Adam harvesting.
I'll admit I was instantly uncomfortable myself once I saw the little girl dragged out of her hidey-hole and the POV character swinging his wrench in prepare for a kill. The inclusion of children IS a big taboo they're breaking. Rockstar has always said it won’t include children in its games. Fable wanted to do it, but had it cut out during production. I think Irrational’s the first game to insert relatively realistic-looking children into a world where you can attack them. It’s risky.
At the same time, I admire the fact that Irrational seems to be dedicated to bringing us a troubling, morally conflicted world in an intelligent manner. It has the guts to explore this stuff in a more honest way than, say, GTA or most violent games that don’t have the verisimilitude Bioshock seems to be aiming for.
What I’m really looking forward to is exploring morality. Many of the monsters are also victims. I think Bioshock is using that to simulate moral choices without doing any handholding. “Brain the little girl with the wrench” it implies, “But we’re not going to pretend that it's clean or easy. In fact, we're going to make the event emotionally wrenching and awful.” I really like it when a PC’s decision to kill something is awful and frightening and unsexy, partly because that kind of portrayal happens so little in games.
I’m taking this from the various trailers and interviews, of course, so the final gameplay may be different than what I’ve extrapolated here. But I hope not.
Also, BEE ARM. Jesus! The cries of agony, and that was from the man INJECTING it into himself. I was worried the adam-powers would just be a rehash of SS2’s old psychic powers kit, but they proved me wrong. They look wonderfully exciting.
It worries me that I may become unwilling to play through what otherwise looks like a great game because all the child-killing (by NPCs like in the gameplay video) will disturb the fuck out of me.
From what I can tell, they want to give you as flexible a solution path as they can. I KNOW you can go through the entire game without laying a finger on any of the little girls. Nearly everyone else is just as exploited as they are, too. The game seems designed to remind you that that maniac charging at you used to be someone's wife or husband, the thing in the clunky wetsuit was someone's sister or brother. (And these are the ones that could afford Adam. Apparently, we eventually get to see the lives of the city’s underclass. Rapture was one of THOSE ‘utopias’) |
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