User blog comment:JAlbor/BioShock Infinite and American History/@comment-68.199.245.187-20130406052445

Yes, fascinating and all that. But I'm still rather confused, bewildered and left wondering at all the gaping holes left by Bioshock Infintie's wake. So many things made little if any sense.

I get the moral dilemma posed by DeWitt's part at Wounded Knee. I get his remorse and desperate need to redeem himself. I get that he's wildly creating false memories in order to try and deal with things as best he can.

What I don't get are all the futuristic references discovered in Columbia. Was DeWitt clairvoyant? And what the hell happened to his wife, mother of Anna? I'm fairly certain DeWitt had a wedding ring on his hand. Where was she in all this? Did she die while giving birth to Anna?

And what about DeWitt's gambling issue? I find it rather telling that for all of his guilt regarding Wounded Knee, he chose to dive headfirst into gambling rather than drinking or drugs as a means of self-punishment. I just find it all a little odd and difficult to believe.

He claims at the end that he's both Comstock and DeWitt. Then who exactly did he "sell" Anna too? Himself? Is Anna still alive? Because I have serious doubts given the ending when he finally chooses the baptism which claims his life and finally offers the long sought for redemption and peace, as each of the "Elizabeths" vanish, that any of them were real, leading me to believe that Anna herself is probably no longer alive.

The one glaring issue that struck me was the Barbershop Quartet signing, of all things, "God Only Knows." Really? It wasn't even part of a rift bleed that could be excused somehow. I'm still at a loss to explain Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". If he's manufacturing these false memories, how is he able to pluck up real songs from 50+ years in the future?

And as for that baptism, if it took place sometime following Wounded Knee, I'm presuming it occurred AFTER what he did to Anna because then absolutely nothing would make sense. Only somehow it didn't seem that way. It felt too rural to be a part of his life after marrying and having Anna. That would again presumably be during or after his time with the Pinkerton Agency. So apparently he was able to get his act together after Wounded Knee to put it behind him, get a good job, a wife and have a family. But then his conscience gets the better of him, he losese his wife, starts gambling till he's lost absolutely everything and rather than kill himself, he chooses to sell off his child to clear his debts?

What's wrong with this picture? Forget the condemnation of America during the Indian Wars. Forget the parallelization with the Boxer Rebellion. This is one hell of a commentary on a damned soul trying to redeem himself for his past sins. Only I feel the game developers went way overboard in so many places that they were overwhelmed by it all, leaving a pile of heaving debris that only served to confuse and confound more than it enlightened.

Finally, what of the tenuous connection with Rapture at the very end? What was all that about? Are we to conclude that Rapture never existed any more than Columbia did? For DeWitt to have seen any of Rapture, it would imply that he'd manufactured it as well as everything else, as a false memory but that would negate the existence of the first two games as pure fantasy, shattering the illusion that Rapture did in fact exist. The timeline certainly could never support both Rapture and DeWitt existing at the same point.

While both Bioshock and Bioshock 2 were most definitley horror games, Bioshock Infinite had a very different feel to it, not only setting it apart, but one could argue that the developers probably should have sought a different title altogether since it had little at all to do with the original Rapture universe, despite the half-hearted attempt to include a direct reference to it at the end of the game.

Gameplay was fun but there was simply too little opportunity to explore using the SkyHook and the tracks were extremely limited as well. Guided navigation was confusing at times. And the overall story left me confused and dissatisfied thanks to the many anacrhonisms that did little to move things along and left behind gaping holes of credibility.