Taking a break from television, I thought I’d put in a good word for 2K’s upcoming first person shooter/adventure game for XBOX 360 and PC, Bioshock.  A demo just released on XBOX Live Marketplace, and I was so struck by it — so infatuated with its scary, decaying, art deco undersea world — that I not only pre-ordered the game, but dropped the extra ten dollars for the special edition.

Anyone who questions the idea that games can be art should really take a look at this one.  The story is intriguing and original: Andrew Ryan, a brilliant geneticist and hardcore adherent to the libertarian/objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, breaks from the real world and the New Deal and builds a vast, sprawling city called “Rapture” at the bottom of the ocean.  There he lives out a dream of individualism and self-sufficiency, as he and his followers set out to improve both the human body and society.  Of course, their experiments run amuck, and the objectivist utopia becomes a nightmare of undersea apocalypse and civil war.  Horribly mutated and addicted to ADAM, a substance that provides genetic “enhancments,” Rapture’s remaining citizens struggle to survive within a world that is a metaphor for what happens when objectivism takes on a certain deadly inevitability.  Your character, the nameless survivor of an oceanic plane crash very similar to the one in Lost, must journey to Rapture, or drown in the ocean.  Once in that decaying, beautiful city, you can either go native, or die …

Bioshock is a first person shooter, but not at all like the ones we’re used to seeing.  The spiritual successor to the classic System Shock, one can could say that Bioshock is Myst with guns, monsters and superpowers.  Just as Cyan crafted a believable and yet wholely original fantasy world with their classic point-and-click adventure, Ken Levine and his team at 2K Boston/Australia/Irational Games have done much the same with Bioshock. 

It’s rare that I feel compelled to do anything but shoot in an FPS, but with the Bioshock demo, I found myself looking out expansive windows at the undersea city around me, marveling at the furniture in a decimated restaurant, which had once been a high-end affair, and marveling at the detail on everything.  This is, of course, when I wasn’t running for my life from deranged “Splicers,” nearly human creatures with a craving for my genetic material, or fearing the dreadful arrival of the Big Daddy’s, lumbering creatures in antique diving suits who jealously protect the Little Sisters, mutated children who harvest ADAM from the corpses of the dead.

There are horror elements to Bioshock — in fact, there’s a constant sense of terror.  But unlike other “horror” games, Bioshock is tempered by humor, the wonderous fiction that serves as the backbone of the world and the beautiful graphics.  It’s scary, but it’s not offensively scary (I’m talking about you, Doom 3) — and as you find weapons and powers, you feel empowered to destroy the monsters.

The demo provides about an hour of satisfying gameplay, and if you have an XBOX 360 and an HDTV, you have no excuse but to download it and give it a try.  Throw in a pair of surround sound headphones, and you’ve got an evening of immersive entertainment.  Just remember to turn out the lights.