“Welcome to Rapture”. How long have I waited to hear those words! I don’t know what the 2K Boston studios are feeling right now, but I am positively bouncing off the ceiling and the walls here, having played the newly released BioShock demo over and over and over again. Has the mega download been worth it? Yes, every little kilobyte and every little second of it. From the second this game starts up and shows off the main menu, to the very last panic-stricken second of the nearly half an hour long demo (much longer for me, since I just ran around exploring every nook and cranny of this underwater dystopia), BioShock has delivered all that it has promised over the years, and then some. Make no mistake about it, BioShock is, single handedly, the most brilliant looking game on the Xbox 360 when it comes to lighting, atmosphere and, Sweet Jesus, water effects.

Starting with a gorgeous looking (and incidentally, very musical) main menu that shows off the lone lighthouse standing in the middle of a pitch black ocean, the demo sees the player, Jack (yes, the player has a name, and he speaks, although only a few words), on board the ill-fated airliner over the Atlantic Ocean in the mid-1960s. Of course, things aren’t meant to be and the plane goes down, with Jack waking up a couple of feet underwater as his former means of transportation sinks to the bottom of the sea, replete with a whirring propeller blade that barely manages to miss him. As Jack surfaces and the demo handed over control, the full realization of what I was seeing hit me. This is by far, the most gorgeous looking water I have ever seen in a game! With the plane’s fuel burning like the fires of hell in the middle of a pitch black and ominously calm ocean, you swim towards this small opening among the flames, even as embers rain down upon you and little droplets of water on the screen sparkle like fiery little diamonds every time you turn to look at the harsh orange light of the flames.

As if the visuals don’t grab you, a few seconds of turning the volume up should give see you hopelessly fall in love with this game. With the airplane fuel smoking, hissing and crackling in the water, Jack’s pained gasps, the gentle lapping of the waves and as a really ominous counterpoint, the metal airframe screeching and yowling as it is pulled in beneath the waves. And there, like manna from heaven, a lighthouse rises in the middle of the ocean, and you swim towards it, pausing for a few minutes to see the tail section of the wreckage slowly sink in a seething mass of bubbles before the sea rolls in again, leaving no trace of the hulking mass of aluminium that was there just a few seconds before. And once again, the visual awesomeness of the game hits you, as you watch the flickering light cast an eerie glow on the water, or the sheen on the steps as you climb up to the lighthouse or you go around the lighthouse and watch the moon come out of the clouds and turn the waves into silver ripples stretching out into the black oblivion of the night.

As you stand at the doorway of this huge lighthouse, that’s where the lighting and level design elements in the game smack you all over the place, watching as this sliver of light illuminates a small section of the blackness beyond and you step in and the door shuts behind you, swallowing you in the darkness before practically assaulting you with the exact opposite of what you expect. Needless to say, your senses are completely jarred when, instead of some underwater monstrosity coming at you, you are greeted by fanfare and sheer opulence, even as a peppy instrumental version of Sinatra’s “Somewhere beyond the sea” pipes from somewhere below. Following the awe-inspiring “cathedral” into the bathysphere, you begin your descent into Rapture as Andrew Ryan’s video welcome introduces you to the underwater utopia, replete with a huge whale that gracefully swims past your transport.

Needless to say, things start to go downhill for you from there, starting with the bathysphere radio crackling to live with a conversation between two citizens who talk about the airplane crash on the surface and how a survivor is most probably headed down to the city and to get to the docking area quick to avoid the Splicers that are also coming. Unfortunately for your would-be rescuer, he gets torn apart by one just as the bathysphere pulls into the docking area and then goes berserk trying to get at you inside the well-protected metal husk. Fortunately for you, though, Atlas, your personal guide to Rapture, is willing to help you survive yet another day, but in return, wants your help to rescue his family that’s trapped in another section of the city. And the demo then takes you through your first plasmid, Electrobolt (another, Incinerate, finds its way into your hands later) your first spooky-as-hell encounter with a Big Daddy and a Little Sister, a highly disturbing shadow play of a Splicer singing a lullaby to a revolver in a baby carriage and dozens of encounters with Thuggish and Leadhead Splicers, security bots that shoot at you, try to set you on fire, your first hack attempt (which I failed miserably the first 2 times) and a personal “Oh shit!” moment at the end, before leaving you completely breathless and rearing to start the demo all over again.

With a seriously intense atmosphere that seems eerily reminescent of System Shock 2, including a “ghost sighting”, audio logs that document the first outbreak on the night of New Year’s Eve 1957 and the surreal conversations and “humming” of the deformed citizens, Rapture is the antithesis of the von Braun, even though they’re fundamentally the same as far as the player is concerned. And let me say again - the water is the best I’ve ever seen in any game till date, which you too will see in a glass hallway as an old acquaintance, the tail section of the airplane, comes crashing down through it, and the surrounding ocean rushes through in the most breathtaking fashion possible.

I can’t find a single thing that’s wrong with the demo, except that the UI seems to have changed since the 14 minute LGC video from last year and the little sisters’ eyes now seem to glow red, which I don’t particularly fancy. The demo might be 20 minutes long, but if you take the time, the sights and sounds of Rapture can take you well into 60 minutes, even as you run through it over and over and over again until we get our hands on the game at the end of this month. Here’s to BioShock, what could easily be 2007’s “Game of the Year” and a milestone in gaming history!

NOTE: For those unlucky enough not to be able to play the demo for some reason, Gamersyde has an HD video walkthrough of the demo available at their site.

Images and Videos of the BioShock demo [Gamersyde]

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