Bioshock: Rapture

Bioshock: Rapture is a flawed complement to its great source material: Bioshock’s greatest strength was its fantastical setting – the grandiose underwater city of Rapture – and how it managed to tie the philosophy behind it to its horror elements. The novel may try to follow suit, focusing on the city’s initial years before its terrible downfall, but fails to add anything new, making the act of playing the game a much more fulfilling experience.

The story initially follows two main characters: the plumber Bill McDonagh and the scammer Frank Gorland. McDonagh has always dreamed of becoming an engineer and, one day, he’s indeed offered a chance by the eccentric tycoon, Andrew Ryan – the catch, for there’s always one, is that his job is to repair and maintain the foundations of a seemingly impossible city on the bottom of the sea. Gorland, on the other hand, sees in Rapture’s propaganda (the unwavering defense of the free market) a perfect business opportunity.

By putting these two characters inside Rapture, the novel establishes two opposing visions operating within the same setting: that of a serious and honest worker, and that of a swindler who never misses a single opportunity to exploit the person next to him. The narrative frames McDonagh and Gorland as rats in a lab experiment, putting both of them in an isolated society with minimal regulation to see which one becomes more successful in the end. What matters most in a neoliberal utopia, it asks, hard work or a total lack of scruples? (Spoilers: it’s not hard work).

Rapture has always been fascinating: an insulated society on the ocean floor whose core tenet is the belief that humanity will only thrive if it stops being regulated, limited, and constrained by the State, with its many immoral taxes and impositions, useless laws and regulations that only hinder progress. Rapture, free of these modern shackles, can let science flourish and the market regulate itself – its invisible hand leading everyone to glory. Let’s flash forward to the screams, blood, and gore that ensue. In the game, when we arrive in Rapture, the city has already fallen into chaos, and its people have lost all trace of civility, turning into hungry, animalistic creatures. It turns out that the invisible hand of the market is a merciless psychopathic bitch and humans, when left unchecked, thrive only because the word’s meaning in a capitalist dictionary read “exploit everyone else to the very limit” (and in Rapture there are no limits).

Andrew Ryan approached McDonagh because he was impressed with the men’s work ethic – McDonagh used brass instead of tin to repair bathroom fixtures, out of his own expense, because he took pride in the fact that his work never leaked – but his own society is built on the idea that ethic is an obstacle to be overcome. Andrew Ryan believes science is limited by morality, which means that in Rapture, scientists can finally do whatever they want without fearing retaliation. The consequence? Technology indeed advances a lot in Rapture, so much so that it frames Bioshock in the realm of science fiction, modifying and twisting the human body to great extremes. The rub? People have generally terrible decision-making skills and a strong tendency to violence, which technology only facilitates: imagine bullies capable of shooting fireballs with their hands, and that the bullied kid can summon swarms of bees that will harm everyone in the vicinity – people with access to equally deranged powers. As foxes used to say, chaos reigns.

It’s not difficult, then, to imagine which of the two main characters the story already positions as the clear winner very early on (Spoilers: it’s not the plumber). McDonagh, after all, has absolutely no chance with his hard work mentality and honesty, being quickly swallowed up by the hostility of Rapture. Gorland, on the other hand, profits from the chaos, which he starts to encourage to increase his earnings. After all, if your objective in a society is to take money from someone else and there are no rules at play to limit how much you can take from them – and a proper, civilized way for you to take it – someone like Gorland will simply employ violence to take everything. If he’s framed as a survivor by the narrative, he’s also its clear villain: it’s because of people like him that Rapture falls, that neoliberalism can never work.

This is all material for an excellent discussion, so the problem is that this is all present in the game as well. And in Bioshock: Rapture, these ideas are wasted by an undercooked story that fails to develop its characters and themes in an original and engaging way.

For example, it’s understandable that some scenes from the original game are reused – it’s the nature of these “companion pieces” after all. But Bioshock: Rapture goes overboard with this, so if in the game we come across old recordings that paint how Rapture was before its downfall, here we find these same exchanges, line by line. The same reflections, the same confessions. All the time.

The attempts to show the origins of some of the city’s most striking landmarks are also redundant, since the explanations are as shallow as they are inconsequential. Why did Andrew Ryan put the song La Mer to play at the lighthouse that leads to Rapture, for example? Because he thought… it would fit the ambiance. Why did he have a huge banner hang at the same lighthouse with the saying ‘NOT GODS OR KINGS. ONLY MEN’? Because he thought… it would give “personality” to the statue that holds it. In other words, the novel takes questions no one sane ever asked (because they’re either obvious or irrelevant) and offers answers so poor, so random, so foolish, that they make you question if we were too hard on Solo for explaining the origin of Han’s name.

The prose also misses the mark in tone, rife with comparisons and metaphors involving water that are just funny in nature, functioning as inside jokes that refer to Rapture’s location “Bill McDonagh was riding an elevator up to the top of the Andrew Ryan Arms—but he felt like he was sinking under the sea.”/ “I’m diving in at the deep end, Mr. Ryan…” They would have matched the whimsy of a fairy tale much more than the brutal nature of this story.

Dialogues don’t fare much better either. Many suffer from the same redundancy as the rest of the novel, such as the “Drunks!“ that Andrew Ryan mutters after spotting a group of… drunks. Others are simply, well, wrong: one scientist, for example, claims to have invented a way to “project cold,” making a basic mistake that not even high school students should make. Finally, one of the chapters ends with a character asking, “How badly could it go wrong?” which is simply hilarious.

Character development also lacks subtlety to the point where McDonagh has to sum up his own personality to make things very, very clear to those in the back: “I’m all loyalty, me. That’s Bill McDonagh—straight through.” Can you guess what Bill McDonagh’s relationship with Andrew Ryan is based on now? (Spoilers: it’s loyalty) And there is no character more badly characterized than the tycoon himself, which is a serious problem, as he is the ideological compass of the story, always being present in one way or another: his name is repeated more than nine hundred times during the novel. It’s with his speech that it opens, for example:

“I am Andrew Ryan and I’m here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow? No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God. No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone. I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose … Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by Petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.”

You can see that the above speech – took straight from the game’s opening, of course, this is why it’s great – has a clear propagandistic purpose. Its exalted and affected tone intends to seduce the audience to share Andrew Ryan’s dream. Similar speeches were then found in his recordings and posters throughout the game because these objects were meant to sell the idea of what Rapture represents. The novel, however, applies this logic directly to the man himself. In other words, instead of being a multifaceted character in the book, Andrew Ryan comes across as a caricature of his own image, speaking in the exact same way as his propaganda: “Look at it, rising like an orchestral climax! Rapture is a miracle, Bill—the only kind of miracle that matters! The kind a real man creates with his own two hands. And it should be celebrated every day.”

The narrative even contradicts itself when it comes to how Andrew Ryan is described and presented. It’s repeated a few times, for example, that he carefully handpicks who he invites to Rapture, although there is a scene in which the tycoon appears interviewing a scientist… without even knowing the theme of her thesis.

Bioshock: Rapture, then, doesn’t come close to living up to the original game, failing to explore its fascinating setting in novel (pun… deeply intended) ways. As a result, the novel ends up being redundant, offering nothing to old fans and newcomers alike.

June 24, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on July 11, 2016.