Bioshock Infinite is one of the most profoundly weird pieces of media I’ve ever experienced. Not weird like a Lynch movie is weird, where it’s intentionally trying to be weird. It’s weird in a way where everything it presents seems on it’s face to be part of a whole, but you can never quite picture what it is the whole might be.

The game begins as a noire. You, a down on your luck private eye, are tasked with retrieving the mysterious beautiful girl from the city in the sky. It’s a standard set up, that in some ways plays out in an expected way. You let your heart get the best of you, and fall for the girl. She turns out to be more than she seems, things get sticky, and you end up dying for the greater good. How this game gets from A to B though is anything but standard.

At the outset you’re confronted with Columbia. A city in the sky gone mad with the american dream, where Christianity, prophecy, and patriotism have become fused. It’s an incredibly racist society as well; an early scene in the game asks you to throw a baseball at an interracial couple. Pretty soon after that, Elisabeth joins you, and begins to mess with the space-time continuum. The game then spends some time showing you how terrible it is to be black in this world, then inexplicably thrusts you into a new reality where there is a black rebellion destroying the city. It then goes out of it’s way to show you that actually the black people leading the rebellion are awful child murderers.

This is all made stranger by the presentation of Elisabeth as a 30's era Disney princess. In a lot of places, Columbia itself feels like gritty Disneyland. After she murders the leader of the rebellion with a pair of rusty scissors, she cuts her hair and changes into a more revealing outfit. The prophet then tricks her into using her powers to raise a ghostly version of her dead mother that is half the reality of her mother, and half her imagined version of her mother as a monster. After you shoot the ghost in the face enough, she lets you into her house and the end of the game begins in earnest. You travel forward and backward in time, across several realities, quantum physics and hidden relationships abound. It’s a mess.

As if that wasn’t weird enough, the part where you actually play it (usually quite separate from what is described above) just adds to the already insane level of dissonance. For the majority of the game I was oscillating between three states: Shooting people, frantically searching corpses, trashcans, trunks, and chocolate boxes for loose change and rotting fruit, and lingering to marvel at striking and beautiful views. It made me feel like an insane person. Elisabeth too acts erratically during gameplay sequences. I don’t know how many times a dramatic scene ended where the state of our relationship was up in the air, only to be punctuated by “Hey Booker, you need money? Catch!”

So why did this happen? These people made the original Bioshock right? How could it have gone so wrong? There are a lot of differences between the original Bioshock and Infinite, but I think the most important might be the state of the city in each. Rapture, the city of the original Bioshock, is a city in ruin, Columbia is a city in it’s hey day. Most of the original Bioshock was figuring out what happened there, not what’s happening there. You are immediately confronted with a bunch of questions about what that place was and how it worked. Columbia is inherently less mysterious, you can see how it operates, what it’s citizens are like, and so on. It feels like they still wanted to capture that original feeling in Infinite, so those mysteries inherent to the environment are replaced with things like “What’s the deal with these tears in space-time” and “Why does magic exist?” and “Is that a ghost?”

Perhaps the greatest piece of mind boggllery though, is just how good so much of it is. Individual environments, designs, moments, are done incredibly well. They made me feel and think stuff. It made me take the whole thing seriously. It made me puzzle over it for a long time after completing it, sure that I was the problem not the game.

Bioshock Infinite is the best kind of bad thing. It is insanely ambitious and fails in a completely original way.

3/5 hallals.

This would appear on a blog or as an editorial.

2K has spent millions of dollars to try to impress upon me, and all of my peers, that Bioshock Infinite is The Next Big Thing. By now you’ve seen the CG reveal trailer, and probably read several accounts of the gameplay shown at last night’s event, describing a game that is all that and so, so much more. If not, please do so, because there’s nothing more about the game itself I could tell you. What you probably haven’t read is that last night was gross.

2K held the event in a ballroom at the Plaza Hotel, a place where even the cheapest room will still run you a thousand dollars a night. After some meaningless PR spewed at the crowd, we were shown two videos, totaling about 12 minutes. Then the back of the room was opened up, revealing a collection of carnival games, and riffs on Bioshock Infinite themed food by none other than Thomas Keller. There was no further information on the game given, and access to Ken Levine (or any of the hundreds of other people undoubtably working on this game) was strictly limited. It was all there as implicit pressure to write positive press, to create the impression that this was something bigger and more important than you and your little life. This was history in the making.

It was gross.

Beyond the event itself, the gameplay video shown seemed too good to be true. Each moment was so scripted, that while it was beautiful, it’s hard to imagine how the systems presented could be used in a less prescribed way. It doesn’t feel like an experience that could be stretched out into a full game. Though even if it was completely representative of what the game ends up being, it’s showing a Call of Duty-esque roller-coaster ride that forgoes the strong environmental storytelling and exploration that made its predecessor such a marvel.

So all in all it’s a game that for all we know could be heading in a misguided direction, made by a pretty gross company. We all should probably start reducing our expectations now, and withhold judgement until we can form a more complete picture of what this game is going to be.

Except it was awesome.

James May, a television presenter on the British car show “Top Gear”, describes a fizzing sensation he feels behind his penis when driving a particularly exciting car. The fizz defies explanation. It’s an irrational (they’re winning) adolescent excitement. Bioshock Infinite has the fizz. Since watching the videos presented last night, I can’t shake the itch they created. That knowledge that my life would probably be a lot cooler right now if I was playing Bioshock Infinite.

I don’t know how I should feel about last night, and I don’t know how that should influence my thoughts on the game. Right now awe and disgust exist in equal measure, and to deny either would only be an attempt to escape the uncomfortable middle ground where I now find myself.

Sausages will always be delicious.

Imagine the drum-tight, best-in-class controls and guns of Halo mixed with the leveling structure and loot collection of Borderlands. If you’re imagining anything other than the future of interactive entertainment, then you’re wrong. Dead wrong.

As if that wasn’t enough, Bungie has created an innovative living, breathing world, not only populated by wondrous alien races to shoot (like “The Fallen”, “The Vex”, “The Hive”, and “The Cabal”), but you’re friends! Bungie has created a “shared-world” shooter. It’s the first of it’s kind, but I’m sure will come define how we see next gen gaming in years to come.

“Well that’s all well and good,” you might be saying, “but what does it look like?” Well I’m here to tell you that Bungie’s technical wizards have done it again, to deliver a revolutionary next gen experience. Lighting and textures are so life-like that after a few hours of Destiny real life begins to pale in comparison. I think we can all agree, Destiny is the go-to destination for alien shooting action this year.

Destiny is destined for store shelves on Playstation 4, Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Xbox One this Fall 2014.