I just finished Bioshock 2 and I can say without equivocation that it is the best Bioshock game.
This is true both in terms of gameplay and story. Unlike the first Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite, both of which were written and directed by Ken Levine, Bioshock 2 was developed completely separately by the gaming studio 2K and directed by Jordan Thomas. As a result it avoids the big moments/poor storytelling that was a highlight of the other games (as discussed in our reviews for Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite.) There aren’t so many story contradictions and Thomas and his crew knew a great deal more about what they were talking about than Levine did Objectivism, religion, and capitalism. As a result the game’s story doesn’t crash and burn within the first hour of playing it and actually builds up to a meaningful and emotionally powerful conclusion that has a serious and substantial moral at its core.
Bioshock 2 is, at its core, a morality play. Instead of subverting the story for the sake of pushing ideology, as the other two Bioshock games did, Bioshock 2 is about two things – family and mercy. Through the story and gameplay Bioshock 2 presents us with two different concepts of family, the atheist science cult of Sophia Lamb called the Rapture Family and the relationship between the player’s character, a Big Daddy named Subject Delta and the rebellious Eleanor Lamb (daughter of the aforementioned Sophia Lamb.) The main goal of the story is for Subject Delta to make his way across the broken remains of Rapture, rescue Eleanor from her mother by any means necessary, and help her escape Rapture forever. In the process of this story the player is given the option to either kill or spare important non-player characters (NPCs) and the Little Sisters. Depending on what Delta does to survive, whether he chooses vengeance against those who have harmed himself and others or whether he chooses to have mercy on them and spare them, has a meaningful impact on who Eleanor will become and the outcome of the game.
In this article, after giving a brief overview of the story of Bioshock 2, I will these themes, how they play out in the game, and what they tell us about the meaning of family and the necessity of mercy in our modern age.
Note, there will be massive spoilers.
The Story of Bioshock 2
Bioshock 2 is set in Rapture eight years after the end of the first Bioshock. Andrew Ryan is dead. Frank Fontaine is dead. And the crumbling ruins of Rapture are ruled by Dr. Sophia Lamb. Lamb is a trained psychologist who wants to use ADAM to entirely destroy individuality and the individual itself so she can substitute it with a fully realized collectivist, a utopian without free will who would only do what the “common good” demands. Eleanor, her daughter, is resisting this in every way she can because it is Eleanor who her mother wants to turn into “the People’s Daughter” by completely destroying her identity, her individuality, her self entirely. In an attempt to save herself, Eleanor, who was once a Little Sister, has the current Little Sisters use the Vita-Chamber to resurrect her former Big Daddy, Subject Delta.
The opening Prologue sees Delta forced to kill himself by Sophia Lamb as she takes Eleanor from him and then immediately jumps to ten years later when he comes falling out of the Vita-Chamber. Once reborn, Delta begins to receive telepathic messages from Eleanor, who is kept in a constantly narcotically sedated state by her mother, can do little more than send brief messages pleading for help from her father – Delta. Almost immediately you are reintroduced to Dr. Brigid Tenenbaum who has returned to Rapture to rescue the little girls who have been kidnapped from the surface by Lamb to be used as Little Sisters. After helping her escape an attack by the Rapture Family – Lamb’s cult of Splicers – Tenenbaum goes off to complete her mission (seen in the Minerva’s Den DLC for Bioshock 2), but not before hooking you up with her ally, Augustus Sinclair.
Using the Atlantic Express, Delta and Sinclair travel through Rapture on their way towards Persephone. During this journey, Delta is confronted with four people who have had a major impact on his life and the life of Eleanor.
The first is Lamb’s trusted lieutenant and follower Grace Holloway in Pauper’s Drop. When Sophia Lamb was arrested she left her daughter Eleanor in the hands of Grace to be taken care of and raised according to Lamb’s ideals. A former songstress, Grace hates Delta because of an encounter in the past where he accidentally broker her jaw and ended her career.
The second encounter is with Simon Wales. Simon and his brother were the original architects of Rapture, but Simon felt dissatisfied with his life and turned to Lamb’s teachings with a religious fervor. He became the head of the Rapture Family Cult and preaches that Eleanor will be their messiah to save them from their own sense of self. Given entirely over to splicing, Simon has become little more than a lunatic monsters who murders on sight anyone not part of the Family.
The third encounter is with Stanley Poole, a true weasel of a man who is dominated by his fear of everyone. Poole is a journalist who had infiltrated the Rapture Family on behalf of Andrew Ryan and who became one of its leaders after Lamb was imprisoned. The game reveals that it was Poole who kidnapped Eleanor from Grace and turned her in to Fontaine to be made into a Little Sister because he felt she knew too much about his secret and who turned you in to be made into a Big Daddy. Then, after all this, when it became clear that all of his treachery would be revealed anyway, he flooded Dionysus Park, and entire section of Rapture, drowning thousands of men, women, and children to death in the process. All of this to cover up for his own crimes and lies.
The final encounter you have is with Gil Alexander, a former scientist who, among other things, helped to develop the Big Daddy and Little Sister pair bond as well as helping to create the Vita-Chambers. I say former because by the time you meet him, Alexander is completely insane. Having fallen for Lamb’s collectivist preaching he had volunteered to be the first test subject in her ” New Utopian project.” As part of this he was injected with massive amounts of ADAM as a way to try and force all the memories of Rapture into him to destroy his individuality under the collective weight of all those memories. The only result of this was to completely fracture his mind, driving him utterly and violently insane while also turning him into a massive mutated monster. As he was going crazy he made a series of recording pleading for whoever would find him to kill him and put him out of his misery.
Along the way you are also presented with the option of harvesting or curing the Little Sisters, as in the last game. Unlike the last game, because you’re a Big Daddy you can actually use them to harvest ADAM from specific dead Splicers. The challenge here is will you harvest the Little Sisters for their ADAM in order to be able to buy more superpowers or will you restore them to their childhood innocence but sacrifice the extra ADAM boost you could have had? Your decision has an impact on who Eleanor will become and the way the game ends.
Throughout the game Eleanor refers to you as Father. You as a Big Daddy feel compelled to go to her. You’re slowly going mad without her. She doesn’t have to be kind to you. But she is nonetheless, which suggests that she really cares about you. You were the only one in her life that cared about her unconditionally. In contrast, her mother Sophia Lamb neglected Eleanor when she was young so she (Sophia Lamb) could carry out her psychological and social experiments. Even now Lamb only wants Eleanor because Lamb believes Eleanor is the key to creating the perfect utopian – by destroying the individuality of her daughter, by destroying her daughter. And as a result Eleanor despises her mother for the neglect, abuse, and torture forced on her as part of her mother’s experiments. But, Eleanor remembers you, remembers how you protected her, and has worked to bring you back not only to save her but because she loves you.
When you arrive at Persephone where you free Eleanor and she, based on your previous choices either saves or harvests the Little Sisters. There is one final climactic battle and Eleanor escapes with you dying in the process. Here, depending on what she learned from you, she either saves her mother or kills her. The game ends with your death, but you saved your daughter and Eleanor, through ADAM, will have your memories with her forever.
The Virtues of Bioshock 2
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of violence in Bioshock 2. You probably kill a thousand Splicers as you go throughout the game. And perhaps in this way the game suffers from ludonarritive dissonance, i.e. the messages of the story are out of sync with the way the game plays. But to a large degree I do not think that is the case. Delta doesn’t have very much free will. The pair bond system that links him to Eleanor essentially makes him a slave to it. He has to go to her or he will go insane and die. All of the other Splicers in the game have already gone completely insane and are incapable of reason. They will murder you and Delta cannot just choose to die because he is driven by his bond to get to Eleanor at all costs as quickly as possible. Since reasoning is rendered impossible for both sides, and not even self-sacrifice is possible, then violence and brutality can be the only outcomes.
Yet, within this paradigm of driven slavery and inevitable violence, the game offers you moments of true choice. Delta cannot help who he will be and what he must do in term of fighting the Splicers. But there is nothing compelling him to either kill or spare Grace, Stanley, or Gil. And so he has a choice. What will he do? Who is he beneath all the psychological and plasmid programming? Is there anything left of Johnny Topside inside of Subject Delta? Who will you be when you have the opportunity to be whatever you want?
Mercy
In all three of these situations you are given the option to spare or kill these characters and this choice has a large impact on what kind of person Eleanor becomes. The easiest to spare is Grace. It is clear that she is as much a victim of Sophia Lamb’s manipulation as you are and at least she has a legitimate reason to hate you. It is also clear that she actually loves Eleanor as well. Simon Wales you cannot spare. He is insane and attacks you on sight, triggering combat. Stanley Poole is the one that you are most justified in killing. He is a monster and a coward who is responsible for some of the worst crimes in the series. There is no Rapture justice system at this time. The only justice or mercy to be found is in your hands. And of all the people you can kill, Poole most deserves it. Then there is Gil Alexander. If the game challenges your sense or mercy with Poole by giving you someone who deserves to die, the game challenges you differently here by giving you someone for whom death would seem to be merciful.
The carnal satisfaction of violence is obvious. Grace just tried to murder you, repeatedly, based off a simple misunderstanding. Poole is a monster and if you snapped his neck no one would complain. You would only be serving justice. Gil has become a giant freak who is completely insane and does nothing but shout incoherent nonsense while torturing all those near him. Putting him out of his misery seems like the nicest thing you could do and you could stick it to him for everything he put you through. He is literally asking for it.
But is that who or what you really want to be?
Is that the kind of example you want to set for your daughter?
Because like all children she is watching, she is listening, and she is being molded by your example.
If you become an agent of vengeance, killing these people who have threatened you then at the end, then it changes Eleanor. Upon reaching the surface, she says:
You taught me that Justice is a contract. Once broken, it can never be mended. You sacrificed so much to preserve the innocent, but to the guilty, you offered no mercy. I loved my mother, and I never wanted to hurt her. But with what she did to us, she gave up the right to exist. My hands were shaking when I did it, but you were there to steady them.
Yes, she throttles her own mother to death out of a twisted sense of justice. There is no such thing as repentance or hope, only harsh punishment and vengeance. You basically turn her into the Punisher with superpowers. And that – a person willing to murder her own mother – is a best case scenario. In the worst case scenario (kill the three and harvest the Little Sisters) Eleanor becomes a homicidal hedonistic tyrant ready to slaughter anyone who gets in her way.
But if you spare the three? Incredible things occur.
Before the ending of the game you get an opportunity to see yourself through Eleanor’s mind. For every choice you made there is a statue representing how Eleanor sees you. If you saved Grace then there is a statue of you carrying her to safety. If you spared Stanley then the statue will show you helping him to stand up off the ground, lifting him from where he has fallen. If you spare Gil then the statue shows you pulling a human out of the jaws of a monster. In all these cases she learns service, forgiveness, redemption, and hope. The sparing of Gil is a startlingly pro-life message in that my valuing sparing him over killing him the game suggests that every life, not matter how lost, matters. Even if there is only the hope that the thing inside may be human one day. Whether he is (still) a “person” or not is irrelevant because he is a human and the value of human life is inestimable.
With these examples before her, combined with you not harvesting the Little Sisters, Eleanor saves her mother from drowning at the end of the game. Sophia is as much a metaphorical monster as Gil is a literal one and her life matters no less than his. Just as you saved him based on his innate value as a human being, Eleanor saves her mother for the same reasons. Then, Eleanor says:
And then father, the Rapture dream was over. You taught me that ‘evil’ is just a word. Under the skin, it’s simple pain. For you, mercy was victory. You sacrificed, you endured, and when given the chance, you forgave. Always. Mother believed this world was irredeemable, but she was wrong, Father. We are Utopia, you and I, and in forgiving, we left the door open for her.
The Rapture dream is over, but in waking I am reborn. This world is not ready for me, yet here I am. It would be so easy to misjudge them. You are my conscience father, and I need you to guide me. You will always be with me now, father, your memories, your drives. And when I need you, you’ll be there on my shoulder whispering. If Utopia is not a place, but a people, then we must choose carefully, for the world is about to change, and in our story, Rapture was just the beginning.
Have you ever heard so many Gospel truths in such a short amount of words in a video game? I haven’t. I could easily write an entire article dissecting these two paragraphs. Sin being the result of pain reminds me of these truths taught by the Prophet Spencer W. Kimball:
Jesus saw sin as wrong but also was able to see sin as springing from deep and unmet needs on the part of the sinner. This permitted him to condemn the sin without condemning the individual. We can show forth our love for others even when we are called upon to correct them. We need to be able to look deeply enough into the lives of others to see the basic causes for their failures and shortcomings.
Sin, evil, is not a thing that exists unto itself. It arises from the unmet needs and the pain those unmet needs cause and the error trying to wrongfully met those unmet needs cause. Every life therefore has value because no life is completely beyond redemption. The atoning power of Christ heal that suffer, meets those needs, and uplifts the sinner. Christ’s victory is not found in the burning of the wicked or the destruction of the evil, but in HIs infinite mercy and His willingness to suffer our pains and sins, die for our evils, and to raise from the grave, destroying forever the powers of Death and Hell. Justice may have been deserved, most certainly is deserved, but mercy is how He rescues us and how He wins.
Sacrifice calls forth the powers of Heaven and forgiveness is one of the most powerful acts one can perform. The world is not beyond saving, is not beyond redemption. No one and nothing is beyond the Infinite and Eternal Atonement of Jesus Christ. The salvation of all people, not their destruction, should be our goal. And as we do so, as we forgive, we create the space for repentance, forgiveness, and salvation to take place in even the hardest of hearts. This kind of love, the love of Christ, founded on forgiveness, self-sacrifice, and redemption, is the very foundation of Zion. You want to build Zion? Then live a Zion life, live this kind of life. Zion is not a specific location, it is not a place but a people. And everywhere people live these Gospel truths and Christian virtues then there to is Zion.
Family
The game also teaches another powerful Gospel truth – the importance of families. We don’t know who Eleanor’s biological father is, the game never reveals it. Subject Delta was her Big Daddy and even after that link is broken and a decade has passed, she still thinks of you as her father. Every time she speaks to you she calls you, “Father,” and your impact on her is undeniable. She says as much near then end:
Mother was right about one thing. I have been watching you, Father, studying the way you have treated others. And now I know who I am…
Every parent, good or bad, leaves an indelible impact and has an undeniable influence upon their children. Children grow up to become whosever they become in a large part because of the influence of their parents upon them. Eleanor’s mother was a sociopath, negligent at best and willing to destroy her daughter at worse all in order to achieve her socio-political dreams of the perfect Socialist utopia. What impact you have on Eleanor is determined by how you treat the Little Sisters and whether you spare the characters discussed above.
She becomes a hero or a demon based on what she sees you do. If you harvest the sisters and kill the three characters then she become brutal, taking what she needs to survive no matter who it hurts. If you spare them, Eleanor says this as she comes to recuse you:
I am free. After everything Mother has done to me, I am alive and sane enough to be curious about the sun. When you rescued my new Sisters, I felt every one. And it gave me hope for the first time in years… Now, I will do the same for all the others – starting with this one. [Eleanor cures a Little Sister] We’ve done it, Father. I’ll be there soon. [Eleanor breaks into the room where Delta is imprisoned and frees him] These suits always did make me think of you, Father. I guess I still remember you in shining armor. But now it’s my turn to fight for you.
That is both the blessing and duty of family. God holds parents accountable for teaching their children the Gospel truth, to revere the commandments of God not just in word but in action also. The most powerful way we do this is not in what we say, but in what we do. We may talk until our dying day about how important the Gospel is, but unless our children see us living the Gospel of Jesus Christ and striving to be Christ-like then they will see the truth, that for all our talk it really doesn’t matter. If we live the Gospel in word an deed then we preach the most powerful sermon one can, the sermon given by our example. And the ultimate goal is to see your children flower into the person he or she will become, an independent individual tempered by the truths you have taught, but wholly his or her own self.
Contrast this lead by example where the parent directs helps the child become who she or he can be through the power of example with the Rapture Family Cult of Sophia Lamb. The Rapture Family is a dictatorship. Lamb’s word is law. She is adored, respected, and feared. She is obeyed. Those who question her die. There is no room for mistake or error. She sits above everyone, watching everyone, ordering everything, threatening everyone, preaching her Collectivist Gospel of Self-Annihilation, and all must bow down and be thankful for her. She is a perfectly twisted image of what God is truly like, a kind of inverted reflection of Him, a commentary on the dangers and errors of materialism. But unlike the Mother Goddesses of the past, Sophia Lamb is not a nurturing or caring mother. She is a harsh one, who would torture and destroy her children in order to achieve her goals. She would dominate by force for the “greater good” and because of this achieves nothing but chaos and destruction, for herself and for the last remnants of Rapture.
Final Thoughts
Bioshock 2 is a great gameplaying experience. But its storytelling is where it really shines. What it has to say about the power of parents, the importance of families, and the redeeming qualities of mercy and love, not just as a means to an end but as a victorious ends in themselves, the way to build Zion, all of these are wonderfully conveyed and terribly important messages that the world today needs. And i haven’t even talked about Minerva’s Den, the DLC for the game which tells the story of Charles M. Porter, an inventor who is trying to come to terms with the loss of his wife, the despair causes by inevitability of death, the search for hope, and the meaning of life. But even without include the excellent DLC, Bioshock 2 is the best game of the trilogy and definitely worthy of owning so you can play it not just once, but again and again throughout the years. It is absolutely the $15 you’ll pay for the Remastered Collection on Amazon.