Ambiance
Note: I was asked for images, but I can’t grab screenshots from my PS3 and my room is lit all wrong for pictures. Perhaps I should include interweb-fount images just to show the general look of the game I’m moving through…
In fact, that’s what I’ll do for this post.
First out is the setting: your first-person character is trying to get the heck out of this creepy place called Rapture. When you show up, someone who is, as far as I’ve seen so far, the only person left his sanity, notices your arrival and begs you for help. It’s implied that you will help him, and so he gives you tasks and guides you through your journey. He can tell you what things are, but he isn’t able to tell you “look out behind you!” or “if you get just one step further in to this area, you’re going to be ambushed”.
Rapture is slowly being waterlogged. There is water everywhere, and ice, too, at some entrances. It’s mostly dark, with lights having smashed out by frantic crazies or shorted out by the moisture.
As I mentioned before, there is no constant music in this game. It’s quiet, so that you can hear all the crazy mutterings of splicers, and their footsteps and clatterings as they roam the map, oblivious to you until you get too close… for the most part.
Splicers, as your mutant enemies are called, are crazy with a lust for Adam, a commodity of a sort, which allows you to modify your genetic makeup further and further, in order to gain more power. They are examples of what can happen if you throw integrity to the winds and do whatever you can for power. Their minds are broken, and you often come across a scene where a splicer is treating an inanimate object as if it were something alive or at least more precious. My first such encounter with this ended with me acquiring a pistol, after I offed the splicer who was crooning and murmering to it as it lay in a baby carriage.
Some splicers are more with it than others, though. One persistent character wearing a surgical mask and toting a wooden crate took great pleasure in flinging grenades at me while deftly evading fire. Once, after I had left the screens which took me through acquiring my first engineering tonic (which heightens your skill at hacking machines by giving you more time to do so), I turned to move on, only to see another splicer in a surgical mask standing directly behind me. He stared and muttered something for a split second before proceeding to whale on me before I could react.
As I wander the maps, keeping an eye out for shining objects (which is how you can find useful dropped items in the unlit areas) and movement, and an ear out for muttering, footsteps, and other movement, I realize that I am essentially adapting to my environment. Of course, it’s taken me several deaths to do so (thanks goodness for vita-chambers), but this game shows me that I can, in fact, become capable of stealth, strategy, and decision, some things which I never had to worry about when I played Katamari Damacy or Super Mario Bros.
(Sorry this post is a little later than 6 — I swear the majority of it was written on Thursday!)
(Edit 2: inserting images didn’t work, so get ready for an image post instead..)
