BioShock Infinite 7: I am Booker DeWitt, Destroyer of Narratives

In which we are cheated out of factory tour, run into a totally unforeseeable plot twist and kill an anarchist.

So, we’re storming this factory, or so I’ve heard. After gunning down the little resistance left, we press on towards… no. No, wait. We don’t. Didn’t get the memo. We just stay here, in front of the next set of doors, doing small talk and stuff.

It’s just like the AI knows that there are no more enemies behind this door. No more shooting. We’re done here, the entrance is our. We can go home now. An elevator waits for us in the next room. This could have been handled by having our allies push on and wait in the NEXT room. Maybe a line or two how the stairs to the factory floors are blocked by debris and that they’ll wait for reinforcements. Something like this. Anything would be better than… this. Disregard the last sentence, there are actually way too many ways to fuck this up further.

Did I mention before how good this game handles dialogue-interrupts? In the elevator to the factory roof, where the airship is parked, we get a call. Elisabeth was talking at this moment, the phone was clearly meant to interrupt her (the subtitle ended with “[phone rings]”, ffs) and there was the dreaded second of silence. Oh well. You can’t win every time, and it still works most of the time.
On the other end of the line was no one else but Daisy Fitzroy. As you might have guessed: she didn’t have good news. We complicate her narrative, as this worlds DeWitt is both dead and the face of the revolution. We’re either an imposter or back from the dead, and the latter would be REALLY difficult to explain. So unfortunately, we have to go. On the top floor, we meet some Vox-troops who start shooting as soon as they see us. Mind you, not as soon as the elevator arrives. I have to leave the elevator or start shooting. There are probably hopefully technical reasons for this.

During the ride we also pass several floors of Fink’s factory. Fink produces vending machines, Eve Salt, infusions, vigors, guntowers, this weird vigor-driven electrical machine things… everything. That is, everything the player uses. In the same factory.
Okay, one thing seen that the player doesn’t actively use are the freight-trains, but that may be the shipping-division. It’s a bit sad that the designers cheated us out of our close quarters-shooting in a deadly industrial setting, but as Infinite isn’t big on killing-by-environment, this probably wouldn’t be as much fun as I like to imagine. Enjoy some impressions:

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Enough with the impressions, we still have to take over an airship.
On the top floor we find a voicelog from Mr. Fink. He got some of his ideas from the tears, seeing things on the other side. His at the time of recording latest insight is a way to combine man and machine, and maybe Comstock could use one of these creatures to guard whatever he locked up in that tower…20141209_BI_Songbird1

Leaving the hall, we move up to witness Fitzroy shooting Fink.
This event is preceded by Elisabeth screaming “Booker!” and running up the stairs. Then there are these moments when Elisabeth throws you stuff she “found” (money outside of combat, ammunition, medpacks or salt in combat), preceded by a line like “catch!”. So here’s what happened:
Elisabeth screamed “Booker!”, started running up the stairs, turned around, “catch!” and threw me a coin. I’m pretty sure this is NOT the way this scene was planned by the designers…
On top of the stairs we witness Fitzroy executing Fink. Messy business.

Yes, Fitzroy smears some of Fink’s blood over her face. Directly afterwards she orders her men to shoot us and Elisabeth and burn the remains. So we shoot our way out of this situation and have the opportunity to pry a weaponized tesla coil out of a tear. While this is awesome 9000+, I do wonder where this thing comes from. Everything else we could summon before existed in the game before, and tesla coils were ever only background scenery, never weaponized.
20141209_BI_Factory_TeslacoilHere I had my first game-breaking glitch: one of the enemies spawned behind a plot door. Plot doors can only be opened when every enemy is dealt with. We cannot open the plot door to kill the mook we need dead to open the plot door. HelloO, checkpoint. Let’s do the shooty stuff again.

Afterwards, we find out that Fitzroy has a hostage. A boy in a suit, probably Fink’s son. Elisabeth asks for a boost into a nearby ventilation shaft (I see what you did there), so she can sneak around Fitzroy while we divert her.
DeWitt tries to talk her out of killing the kid, but Fitzroy insists that the Founders (aka Comstock’s men) are nothing but weeds which need to be burned. We have a wee bit of extremism going on here, and if there was a time where I could sympathise with her goals… it’s over. Elisabeth stabs her from behind with a pair of scissors, the child goes off-screen (maybe there is some interaction with him, but I missed one room here (and an infusion (and with it, the “collect all infusions”-achievement))) and a rather unsettled Elisabeth makes a run for the airship, locking herself into the bedroom. We get a chance to comfort her by pressing the interact-button (it doesn’t work and is in fact what gets her running) – this reminds me a bit too much about the scene in the last CoD which went through the internet. Scripted scenes are bad, but button-pressing is sometimes worse. I wont even start about quicktime-events, of which Infinite has remarkable lack of.
What puzzles me here: Fitzroy wants the child dead. Why didn’t she just kill the boy right after Fink? Why does she hold him hostage? If she is the extremist she’s portrayed as, why does she hesitate even for a second to shoot this kid? There is absolutely no reason for this behaviour apart from Elisabeth’s character arc. I don’t know how this could have been made better, but this is… strange.

That’s it for today. Part 8 will have fewer screenshots.

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