Bioshock Infinite – Booker And Comstock
Riding the choppy waters aboard a small rowboat, a battle-scarred soldier named Booker Dewitt sees a lighthouse in the distance. A brother and sister team at the head of the boat – the Luteces – look him over, turn to the looming sanctuary and announce: “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt.”
Into the lighthouse we go, which catapults Booker into the city of Columbia, suspended above the clouds. Here it’s revealed that a girl named Elizabeth has been imprisoned Rapunzel style inside a tower by the evil ruler of the city, Comstock. So proceeds a fairly ordinary first-person shooter – albeit dressed in pretty frock – as you rescue Elizabeth from her tower and fight off Comstock’s forces.
But towards the end game, Bioshock Infinite indulges one of the best twists in storytelling history.
The Luteces aboard the boat at the beginning of the game are inventors of a device that can open tears in the universe, and through a twist of fate, Elizabeth has inherited that power. Elizabeth reveals that there are infinite universes made up of constants and variables. One constant, which occurs long before the game begins, never changes: namely that Booker has killed in the name of war and attends a baptism to cleanse his sins. However, here the winds of fate diverge. In some universes, Booker rejects the baptism and returns to a normal life, where his wife gives birth to a baby named Anna DeWitt. In other universes, he accepts the baptism and becomes a religious fanatic who dreams up a world in the clouds – calling it Columbia.
Yes, Booker DeWitt is Comstock.
In Comstock’s world, the zealous leader uses the Luteces to convince people he has God-given powers. At one point, he opens up a tear and spots an alternative universe where he has an all-powerful daughter (Booker’s). He uses the Luteces to lure Anna DeWitt into his reality and names her Elizabeth.
Wanting to atone for the monster Comstock becomes, the Luteces use their power to transport Booker into Comstock’s universe. As a heads and tails board demonstrates at the beginning of the game, this has happened hundreds of time before. But a new variable allows Booker to successfully save Elizabeth before he ends his life in Comstock’s universe, disrupting the course of history and killing the tyrannical leader in the multiverse, too.
What’s more, the Luteces aren’t brothers or sisters at all – but variables. In one universe they appear as a man, in another as a woman, but through their own twist of fate they can now span the multiverse.
Head spinning, yet? The name Bioshock Infinite suddenly takes on new weight, and the delicious twist elevates this game far above contemporary shooters.