We get no sense of place, no sense of the cabin fever and no real sense of the desperation that people feel when they realise it is not the paradise they were promised. Nevertheless, that is no reason to avoid describing the various wondrous places within the confines of the city of Rapture. If you read this having not played the Bioshock games, there are things that will not make sense to you without the context. The author assumes familiarity with the games. Everything you could want is here, yet the book feels lacking in so many places.įirstly, there is very little sense of place. The book ends as the civil war is in full swing between Atlas and Ryan. McDonagh is a character we only come to learn about through the audio logs dotted around Rapture in the games, so this is a pleasing element to the story. Surprisingly, and aside from Ryan and Fontaine, the character with the most coverage is Bill McDonagh – the plumber turned chief engineer. We see as the city gradually attracts Doctor Suchong, Augustus Sinclair, Sofia Lamb and Brigid Tenenbaum – and, of course, Frank Fontaine. Slowly, surely, he starts to put together the plans for his city and starts to recruit people who think the way he does. Several decades later, the arch-capitalist Andrew Ryan is appalled at the “Socialist” New Deal and sets about devising a project where people like him can live and work in the capitalist utopia that the USA failed to become. It follows Ryan’s early life as a young boy escaping the Russian Revolution with his parents and going to America. (The third game is set in an equally impossible city, one in the sky and fifty years previously).

It is the story of Andrew Ryan and the founding of Rapture – the city beneath the sea where the first two incredible games are set. This one has some very good reviews so I took the plunge. I’ve generally been mistrusting of this type of book, feeling they often lack the depth of other books. Having recently replayed all of the Bioshock games (including the DLCs I never played before), Amazon recommended me this – an official novelisation of the early years of the city where the first two games (and both DLCs) are based.

Bioshock rapture john shirley