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On February 9th (less than a week away!) you’ll have an important choice ahead of you.  Two separate dungeons, each teeming with subterranean horrors, await beneath wave and mountain.  On one side is Rapture, BioShock 2’s undersea nightmare.  On the other, no less than Hell itself, its gates thrown open by the stalwart hero of Dante’s Inferno. Both of these settings offer action, terror and mystery, but each retains an individual vision of human suffering.  How is Dante’s cosmic torture chamber different from Andrew Ryan’s drowned metropolis?  I’m here today as your Atlas/Virgil to guide you through the chaos.  Buckle up.

No Kings or Gods, Only Man–The City of Rapture

BioShock 2

Rapture is one of the most exciting locations in today’s video game landscape.  Its atmosphere and gravitas propelled an otherwise unremarkable first-person shooter into the realm of celebrated classics.  Built by Andrew Ryan, captain of industry and philosophical giant, Rapture was once home to an unprecedented community of intellectuals and free spirits.  Unfortunately, it was not destined to become the underwater paradise Ryan first envisioned.  The taste of power soon warped the city’s inhabitants into ravenous, gene-slurping beasts, and an entirely new culture of fear and oppression took shape.

Rapture is an underworld in the classical tradition.  In its most compelling moments it’s more sad than hostile and more haunting than frightening.  It’s alive with ghosts and voices from the past, coming to the player in the form of audio diaries.  The old vending machines still sing the same obsolete jingles as people walk by.  Even the deranged Splicers cling to memories they can no longer completely understand:  a fair number of them roam the halls muttering, “Jesus loves me, this I know…”  Rapture’s vision of Hell is a place of ultimate neglect and decay, the hollowed-out, flooded shell of something great.

And yet, Rapture remains compelling, at least in part, because it also contains flashes of innocence.  Surely the Little Sisters, compelled by their master (no spoilers!) to scour the city for corpses to harvest, are not the sort of children you’d expect to see topside.  But the little games they play, the nicknames they give to their massive protectors–these are the trappings of a normal (ideal?) childhood.  The Sisters remind players and Splicers of everything the city has lost.

Overall, Rapture is a more ephemeral, more atmospheric kind of Hell, ruled fundamentally by disorder and chaos.  David Bowie might’ve called it a “sunken dream.”  Waterlogged, choked of life, and nearly washed away, Rapture challenges gamers to hold onto their humanity–whether that means compassion or pragmatism–in a crowd of monsters.

Abandon All Hope–The Circles of Hell

The most obvious difference between the Hell of Dante’s Inferno and BioShock 2’s Rapture is elemental.  Unlike the drowned city of Splicers, Dante’s Hell is dominated by fire.  Rapture may be lonely, but Hell can scarcely contain all the lost souls and demons trapped within.  The environment itself is alive, hurling fiends and traps at Dante as he soldiers on in the name of love.  Here, there’s no mysterious backstory to puzzle out, no lingering voices pitching EVE syringes and Plasmids.  In Dante’s Hell, everyone knows the score:  this is a place where God makes sinners pay for their crimes.  That’s all you need to know.

Unlike Rapture’s Splicers, the demons of Dante’s Hell are truly inhuman.  Some of the foes were once sinners on Earth, but many are creatures whose very essence is torment and pain.  Like Rapture, Hell tests the player’s humanity, but it does so by comparing Dante to supernatural agents of evil.  There is a bigger cosmic plan at work here–an idea explicitly forbidden in atheist Rapture–and Dante dares to go outside his assigned place in it all.  As a hero, Dante is a source of chaos in a world of regimented order.  Hell is divided into Circles and ruled over by a strict hierarchy of demonic princes.  Dante’s take on this is essentially “screw that.”  He doesn’t care whose little pointy tail he has to kick in order to get what he wants–he’s ready to take on all comers.

Dante’s Hell is designed to accommodate this heroic journey of rebellion and challenge, while Rapture is more focused on a human journey of redemption and survival.  Both of these nightmares deserve the word ‘hell’ (though only one gets to have it in upper-case) because they serve as dramatic crucibles, putting the best and worst of human nature on display.  Each has its own area of interest, its own perils to overcome, but both present a cohesive vision of damnation.

Whether you seek the emotional catharsis of Rapture or the bold self-definition of Dante’s Hell, you’ll be able to explore the pits of human nature on February 9th.

[Image Source:  Video Games Republic, Console Monster, TechShout]

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