Lucky you, you'll get to explore that city entire and interact with its mysterious benefactors in what amounts at least mechanically to an identity quest cum tactical shooter. But that catch-all tag misleadingly sells short what BioShock's up to, since it's really the spiritual successor to design lead Ken Levine's terrifying, transfixing, ultimately unclassifiable System Shock 2. Like the latter, BioShock is less a battery of point-and-spray encounters punctuated by shallow plot reveals than a tale sketched by Rapture's mise en scène, where the city's art-deco spires, billboards, terrariums, markets, pavilions, power cores and flickering neon signs weave their own architectural libretto crosscut by your escalating diegetic discoveries. Instead of check-me-off cutscenes and forced interactions, Rapture's history arrives in unreliable fragments, a network of memories unfurling in found audio diaries, psychosomatic episodes, ominous dioramas and bloody graffiti. Your objective is less about climbing to the top of some arbitrary melee pyramid than translating all those bits and pieces into a coherent history.

As you poke your first-person view into the city's businesses, apartments and theaters you'll have to contend with Rapture's curious citizenry by synthesizing weapons and special abilities. Guns and other projectile devices can be customized to shoot or handle better, while a medley of upgradeable genetic abilities lets you enhance your intellect and physique and wield paranormal powers that, among other things, can turn foes into friends or enemies against each other. Almost everything can be fiddled with, from hackable security cameras, turrets and bots to the detritus gathered from desks, shelves and corpses, which can be recombined in special machines to craft special ammo, hacking tools and genetic enhancements. You can even conduct ability-enhancing research by snapping pictures with a camera fed by film rolls you'll have to scrounge for (along with ammo and everything else) in Rapture's water-shadowed walkways and chambers.

Paradise by the bathysphere light

BioShock may not be the best solo shooter going, but that's beside the point. It tells the best-conceived, -written and -executed story ever experienced in a game. It doesn't shy from either ideological or symbolic complexity, but at the same time it manages to convey both without high-concept jargon or pedantry. That it happens to be a capable shooter with a moderately sophisticated AI ecology on top of everything else? Well, that's just gravy.

Maybe it's the Schlegelian way that irony builds on irony in the game between strands of jaunty music and some of your decidedly less jaunty tasks. Maybe it's the omnipresent tension between the very serious, very real story and the casual, almost blithe way the game operates at the purely mechanical and tactical level. Maybe it's the unprecedented level of environmental detail, where literal in-game art and architecture collide with a kind of impalpable ambient aesthetic that shatters gaming's "fourth wall"—the one that tends to separate us emotionally from whatever setting or sandbox we're playing in. Whatever the case, BioShock may be the first game you can rightly call "haunting" and "unforgettable" without sounding like a melodramatic twit.

Of course the game isn't perfect, but then nothing is, so it's almost beneath me to mention stuff like the unnecessarily palm-slapping, view-obfuscating wrench, or your inability to see what you already have equipped before buying new stuff at upgrade stations, or the way you can't collect most items (you can only activate them on pickup). The game's stunning tells-itself story is also occasionally interrupted by flawed design, i.e., They're About To Get You moments, except that they're not and never will—you can just put the pad down and grab a soda during these sequences, since nothing bad actually happens, kind of wrecking the moment. The hacking mini-game never really evolves (say, the way it does in Spider-Man 3, incidentally one of the few good thing about that game), and toward the end you're so powerful that cracking cameras, safes and keypads are just tedious chores. But the biggest problem actually worth mentioning involves the endgame, which after dozens of hours of shocks and revelations feels tacked-on and embarrassingly trite. I can't tell you why, but once you're through it, you'll probably wish they'd ended things at a more poignant moment (very nearly the game's best) about two-thirds of the way through.

To reference film critic Roger Ebert citing German director Werner Herzog, we live in an age starved of new images. At its best, BioShock offers the kind of nourishment some of us have been dreaming about for decades, a sort of triumphant syncretic experience that film and literature and music by definition cannot replicate. The tragedy is that games aren't this; BioShock reminds us that they can be, and why they should.