Minerva's Den

The team behind Minerva’s Den have done the impossible – building on a masterpiece and managing to improve on it.

Bioshock 2 box-art. Source: Kotaku/
2Kgames

Minerva’s Den was a stand-alone piece of down-loadable content released for the 2010 videogame Bioshock 2. But it wasn’t just more of the same – it had very big shoes to fill. Bioshock 2 scored ok but wasn't generally well regarded. It was itself a sequel to one of the most significant videogames of the generation.

Released in 2007 on Xbox 360 and PC, and a year later on PS3, Bioshock will be remembered for its story and setting as much as its gameplay. It wasn’t your typical first-person shooter.

If the combat was fun, it was in spite of sluggish controls and overly twitchy artificial intelligence of its enemies. A great shooter this was not, at least on console. Bioshock combined traditional gun-play with a series of powers that could be elegantly combined with environmental tools to great effect.

Bioshock’s real success came from the atmosphere of its setting – the underwater city of Rapture. This city was a dystopian art-deco ruin inspired by the writings of Ayn Rand – a place where the world’s greatest had gone to escape the tyranny of the masses.

Of course it didn’t end well. As a result of unchecked gene-therapy, advanced technology and confined spaces, Rapture served as the perfect setting for a sci-fi shooter. Like the best science fiction, the game asked tough questions of the player – how far would they go to survive in this dog-eat-dog society.

Bioshock stands as one of the few games that shows an awareness of the constraints of videogame narrative. It managed to shake the player’s understanding of why their character had been doing what they’d been doing throughout the story.

The Minerva’s Den team had big shoes to fill and they set their sights high – the add-on was described as “a new narrative in the world of Rapture”. And they delivered.

Bioshock 2's Big Sister Source: Cultofrapture/2KGames

Minerva’s Den explores many of the same themes as last year’s experiment in exploration and narration, Dear Esther. More than two years before Dear Esther used emotive imagery and audio to deliver to the player the sense of grief and loss that comes from the death of a loved one, Minerva’s Den did much the same thing.

It wouldn’t do to spoil the story of Minerva’s Den, any more than to spoil the story of the original, but there are a number of key points where this spin-off improves on its forbearer that are worth a mention.

Bioshock suffered from a severe case of the third-act problem. After its mind altering climactic sequence the game and the player lost all sense of direction. Unnecessary hours of gameplay padded out the experience and led to a conclusive battle so poorly designed that it left most gamers with a bad taste in their mouth.

Not so Minerva’s Den, which moves at a clip from exploration to revelation to conclusion. It tips its hat a little too early - you’ll most likely figure out the twist just minutes before the reveal but once it comes the game quickly changes pace from ferocious combat to pathos. And then neatly wraps things up with speed.

It is pacing in general that makes Minerva’s Den stand out. Set in the central computing area of Rapture this standalone adventure only takes a few hours to complete. Inside that short spell the player is given absolute freedom over what powers they take into battle. This is a full game condensed into a manageable duration. It maintains the core combat of the original and brings in elements from Bioshock 2 such as the new enemy type – the Big Sister.

The game makes all of Bioshock’s powers available from the outset – it’s up to the player how much time they want to put in to explore for rare weapons or more currency to spend on upgrades. The carefully balanced risk-and-reward loop that comes from exploration is a masterstroke.

So impressive was Minerva’s Den that it’s lead designer Steve Gaynor was hired by Irrational Games (the team behind the original Bioshock) to work on their next game Bioshock Infinite – an unrelated game set to consider themes of power and influence and right and wrong in much the same way as the original.

Hopefully he managed to have an impact on the game’s direction before moving on to start his own new studio last year. I look forward to their first project Gone Home.