Burial at Sea

The death of Elizabeth puts an end to the Bioshock trilogy, leaving me there, sitting before the screen, with a mixed feeling of anger and sadness. I should have fallen into sleep, yet I have not. I can’t. The emotional burst is there, it is definitely there.  I could not get sleep. I am thinking about the death of Elizabeth.

It is rare in video games to see as fascinating a figure as Elizabeth in Bioscok Infinity. She is beautiful and intelligent, with a certain kind of charm that is rarely found in other female characters in video games. It is a strange mixture of girlish naivety and a rebellious hardness. Soon after the first encounter between DeWitt the player and Elizabeth, we saw the naive side of Elizabeth rapidly become folded, while the intrinsic hardness of her personality becomes more and more obvious as she struggles to get her own freedom. Geralt the Whitewolf is the whitewolf long before the player play as him, yet Elizabeth does not become Elizabeth until the player meets her. In this sense, Elizabeth is a truly interactive character. The player is responsible for the development of Elizabeth, for what she has become, for her happiness and sadness, for her anger and fear. And at the end, out of one’s own free will, the player died in Elizabeth’s hand.

It is so cruel of the developers to make the player to repeat what DeWitt did for Elizabeth while playing as Elizabeth. DeWitt becomes Dewitt before the player becomes Dewitt, yet Elizabeth is different. While playing as Elizabeth, it is rather not possible to forget how  Elizabeth growed up in a few days in the stroy of Columbia. Seeing DeWitt dying is not a very hard thing to accept emotionally, since the player is prepared. Yet seeing Elizabeth dying is another thing, no matter how free-willingly she is, the player can never be prepared. Unless one plays Burial at Sea before playing Columbia, one can never accept the death of Elizabeth.

Of course, the death of Elizabeth closed the narrative of the story of the Bioshock trilogy. And since it is also the last game of Irrational games, the significance is twofold. At the end, walking through all the lighthouses, out among the stars, the smile of Elizabeth dying, deep in the Pacific ocean, darkness crawled upon Rapture city, the end of everything.