Despite all of these impressive elements, what was to me most breathtaking about BioShock by far is how well-crafted it all is. To an absolutely amazing degree, the world is packed with context--just as Rapture seems to have burst at the seams with unrestrained human ambition, so too does BioShock practically strain with the amount of carefully constructed detail layered throughout. During the first few hours, without any tedious text crawls or out-of-context narrated exposition, Irrational manages to impart a great deal of evidence as to what happened to Rapture.

There seems to have been a particular moment when things went wrong, but it was no single factor that did it. Rapture's fall was a physical breach, a scientific disaster, a psychological breakdown, a moral decline--overambition to the highest degree. I will decline from elaborating on the content of specific points, but suffice it to say there are many avenues by which to discover just what happened.

Transmissions from Ryan increasingly demonstrate the society's immense hubris. Scattered audio logs from cirizens of Rapture tell the stories of individuals before and during the decline--in these tales are nestled nuggets that refer to greater events or suggest a more overarching social dysfunction. Different types of advertising reveal how inhabitants spent their money--and, therefore, what they strove to acquire and what their desires had become. Lingering Rapture residents clinging onto their last scraps of sanity provide a distorted but illuminating link to life prior to the end, while photographs depict crystallized images of the Rapture of ideals. Even the graffiti scrawled on the walls contributes to the richness of the world. It would be nearly overwhelming were it not so endlessly engrossing.

(Skip this paragraph to avoid potential spoilers.) In a early moment of invigoratingly mounting horror, you come across the offices of a plastic surgeon who, after perfecting the art of gracing faces with traditional beauty, still finds himself driven to further his craft. Slowly, and piece by piece, you begin to realize that, like abstract artists before him, the doctor eventually abandoned notions of traditional beauty and set out to realize his vision in less predictable ways. Picasso-inspired target images and diagrams reveal the artistic approach the doctor took with the faces of his trusting patients. "We said, 'Wait a minute, what about this plastic surgeon who's an idealist about beauty? How would that go wrong?'" recalled Levine when I brought up the sequence. "I started writing all these ideas that came out of that, then some other guys said they were going to build these little Steinman shrines throughout the level, giving more hints to his character."

"Every room feels different," Levine went on. "Every time you're in an office, it's a different office--different decorations, different things, a different vibe. Maybe you're in a dentist's office and you can tell that this dentist loves tennis. It's not a prefab thing. The game gets more exploratory as it goes on. I mean, it's not Grand Theft Auto, but it's also not Half-Life. It's in a space between.

I asked Levine to elaborate on his attitude towards narrative and game design. "If you've got to just tell the player, then it's wrong," he said regarding exposition. "The whole city is a visual metaphor--this city that looks like their ideals. All the water pouring into it is basically what happened to their ideals. It's all visual metaphor. We call it mise en scene, you know, because we're pretentious fucks, with these little visual moments we build where you can look at it and say, 'Oh my God, I know what happened here,' rather than reading some extensive thing. It's a storytelling technique."

(I guardedly admitted that I had used the term mise en scene myself in a recent conversation about Valve's Half-Life series. "Ah, so you're a pretentious fuck too!" laughed Levine.)

If there is anything that might be worrying about BioShock, it is simply that the amount of gameplay, atmosphere, and sheer information contained in the first few hours is so densely packed that it is difficult to imagine how a team could reasonably create a game that carries on at that pace through the entire campaign. If it does, however, I have no doubt that Levine and his crew at Irrational Games will have managed to create something that will prove to be among the more complex, weighty, visceral, and atmospheric games in recent memory.

Irrational Games' BioShock is set to be released in North America on August 21 for PC and Xbox 360. The game will follow in Europe on August 24.