The Game Boy: Best Games You Missed in 2011 -- BioShock 2: Minerva's Den

Posted 01/04/2012 at 12:05pm | by Nathan Grayson

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My favorite games of the year were Bastion, Skyrim, and the Witcher 2. Wow, that was easy. And hey, I already wrote extensively about all of them. Convenient! So, for the next few days, I'm gonna discuss some of 2011's lesser-known greats. First up, the PC version of BioShock 2's ages-in-coming story DLC, Minerva's Den. Oh, and I'm also gonna go ahead and slap a Big Daddy-sized SPOILER WARNING on this one -- just to be safe.

I shoot first and ask questions later. I'm not much of a talker. I just do what I'm told. Who am I?

Give up? OK, fine, I'll uncover my nametag. Yep, that's right: “Hello, my name is... Every First-Person Shooter Main Character Ever.” Yeah, my parents had an odd sense of humor. (If you think that's bad, you should meet my brother, Racist 14-Year-Old's Xbox Live Gamertag.) Anyway, I have a teensy bit of a problem: My entire existence makes no sense.

Main characters who communicate almost entirely through cricket chirps and whatever sound a tumbleweed makes have always been something of a silly conceit. Yes, we as players are supposed to become the brain our scarecrow of an avatar sings showtunes about, but it's only possible to suspend your disbelief for so long in the face of complete silence. On top of that, it's generally pretty boring -- especially in the context of highly scripted, otherwise character-centric stories where everyone else acts like you're Mr/Ms Charmer McCharisma.

Don't get me wrong: If Gordon Freeman ever speaks, I'll hold the world's entire supply of crowbars hostage until Valve's act of sacrilege is nothing but an unpleasantly unholy memory. However, as a general rule, I don't want to be the disembodied brain manning a floating gun. I can be me any time. Games give me the chance to think and act like anyone else.

And yet, the main character of Minerva's Den is one of my favorites of all time. He never speaks a word.

That's because Minerva's Den is the silent protagonist perfected. It creates a story in which a non-speaking main character makes perfect sense, and then it turns the whole thing on its head entirely.

I'll admit that I was initially skeptical. Incredibly so, in fact. The game unceremoniously sealed me inside the diving suit of some random Big Daddy, and chattering voices in my ear told me everything short of when I should draw my next breath. Translated from Big Daddy whale sounds, that's about as close to “Hi, I'm Every First-Person Shooter Main Character Ever” as you can get.

But, as I slowly unraveled the story surrounding a Rapture-running AI called “The Thinker,” I also sipped on a gradual trickle of information about the machine's creator, Charles Porter. I picked up plenty, of course, as present day Porter ordered me from place-to-place in an attempt to liberate his creation from Rapture's increasingly insane depths, but the more interesting tidbits -- as per usual -- came from audio recordings scattered around the crumbling undersea utopia.