BioShock is not only the most oh-my-god-save-me-
from-this-grim-hell-frightening game I've ever played, it may be the most compulsively thoughtful and obsessively constructed games ever made. There is a recipe for the horror here, and it's part 1984, part Eyes Wide Shut, part Atlas Shrugged.

The complex plot in this shooter meets role playing game? Lost-like, my plane crashes. Immersed in black water and swimming away from the fuselage fire, I discover a dark castle. Once inside, a sad, ironic version of "Beyond The Sea" plays on a piano as I enter a bathysphere into a strange city called Rapture. It's in this Atlantis gone insane that I must help a man reunite with his wife and child—and save myself.

The creepy sounds jumping from the black depths scare me more than Doom III before it. The well-researched 1940s culture make me think that someone as obsessive as Gore Vidal was in Creation helped map the plot line. And the graphics—the inky shadows, the demented Coney Island-like billboards and signs, the way the smoke and fog and gushing seawater moves—are stop-this-game-I-must-look-around awesome. It's almost too much. Bioshock may well be the game of the year.—Harold Goldberg