“There’s Always a Lighthouse” was meant to be a moving revelation that underpinned BioShock Infinite’s narrative theme: how countless characters and ideologies could be found in an infinite spectrum of potential universes, all of which could intertwine. It was an original idea, and the sequel came close to realizing it, but it failed at every hurdle, too obsessed with being perceived as politically mature and emotionally stirring. Sure, it has something to say, but it’s also a game about digging through trash cans for rotten food and shooting crows out of your hands.

It’s still a great game, but its ambitious story was overloaded with pompous ideology and self-righteous ideas, and it fell victim to its own lofty ideas of what intelligent narrative exploration should be. One of the key insights is that freedom fighters are just as flawed as racist oppressors because they resort to violence to further their cause. It doesn’t matter, because Booker DeWitt is a human army marching in a hail of bullets and inferno. Violence calls for violence. It doesn’t matter if you’re fighting for equal rights or a world without racism. It’s a bit of a silly story when you think about it, but gamers want to feel smart, and so BioShock Infinite became the hallmark of narrative greatness for a while.

But history has not been kind to the game. In recent years, the game has been the subject of critical reexamination, with fans and critics alike reexamining what worked and what didn’t in Irrational Games’ problematic sequel. It shares a lot in common with Cyberpunk 2077, as shown in a multitude of trailers and press demos prior to release, but they’re nowhere near the layered experience we ultimately get. Perhaps many of the complex narrative threads and player decisions got lost in the inevitable evolution into a triple-A shooter, with frequent gunfights and unexpected twists taking precedence over what we might have remembered.

What makes BioShock Infinite satirical is not so much the actual story content of BioShock Infinite, but what the story being told represents across the medium. Like I said, we put it on a pedestal and celebrated it as a pseudo-intelligent example of what all games should strive to be, especially since it had fun twists and themes we hadn’t seen in any big-budget game before.

It launched at the same time as The Last of Us, another game with a mature and thoughtful narrative. It gave players a story and characters that weren’t afraid to ask human questions about love, loss, and the situation, while simultaneously leaving us wondering: what is right and what is wrong in a world that is fundamentally flawed in many ways. It’s aged much better because it never tried to be smarter than it was. Anyway it’s basically Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in video game form, offering a ray of hope in the midst of an apocalypse where all seems lost. BioShock Infinite, on the other hand, wanted to be more than that, and failed. You can’t blame it for its ambition, but you could also spend all day deconstructing its pathetic execution.

The original BioShock, which took the Objectivist ideology founded by authors like Ayn Rand and took it to its most logical extreme, has aged much better because, for all its political themes and dense world, its central message is obvious and simple. I love this game, it’s truly fascinating, but Infinite falls apart because it tried to do too much without understanding the narrative and mechanical foundations on which this series is built.

Learning a bunch of words and topics doesn’t make you smarter; using them makes you smarter. BioShock Infinite achieves this with the grace of a toddler doodling on the walls of his living room. And yet, it was a necessary milestone for the medium. We needed a game like this to examine where we stand as storytellers, to see how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. You have to push the boat out too far to see how far you can get to shore without dropping your head underwater. I’m sure you can see Booker’s unhappy little face still simmering under the surface.

BioShock Infinite has the worst story in any video game, but it comes from good intentions, wanting to portray complex characters and themes that the medium didn’t dare touch in 2013. This led to blockbusters being riskier, more mature, and perhaps holding us back when it comes to emotional investment. The fact that we didn’t deliver on those promises didn’t matter, because we learned more from that failure than any success.