Shock and Awe

You play as Jack. You walk into a gorgeous art deco room. You see a pigtailed girl sticking a medical needle into a corpse to suck out his life force. From a transistor radio, you hear a faraway guide warning you to avoid her.

"You think that's a child down there? Don't be fooled," the voice of Adam tells you. "Somebody went and turned a sweet baby girl into a monster."

So there you go. It's not enough for "BioShock" -- the buzz game of the season, and the best-reviewed title in several seasons -- to send zombie nurses and machine-gunning robots after you. Even girls (named Little Sisters) want to destroy your flesh.

Claustrophobic "BioShock" is a masterpiece of a horror game. Lasting longer than more than a dozen films, at 25 hours or so, it is an unparalleled artistic achievement in cinematic, realistic gaming.

It's also the creepiest thing I've played since 2004's prison nightmare, "The Suffering." I literally get chills nearly every time I run up against a zombie.

I will be walking down, say, a medical corridor, where light bulbs just partially give me a view of the room, and I can't exactly see what's coming. Instead, I hear a zombie talking sinister threats while his or her bloody, wet footsteps draw near.

When I finally see these jerks, their fantastically drawn faces are rotted and blood-splattered. Nasty. They try to kill me with lead pipes and point-blank guns.

You fire back using pistols, machine guns and shotguns. You also wield various magical powers, like electric bolts, telekinesis and 1,000-degree flames that zap from your fingertips.

If the little girls aren't eerie enough for you, there's the ghostly, slashed woman staring at a restroom mirror, crying, "I'm all sliced up! Nobody's gonna want me."

Then there are "Big Daddies." They're "Lost in Space"-looking robots that come at you with spiral drills attached to their arms.

All of this takes place in a bizarre, art deco city under the sea in 1960.

The story is a deep narrative about an anti-utopia designed by an evil genius. Literary nods point to Ayn Rand and other paranoid writers. A heavy-handed voice-over echoes in hallways: "The parasites hate three things. Free markets. Free will. And free men."

The lead designer of the game, Ken Levine, has said he's obsessed with "Logan's Run" and "1984" because he's interested in societies where good ideas turn rotten (which would be just about any society ever, Rome onward).

So doctors in "BioShock" used stem cells, surgeries and mind control to turn the leaky city into a terrible, disgusting home. On the floor in one section, you see written in blood, "Aesthetics are a moral imperative!!!"

That's the only funny sentence in the game -- which is otherwise humorless (and offers no online multiplayer) -- since it does seem like the game's artists worked under their own little social constraints of perfectionism, where aesthetics were imperative to the bloody end.

("BioShock" retails for $60 for Xbox 360 -- Plays fun, scary and interesting. Looks unparalleled. Challenging to very challenging. Rated "M" for blood, gore, drug reference, intense violence, sexual themes and strong language. Four stars out of four.)