Anyway, I made this 10th anniversary playthrough a special one by playing through the Burial At Sea - Episode 2 DLC for the first time since its release. To be completely honest, I am still uncertain about what to think of it. On the one hand, it felt fantastic to embark on a new adventure through Rapture, which remains one of the most immersive and imaginative settings in video game history. I appreciated the slightly different approach to gameplay and pacing, scaling it back into a more traditional immersive sim/stealth game with heightened stakes and limited combat capabilities. It made it feel like one of the classics of the genre.
On the other hand, the story... my gut feeling tells me that it is not very good, and it plays out more like a fanfic that is just one retcon away from becoming ridiculous. It tries too hard to shoehorn the character of Elizabeth into pre-existing events of the original game to answer questions that already got a satisfying closure, and nobody asked or even cared about any additional explanation. It reminded me of some of those hacky stories from the Star Wars expanded universe that I read as a kid, in which various background characters that you merely glimpsed in the movies were suddenly given elaborate backstories and an inflated purpose that was entirely absurd.
Overall, compared to the main game - it's a bit of a letdown. I'm much more interestd in what Levine and co. are cooking up for us with Judas, because going back to write fanfic for the original Bioshock is something that even someone like him wasn't able to pull off convincingly.