Bioshock Burial at Sea, Morrowind's Hidden Depths, and a Spoiled 007 That Got Better For It

Every week, a handful of editors at Eurogamer pull back the curtain on what's actually occupying their evenings — and this week's roundup is one of the more entertainingly self-aware entries in recent memory. Between a maliciously bad game recommendation, a decades-old RPG revisited with fresh eyes, and a James Bond title experienced entirely out of order, the staff managed to surface some genuinely interesting observations about how we engage with games at all. It's the kind of column that makes you think as much as it makes you laugh.

Connor's week was defined by a friendship of dubious quality. A close friend has developed a habit of recommending games they know full well will be painful to play — not out of cruelty exactly, but out of what Connor describes as 'great joy' derived from his suffering. This time around, the recommendation was Burial at Sea, the DLC expansion for BioShock Infinite. Connor's verdict is unsparing: the expansion is 'truly terrible,' shockingly so, in ways he finds difficult to adequately capture in a short piece. He had already come around on the original BioShock Infinite — deciding it was a narrative mess on replay, while also discovering that BioShock 2 was something of a hidden gem — but Burial at Sea appears to represent a new low point in the franchise for him.

Chris, meanwhile, spent time with Morrowind, Bethesda's landmark 2002 RPG, as part of a broader side project touching on the entire mainline Elder Scrolls series. His first encounter with the game as a pre-teen was not a success — he spent most of it swinging a dagger ineffectually at a villager who insulted him repeatedly in the game's constructed language before beating him soundly. Returning now, he was struck by something more meaningful: the extraordinary density of the game's opening area around Seyda Neen. Within a tiny stretch of the world, Bethesda packed dungeons, sidequests, rich lore, and what Chris calls one of gaming's great jokes — the tragic fate of Tarhiel and his Scrolls of Icarian Flight. The observation points to why the game retains its reputation more than two decades on.

Bertie's entry is perhaps the most unexpectedly philosophical. Preparing for an interview with 007 First Light's lead writer, he made the decision to watch an entire walkthrough of the game before finishing it himself — essentially spoiling the experience wholesale. For most players, this would kill any remaining motivation to continue. Bertie found the opposite to be true. Freed from the compulsion to push forward and discover what happens next, he slowed down, took in the environmental design at his own pace, enjoyed the dialogue more fully, and explored areas he would otherwise have rushed past. It's a counterintuitive argument: that foreknowledge can deepen rather than diminish the pleasure of playing.

Taken together, the three entries this week touch on something worth sitting with — the question of what we're actually looking for when we play games. Connor is being made to confront bad design in real time. Chris is finding layers in something he once bounced off entirely. Bertie discovered that removing narrative suspense gave him space to appreciate craft. None of it is especially dramatic, but all of it is honest, and that honesty is what makes this kind of column worth returning to each week.