Actually now that I think about it there's really no reason why this should be a Bioshock game. It doesn't have anything in common, short of a hero protagonist with a dark past but then so do 99% of all games today. A lot of the elements in game, most notably tonics, feel tacked on and only present because Bioshock had them. If this had been called "Not Quite Myst But We Have A Lighthouse" instead I would have enjoyed it more because then it could be it's own game rather than some weird ginger spawn of Bioshock that just wants to imitate it's dad but isn't quite sure how.
I think a lot of people, you and Campster included, are missing the point of BioShock Infinite. It's neither a social commentary on religion/racism/imperialism nor is it meant to be a mere vehicle for a compelling story. It's a commentary on the nature of video gaming and the experience of immersion. In that sense it's a worthy sequel to BioShock the first, which asked the question of "who is really in control when you pick up the video game controller?" Infinite asks "what is the experience you're really having when you immerse yourself in a game?" Every aspect of the game is designed to draw attention to this: from its myriad and shameless kickbacks to the first game to how it drowns you in a meta-analysis of itself, it challenges you to contrast this experience to other video games. Some people - such as Gabe and Kiko of Penny Arcade fame - don't like that. They sense the dissonance but they don't quite touch on it. What exactly do I mean? Well...
I guess for love's sake I'll just say there are
spoilers for the rest of this post.
OK, so let me use this as an example. Whenever you die in Infinite you revive moreorless on the spot sans money following either a "revival" scene where Elizabeth restores you to half-health and half-salts or a walk-through-the-door scene where you step out of your dream world office back into the battle. I think the key here is that there
is no revival, just as there is obviously no office - this is a conveniently memory contrived by Booker to accommodate just having "died." Rather, when you die, you inhabit an alternate-reality Booker that didn't die, and to cope with these memories your character fills in the blanks. This is supported throughout the game by the narrative with characters such as R. Lutece, Elizabeth, and Booker alluding to conjured memories to cope with the stress of crossing dimensions.
The key is to recognize this as more than a convenient narrative MacGuffin to handwave away not actually being able to die. This mirrors the process of playing a game -
any game, with
you being the person who redesigns the narrative whenever your avatar dies.
Take Skyrim. You go into a cave and a troll kills you. You reload save and go kill the troll. Now, you know that this is the
actual chronology of events, but that is neither how you understand it within the context of the game's narrative
nor is that how you'll internalize that as an experience for later recollection (barring a particularly interesting death that itself becomes the point of your escapade). Point being that you won't tell people "I went into a cave and got killed by a troll, reloaded save and then killed a troll" you say "I went into a cave and killed a troll." This is how you rewrite the narrative to suit your experience; this is what "immersion"
necessarily demands of the player, and it is ironically the thing most demanding in terms of suspension of disbelief. Robert Lutece writes at the beginning of Infinite "the mind of the subject will desperately attempt to create memories where there are none" (paraphrased) - you are the subject, the memories refer to your experience.
The entire experience of BioShock Infinite is meant to challenge your immersion by undermining your sense of gravitas. It creates levity at every opportunity (suitable given that the city is
floating). The world is colorful and genuinely unbelievable, which is good because you have no reason to believe in a world where you're listening to anachronistic music tracks and the innumerable bloody encounters are contrasted sharply
and immediately by a freaking
Disney princess. In Finkton the game actually has you move to a completely different dimension, which ought to knock the wind out of you. What the hell does any of this matter if the "solution" is just a dimension hop away? It becomes hard to apply value to any given arrangement of the pieces on the board when it's all so arbitrary.
The real genius in BioShock Infinite is that it never takes itself too seriously. It's a game that's
meant to be overanalyzed, because that's how you start to peel back the veneer. Playing Skyrim and dying is one thing, but it's another thing to use the modding tools to
change Skyrim. That's really digging deep. Infinite uses the Luteces, and later, Elizabeth (Elizabeth is an allegory for the player) to show what happens when you go from immersion - accepting what you see at face value and shoving square pegs into round holes or whatever suits the narrative - to understanding - when you
see all the "doors", so to speak.
It's easy to see BioShock Infinite as a try-hard pulp-fiction adventure, a mediocre shooter with pretty art. But it's actually one of the cleverest and most salient video game commentaries there is.