You won’t believe this. A screenshot from the BioShock game currently in production has leaked online, and if it’s real, it tells us one thing we’ve always hoped to know about the game. That it’s a video game.
Yep, taking a look at this image, which MP1ST claims was dug up from a showcase of a visual effects artist working for publisher 2K, you can clearly see that BioShock 4, reportedly codenamed “Parkside,” is probably going to be one of those gadgets we all love to play with a controller, mouse and keyboard, or dance pad.
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In the screenshot, the player is holding a gun called the “Ricochet Shotgun” and looking directly at some kind of glowing orb on a stand. Maybe they were thinking about this for some reason, or maybe the player just happened to be pointing it at a regular lamp when taking the screenshot, and everyone is excited about something you might buy and put in your back garden if you were Andrew Ryan.
Oh, and the words “Parkside Demo” were spotted near the bottom of the screen, which matches the codename for the project mentioned in Kotaku’s 2019 report.
Beyond that, there’s the UI, which features a life bar and what appear to be some sort of loop of plasmid abilities in the bottom corner. Perhaps the only notable thing is that one of the abilities appears to be time-based, with an hourglass icon next to the life bar in the upper left corner. Is BioShock 4 actually just some very unorthodox DLC for Pluto 2? We don’t know.
MP1ST claims that the screenshot is from a 2021 trailer and depicts an early version of the game, which means it’s likely several years out of date, and therefore probably not worth drawing any big conclusions from it about what to expect when the game emerges from Rapture’s vault (or wherever else it might be set.) Except, as we said, it’s a video game.
Although 2K Cloud Chamber announced as early as 2019 that it would develop the next “BioShock”, the official name has not yet been determined, so we don’t know whether it will eventually be called “BioShock 4” or something like that, nor do we know how it will be related to the existing works in the series.
The series’ creator, Ken Levine, wasn’t involved, as he was busy with Ghost Story Games’ Judas, a game that looks a lot like BioShock.
