Is there always going to be a lighthouse?In BioShock Infinite’s opening moments, your dashing but dark-sided hero Booker DeWitt is in a rowboat. Two mysterious rain-slick-wearing folks – a man and a woman – are paddling you out to a lighthouse in the midst of a terrible rainstorm. The pair are talking about you as if you’re not even there, dropping you off at the dock, leaving you to wonder how or if you’ll ever return.

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“Bring us the girl,” you’ve been told, “and wipe away the debt.”Before long – it’s best to discover for yourself exactly how – you’ve made your way up to Columbia, BioShock Infinite’s floating sky-city, in search of Elizabeth (aka “the girl”). The year is 1912, and once there, you’re left to find the answers to both the riddles you’ve already been presented with as well as myriad new ones that will no doubt be falling into your lap as Booker begins to wrap his mind around the fact that every step he takes is another walk in the clouds.It quickly becomes clear when you start playing Infinite that Columbia is both exactly the same as the original’s underwater utopia of Rapture, yet simultaneously completely different. One is underwater; claustrophobic. The other is endless; the sky is literally the limit. Both are utopias – idealistic clusters of humanity – with cracks beginning to show through beneath the magnificent facades.On that note, however, let me warn you console players up front: unlike its jaw-dropping-in-2007 predecessor (I’m not counting BioShock 2 here, as that wasn’t our first trip to Rapture), BioShock Infinite does not have the same technical wow-factor going for it. Yes, Columbia is stunning from a scale, scope, and art-direction perspective, but on a raw graphical level it is a bit underwhelming on the Xbox 360 version I’m starting with. Textures are muddy and low-resolution and the framerate takes regular slight-but-noticeable dips. It reminds me of the console version of Dishonored in that way.Do these minor issues take away from your experience at all? No, but I’m very curious to check out the PC version during the course of my review. Presuming you throw a beefy enough rig at Infinite, the ol’ mouse-and-keyboard may prove to be the best way to explore Columbia, particularly since, with no multiplayer modes, you don’t have to worry about choosing your platform based on which network your friends will be playing on.Regardless of what dumb terminal you use to experience Infinite, though, your curiosity will consistently lead you forward. Columbia is such a spectacularly realized place – at least in its first impression – that you can’t help but be compelled to learn more. Take the Vigors, for instance. You know them as Plasmids from BioShock 1, but how will the new set fare? Where is Elizabeth? Why is she so special? Who is Zachary Comstock, known to the people of Columbia as “The Prophet”? When is the big mind-blowing twist that I’m expecting from a Ken Levine-directed game going to drop on me like an anvil?Digging into the early hours of Infinite – I spent a good two hours first walking wide-eyed around the town plaza and then the fair like a kid wandering around Disneyland for the first time – is a treat. The color palette is vibrant in a way that’s the polar opposite of Rapture, yet equally effective at convincing you that the place you’re in – here, a city atop the clouds – is a real, believable world. And the moment you get the Skyhook is just…stunning. You’ll see why. I’ll explain everything in the full IGN review of BioShock Infinite, which publishes this Thursday, March 21 at 9pm Pacific/12am Eastern. Would you kindly stop by?

Ryan McCaffrey heads up IGN Xbox. He used to own a DeLorean, which is weird. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan , on IGN , catch him on Podcast Unlocked , and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.