The story drops you off in Rapture as the survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the ocean. With the only thing around you for miles being a desolate bathysphere, you shrug your shoulders and descend down into the underwater city of Rapture, which turns out to be the water-based equivalent of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Rapture, you see, is - or was - a self-supporting community created by a former Soviet citizen, a capitalist paradise supposedly consisting of the cream of society.

Unfortunately, at some point in the 1960’s it all started to go a bit George Orwell. The discovery of a new species of sea slug (sea slugs are actually snails by the way) capable of secreting pure stem cells leads to the further discovery that this substance - dubbed “Adam” - can be used to enhance people’s bodies.

What happens next? Let’s just say the good citizens of Rapture treat themselves to a little thing we like to call a full-on civil war. And when our hero plops his feet onto Rapture’s creaky seabed for the first time some years later, we see the net result of Rapture’s folly; a groaning army of deformed shufflers ambling around a deserted wasteland.