Bioshock

BioShock is the high-water mark of the immersive sim's brush with mainstream success. The 2007 original dropped players into Rapture, an underwater objectivist utopia gone to rot, and used a shooter's vocabulary to ask hard questions about free will and obedience. BioShock 2 returned to those leaking corridors, while BioShock Infinite traded the ocean for the floating city of Columbia and a story about American myth and quantum guilt.

This is a game-first franchise, and a fiercely self-referential one. The Burial at Sea episodes explicitly fold Columbia back into Rapture, and even side pieces like the wave-based Clash in the Clouds exist to feed a world this committed to its own ideas. The Collection bundles the trilogy for newcomers, and the cameo turn in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale shows how far the iconography traveled.

The Bioshock franchise spans 8 games in the CrossBinge catalog.